Austin, Texas, Aug. 25, 2011 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Less than four years ago, Alex and Cadey Charfen were in bankruptcy court and numbered among the many casualties of the U.S. real estate market’s boom and bust. Today, Inc. magazine announced that the Charfen Institute ranks as No. 21 on its 2011 list of the fastest growing private companies in America.
Alex Charfen, CEO and co-founder, credits the Charfen Institute’s stellar success to the lessons learned from being overleveraged in the past. "With zero debt, zero investor funding and some hard-won wisdom about leverage, personal worth and the need for values and a vision, we started our organization determined to help others avoid the traps that we had fallen into," Charfen emphasized.
"In doing so, we grew our company’s revenues from $533,526 in 2008 to $9.9 million in 2010, and we are on track to far exceed that in 2011," Charfen added. The honor of being ranked so close to the top of the 2011 Inc. 500 proves that our message is resonating and the that market is receptive to what we have to offer," he emphasized.
The Charfen Institute educates and trains real estate professionals and small business owners how to find opportunities in chaos - whether it be solutions to the foreclosure crisis or empowering entrepreneurs with strategies to embrace their companies’ full potential.
"The nearly 35,000 real estate professionals nationwide whom we’ve trained in the Certified Distressed Property Expert (CDPE) curriculum are on the front lines of the recovery of the U.S. real estate market through proactive approaches to foreclosure avoidance," Charfen said. At the same time, the Charfen Institute’s Certified Investor Agent Specialist (CIAS) designation is empowering real estate professionals to work toward another facet of the real estate market’s recovery: helping agents and their investor clients to build wealth through residential real estate investments, and in the process, help to get foreclosed and REO properties off of the books of banks, and into the hands of families.
An ethics and values-based company created around core values and a cultural foundation that has proven critical to its success, the Charfen Institute’s newest offering is the LEAD Experience, an intensive, three-day business acceleration program for small-business owners. "We realized early on that small businesses have very little training available to them that is specific to their needs," Charfen pointed out. "So we carefully reverse engineered how we’ve grown our company and created a course to show others how to do the same. We then verified it all in the market through extensive research and from that, the LEAD Experience was born. It is our aim to take business owners from struggle to a daily celebration of achievement, and we are doing just that."
"Considering that small businesses employ half of all private sector employees," Charfen said, "we are very excited about the impact that this program is going to have in getting people back to work as individual business owners unlock their vast potential for growth."
About the Charfen Institute
The Charfen Institute provides training and resources to help small business owners and real estate professionals achieve tangible business results. The company produces more than 300 educational events each year through various divisions, including: The Distressed Property Institute’s Certified Distressed Property Expert® (CDPE) Designation (http://www.cdpe.com), the Certified Investor Agent Specialist™ (CIAS) Designation (http://www.cias.com), STAR POWER Systems™ (http://www.starpower.com), and LEAD Experience™ (http://www.lead-experience.com). The company’s CDPE Designation is the fastest growing independent designation in real estate industry history, with close to 35,000 agents trained.
Recent awards for Alex Charfen and the Charfen Institute include: No. 21 on the 2011 Inc. 500 List of America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies; Best Places to Work in Central Texas 2009 and 2010; Alex Charfen for Austin’s Fittest CEO and the Austin Under 40 Award for Real Estate; numerous Telly and Omni Awards, and the 2010 Aegis Award. For more information, visit: http://www.charfeninstitute.com.