A CEO who writes 8,000 employee birthday cards a year just got the ultimate 'thank you'

pulse

January 18, 2018 4:17 PM

For CEO Sheldon Yellen's birthday recently, every employee at BELFOR Holdings wrote him a card as a token of their appreciation.

BELFOR Holdings CEO Sheldon Yellen has made it a tradition to write a birthday card for every single employee at the company.
He now writes about 8,000 cards a year.
For Yellen's birthday recently, each person in the company wrote a card to give to Yellen as a token of their appreciation.

Corny jokes and gag gifts often punctuate the average 60th-birthday party. But that wasn't the case for Sheldon Yellen.

His gift was 8,000 birthday cards.

Yellen is the CEO of BELFOR Holdings, Inc., a billion-dollar disaster relief and property restoration company. Since 1985, long before Yellen became chief executive, he has written a birthday card to every employee of the company every year. Today, he said he hand-writes 8,000 cards annually.

As a token of the staff's appreciation for that long-standing gesture, Yellen received a signed card from everyone at the company for his 60th birthday.

Yellen said he started writing the birthday cards after he was hired by his brother-in-law, since many of the employees at the time felt he was being given special treatment. If nothing else, the birthday cards would encourage people to stop by his desk, he thought.

"And it worked," he previously told Business Insider. "It got people talking, we started to communicate more, and I like to think it helped me earn respect within the company."

Employees surprised Yellen with gigantic stacks of birthday cards around 4:00 p.m. on January 17. Some of the cards were strung across the ceiling as decorations. Others sat in neat piles on a long table.

Yellen's longtime executive assistant, Gail Kennedy, said the occasion was especially meaningful after working with Yellen for more than two decades.

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