Workers surprise boss with more than 8,000 birthday cards

Frank Witsil | Detroit Free Press

DETROIT — For more than three decades, Sheldon Yellen has penned personal birthday wishes to each of his employees.

On Wednesday, thousands of his workers from around the world decided for Yellen's 60th birthday to return the gesture. They surprised their Birmingham, Mich.-based boss by sending him more than 6,000 birthday cards.

Stacks and stacks of cards, tied with colorful ribbon into groups, covered his big wooden desk. Some cards, which his assistant had already opened, were strung across the room on cords like streamers.

And an estimated 2,000 more cards are on their way.

"Oh, my God," Yellen said as he opened the door to his office late Wednesday afternoon and saw the cards, his two sons, Brandon and Jordan, his younger brother, Mike, and a handful of employees with cameras to record the moment. "Wow! This is unbelievable."

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They sang a few bars of Happy Birthday to the red-faced executive, then Jordan Yellen handed his father one of the stacks of cards and told him: "You've got a lot of reading to do."

Birthday well-wishers even included the Detroit Lions and TV weatherman Al Roker.

Yellen — the CEO of Belfor Holdings, a reportedly $1.5 billion privately held company that restores properties around the world after natural disasters — is no stranger to publicity.

Google his name, and plenty of links to national news publications pop up.

Forbes, a business magazine, published an article last year on Belfor's work.

"When disaster strikes, Belfor gets called in to do the dirty work," it said. "Over the course of its history, Belfor has cleaned up more than a million sites around the world."

Yellen said he started writing personal birthday cards to everyone in the company in 1985. He did it because workers saw him only as the son-in-law of the owner, but the cards were a way to connect with them.

In some cases, employees said, the messages turn out to be more like letters.

"I've tried to stay in touch with as many of our now 8,000 people around the world as I can," he said Wednesday, choking up. "This is one way to touch them, and they have surely touched me."

His executive assistant, Gail Kennedy, who coordinated the birthday card campaign, said that over the years, Yellon's cards have made a big difference to employees and they thought their boss might enjoy getting some in return.

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"It's Sheldon's 60th birthday, so it's pretty significant," she said. "He's such a special person that we wanted to have fun with it due to the fact that 2017 was such an emotional year, and very, very busy with all the recovery efforts."

Kennedy said Yellen keeps thousands of birthday cards on hand and has a drawer full of hundreds of individually selected Hallmark cards for other special occasions, including weddings, anniversaries and kids' graduations.

Yellen's birthday actually was Tuesday, she said, but he wasn't in the office so they celebrated Wednesday.

Yellen dropped out of school in the 11th grade but went back to get his high school diploma at 53.

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Yellen has appeared — twice — on the CBS reality TV show, Undercover Boss. The show puts top executives in disguise and records them as they work alongside their rank-and-file employees.

In one of the Undercover Boss episodes, Yellen struggles to keep up with his workers doing manual labor tasks, such as carrying and hanging gypsum board. He removes a dead animal that falls from the ceiling and he gets an earful from workers who said he didn't really seem cut out for the jobs he was doing.

But, from this experience, he realized that the jobs were harder than he had known, and, when he later revealed his true identity in the show, he tried to compensate the employees with bonus checks and other benefits.

"People call and say that they want to send him a birthday gift," Kennedy said. "But, he really doesn't like receiving gifts or having anyone spend money on him. I say, 'Write a personal note. That means to him more than anything.' "

Follow Frank Witsil on Twitter: @fwitsil