Guy Tweets Story Of Richard Montañez, Former Janitor Who’s Now A $20M Dollar Brand

Forget self-improvement and business motivation books—it’s Twitter with the right guy and the right story that you need to get the job done. No need to thank me for saving you money.

Entrepreneur Ankith Harathi has recently shared a story about Richard Montañez, a man who started off as a janitor at a company you may or may not have heard of—Frito-Lay, part of PepsiCo—and rose to becoming the 20-Million-Dollar Man just because he took initiative and went to that one meeting.

It’s not every day that a janitor making $4 an hour becomes a multi-million dollar man

Image credits: ankithharathi

Entrepreneur Ankith Harahti shared the ‘rags to riches’ story of Richard Montañez that drew everyone’s attention

Image credits: ankithharathi

The story goes that Montañez came from a family of 14, could barely speak English, and couldn’t even dream about becoming anyone because there was no dream where he came from.

But one day, as he was working his $4/hour janitorial job, he found out the CEO of the company he worked for—where he was taking initiative, learning about more than just janitorial duties, and trying to be better overall—had announced to all of its hundreds of thousands of employees: “act like an owner.” Montañez did.

So, he asked for a meeting with the CEO. And he got it. And in that meeting, he shared an idea—an idea of how the company’s products, snacks, could be adapted just a little bit to appeal to a whole new audience, Latinos. Long story short, it was adding spice to the snacks. “Put that mop away,” said the CEO, “You’re coming with us.”

The story ended up being quite successful among Tweeters, getting over 200k likes

Image credits: ankithharathi

This wasn’t secret knowledge, or anything—it just took one man to retell this story in a way that appealed to internauts, drew them in, and made for a pretty inspiring read.

The Twitter thread managed to get over 200,000 likes and almost 50,000 retweets. For many, this was quite an inspiring story, while it started a bit of a debate among others.

One person pointed out that this is quite a rare situation as most conglomerate CEOs don’t provide such opportunities, and it doesn’t work well in certain other cultural contexts, like that of India. But, regardless, people were still left amazed by the story and the hard work, dedication, and belief in oneself that Mr. Montañez exhibited.