After speaking with Ari Brecher for three hours, I had no choice but to “cut our conversation short.” Though the conversation about Ari’s life and business was fascinating, I knew if we kept talking, I would have a hard time squeezing it all into an article. As it is, I had trouble deciding what to keep in and what to take out.
We spoke about Ari’s business, Accelify, and how he transformed it into a successful company, eventually selling it for a significant sum.
After Accelify, Ari started Advenium, a group-therapy based business providing therapy in an activities-based model using tools such as art, yoga, dance, aquatics, self-defense and other modalities with a focus on mild-to-moderate mental health challenges and behavioral differences. Servicing adults, adolescents and children, Advenium has more than 3,000 clients weekly.
Our conversation then turned personal. Ari shared how he and his family dealt with the challenge when his youngest son Benny was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that had a poor prognosis (see article following Lunchbreak). We spoke about Benny, and how Ari managed to work during those trying times.
Enjoy!
—Nesanel
Looking back, it’s pretty clear how Hashem sent me where I needed to be before I knew I needed to be there.
“I was born and grew up in Monsey, New York. Bais Mikra, the elementary school I went to, now has approximately 600 students, but back then it was a small school in a house on the corner of the street.
“For high school, I went to Peekskill Yeshivah, which moved from New Rochelle the first year I attended. From there, I went to Passaic under Rav Meir Stern, and then to BMG in Lakewood.
“I am—well, I was—one of six kids; one of my brothers passed away during COVID. Growing up, my father, Yehoshua Elyakim (Jerry), was in commercial construction. He was a significant contractor for the Reichman family, including for Battery Park City in New York.
“The Reichmans invited him to join them as a contractor in their Canary Wharf London project. Almost every week he flew to London on Sunday and stayed until Thursday. He had subcontractors who did the interiors, the drywall, things of that sort. It was his business, but obviously the Reichmans owned and ran the projects. I was around 15 years old when the Canary Wharf project failed. Unfortunately, my father lost everything.
“He had been weeks away from getting paid. He had invested his own money into it, but he lost it all.
“There were a lot of life lessons to be learned from that. We went from living comfortably to finances being extremely tight. I saw what business challenges can do to a person. When the tide turns for a person who has a certain valuable role in the community, it is noticeable. The hardest thing for my father was not the financial loss, but that people who used to come to him for advice—many of whom he had supported during their tough times—didn’t stay in touch with him. I learned to develop real relationships, not settle for ones that are grounded in quid pro quo.
“After that, my father bounced around from business to business, never really finding his footing. He passed away from cancer almost 21 years ago, when he was 62. He was a really brilliant man. Rebbetzin Rishel Kotler (Rav Schneur’s rebbetzin) once told our family that her shver, Rav Aharon, zt”l, only used the word ‘ilui’ for three or four people, and my father was one of them. Our family was very close with Rav Aharon, and I was named after him.
“As a teenager, I was cerebral, not entrepreneurial. I was a deep thinker, very studious and focused on learning about life, on developing myself intellectually. In addition to learning seriously, I sought knowledge and skills in worldly topics.
“While I was still in yeshivah in Lakewood, I worked part time for a local businessman in a headhunting firm. They worked with large, multinational companies, mostly in the tech space. Our job was to identify candidates who could fill their senior leadership roles.
“The Israeli tech scene didn’t exist yet, and the tech world was not very frum friendly. Professionally, I called myself Alex because at the time Ari sounded too Jewish. In the business world, I’m still known as Alex.
“Like most executive recruiting firms, recruiting meant ‘dialing for dollars.’ Years before the Internet made such information easy to access, we would buy compact disks that contained data from news articles. We would search keywords to find the people leading divisions that were relatively similar to what we were trying to recruit for. Then we’d call them and try to convince them to leave their positions and move to our clients’ organizations.
“As a young guy in my early 20s, exposure to leaders in the tech industry and venture capital world was definitely informative. Understanding how they operate taught me to think strategically not only about where a business is currently but also where it is heading in the future. I’ve used those skills for nearly 30 years now, and they’ve had a significant impact on my career.
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