Jim Randel, the founder of RAND Media Company, is a graduate of Columbia University School of Law, and has been both an entrepreneur and commentator about entrepreneurs for twenty-five years. Randel has been the lead partner in numerous real estate deals and business start-ups along the East Coast.
His real estate deals have been creative and cutting edge: first factory outlet center in urban US, power center development in Albany, New York, early condominium conversion project, early self-storage facility, adaptive reuse of warehouses, apartment buildings, offices, factories and retail buildings in New England and Miami.
Randel’s start-up companies include businesses that: manufactured clothing in Central America, produced content for a satellite television network, published books and e-books, produced children's shoes in China, developed e-commerce platforms for major apparel/shoe brands, made and marketed pain management devices, opened retail outlets to sell overstock brand merchandise.
Randel is also an in-demand public speaker and author. His first book, Confessions of a Real Estate Entrepreneur (McGraw-Hill, 2006), has been one of the best-selling real estate books over the last decade.
In 2008, Randel founded RAND Media Company, a publishing company geared toward creating books that distill important topics into a simple and readable illustrated format.
RAND Media Company is the publisher of the "Skinny On" series which are pictorial explanations of complicated subjects in a simplified, easy-to-understand format, such as time management and credit cards. The first book in the series (The Skinny on the Housing Crisis) was Book of the Year in 2009 as awarded by the National Association of Real Estate Editors.
In 2014 his Skinny books were licensed to a publisher in China and today two of them are perennial best sellers for any book written in or translated into Chinese. Sales of Skinny On Chinese eBooks have exceeded 100,000 copies. Randel has even had two titles sitting at #1 and #2 on the Chinese ebook bestseller list simultaneously.
Randel has also written Street Smarts: Beyond the Diploma which was also honored as Book of the Year for Young Adults by the Institute of Financial Literacy. His three MONEY books have been used by educators and corporations to explain financial principles to employees and students.
Randel has also lectured at Harvard and NYU Business Schools and has been the guest speaker at numerous conventions around the United States. He was also a daily commentator on Financial News Network (the predecessor for CNBC). Randel is a frequent author on Huffington Post. Other engagements included ABC, CBS, Fox, Fox Business and BetterTV.com.