Start With Why

nephew. He asked Bruder, as the chief financial officer of the company at the time, to take a look at the financials of the agency before he went through with the purchase. Seeing an opportunity others didn’t, Bruder decided to join the small travel agency to help lead it. Once there, he saw how all the other travel agencies worked and took an alternative course. Greenwell became the first travel agency on the eastern seaboard to take advantage of new technologies and fully computerize their operations. Not only did they become one of the most successful companies in the region, but after only a year, their business model became a standard for the whole industry. Then Bruder did it again.
    A former client of Bruder’s, Sam Rosengarten, was in some dirty businesses—coal, oil and gas; all industries that created brownfields, land that had been contaminated by their operations. Little could be done with brownfields. They were too polluted to develop, and the liability to clean them up was so high that the insurance premiums alone made it too prohibitive to even try. But Bruder doesn’t see challenges the same way as everyone else. Most avoided brownfields because they could only see the cost to clean them up. Bruder focused instead on the actual cleaning. His alternative perspective revealed the perfect solution.
    Bruder had already formed his real estate development company, Brookhill, and with eighteen employees, he was doing quite well. Knowing what he needed to do to seize the opportunity, he approached Dames & Moore, one of the largest environmental engineering companies in the world, and shared his new perspective with them. They loved his idea and formed a partnership to pursue it. With an engineering company with 18,000 people on board, the perceived risk was greatly minimized and the insurance companies were happy to offer affordable insurance. With affordable insurance in place, Credit Suisse First Boston offered financing that gave Brookhill the ability to buy, remediate, redevelop and sell almost $200 million worth of former environmentally contaminated properties. Brookhill, so called because Bruder comes from Brooklyn and, as he puts it, “it’s a long, uphill climb to get out of Brooklyn,” was the pioneer of the brownfield redevelopment industry. An industry that thrives to this day. Bruder’s WHY not only steered a path that was good for business, but in the process also helped clean up the environment.
    It doesn’t matter WHAT Ron Bruder does. The industries and the challenges are incidental. What never changes is WHY he does things. Bruder knows that, no matter how good an opportunity looks on paper, no matter how smart he is and no matter his track record, he would never be able to achieve anything unless there were others to help him. He knows that success is a team sport. He has a remarkable ability to attract those who believe what he believes. Talented people are drawn to him with one request: “How can I help?” Having defied accepted perspectives and revolutionized more than one industry, Bruder has now set his sights on a bigger challenge: world peace. He founded the Education for Employment Foundation, the megaphone that would help him do it.
    The EFE Foundation is making significant headway in helping young men and women in the Middle East to significantly alter the course of their lives and indeed the course of the region. Just has he taught his daughters at the crosswalk that there is always an alternative route, he brings an alternative perspective to the problems in Middle East. Like of all Bruder’s past successes, the EFE Foundation will drive businesses and do tremendous amounts of good in the process. Bruder doesn’t run companies, he leads movements.

All Movements Are Personal
    It started on September 11, 2001. Like so many of us, Bruder turned his attention to the Middle East after the attacks to ask why something like that could happen. He understood that if such an event could happen once, it could happen again, and for the lives of his own daughters he wanted to find a way to prevent that.
    In the course of trying to figure out what he could do, he made a remarkable discovery that went much deeper than protecting his daughters or even the prevention of terrorism in the United States. In America, he realized, the vast majority of young people wake up in the morning with a feeling that there is opportunity for them in the future. Regardless of the economy, most