Sheldon David Yellen (born January 16, 1958) is an American businessman, author and the CEO of BELFOR Property Restoration. He has appeared on an

Emmy The Emmy Awards, or Emmys, are an extensive range of awards for artistic and technical merit for the American and international television industry. A number of annual Emmy Award ceremonies are held throughout the calendar year, each with the ...

-nominated episode of ''

Undercover Boss ''Undercover Boss'' is a reality television series franchise created by Stephen Lambert and produced in many countries. It originated in 2009 on the British Channel 4. The show’s format features the experiences of senior executives working u ...

'' on CBS.

Biography

Yellen was born to a

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

family, the oldest of four boys. He was raised alone by his mother. He attended

Southfield-Lathrup High School Southfield-Lathrup High School was a senior high school in Lathrup Village, Michigan, United States. It was the second oldest of three high schools in the Southfield Public Schools district, the oldest being Southfield High School, and the young ...

but dropped out to support his family (he later received his diploma at the age of 53). In 1985, he went to work as a salesman for his brothers-in-law's company then known as Quality Awning & Construction which also did restoration work. In 1989, Yellen booked $17 million in sales in South Carolina which was devastated by

Hurricane Hugo Hurricane Hugo was a powerful Cape Verde tropical cyclone that inflicted widespread damage across the northeastern Caribbean and the Southeastern United States in September 1989. Across its track, Hugo affected approximately 2 million peop ...

, effectively doubling the company's sales. He became CEO in 2001. Per Yellen, in 2016 BELFOR is the world's largest disaster restoration company operating in 29 countries with more than 350 offices and employing more than 7,700 full-time employees. He is a guest writer for ''

Entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...

'' - US edition: ''4 Ways to Ensure Your Startup Will Survive Disaster, How to Make People, Not Résumés, Your Hiring Priority, How Growing Up With Nothing Equipped Me to Run a Billion-Dollar Company''. Yellen hand-writes over 12,000 cards each year for employees' birthdays and other thanks and congratulations.

Personal life

At the age of 26, he married at Temple Israel in

West Bloomfield Township, Michigan West Bloomfield Township, officially the Charter Township of West Bloomfield, is a charter township in Oakland County in the U.S. state of Michigan, within the Detroit metropolitan area. It is one of the most expensive places to live in Oakland ...

; he has two sons. Although he had a bar mitzvah, he did not begin to practice

Judaism Judaism ( he, ''Yahăḏūṯ'') is an Abrahamic, monotheistic, and ethnic religion comprising the collective religious, cultural, and legal tradition and civilization of the Jewish people. It has its roots as an organized religion in the ...

until he was in his mid-40s.

References

Living people 1958 births Place of birth missing (living people) American chief executives Undercover Boss Participants in American reality television series Business writers 20th-century American Jews 21st-century American Jews {{business-bio-stub