This Thing Called Success || Alex Charfen

The Ronan Levy Podcast

Every once in a while, life provides a sliding door moment. One of those pivotal moments in life for which there was a before and there is an after.

This conversation with Alex Charfen is one of those moments for me, as it helped me find a level of self-acceptance that I've never found before.

Here is a little bit about Alex...

He was never meant to be the Co-founder & CEO of a multi-million dollar company. As a kid, Alex had a tough time learning, fitting in, and following other people’s rules. His entrepreneurial journey started early on by selling things at school, and he went on to run a window washing service in high school and a financial consulting firm in college. In his twenties, Alex became a Fortune 500 consultant, working with some of the most successful people in the world. In his early thirties, he met his wife, Cadey, and sold his consulting business. Unable to stay out of the entrepreneurial world, Alex and Cadey started buying and selling houses and became one of the largest real estate companies in Florida in less than a year. Following the Economic Crisis of 2007, Alex and Cadey lost everything and went bankrupt. Rising from the ashes, they built an information product called the Certified Distressed Property Expert (CDPE) designation. Through their designation, Alex and Cadey worked with the majority of major lenders and real estate brokerages in the United States to help our country recover from the mortgage crisis. As a result, they helped pull forward the recovery of the foreclosure crisis by five to seven years, sold over $70 million, were featured on the Inc. list of fastest-growing companies in the country three years in a row, and won many other awards.

Alex went on to create the Entrepreneurial Personality Type (EPT), helping tens of thousands of entrepreneurs with six-, seven-, and eight-figure businesses to grow and scale. Today, Alex has created multiple multimillion-dollar companies, learned a lot along the way, and is teaching entrepreneurs how they can do the same. Sharing his journey with others led Alex to write for publications such as Success, Entrepreneur, and Inc. Magazine, and his story has also garnered attention from major media outlets like MSNBC, CNBC, FOX News, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and Investor’s Business Daily. As a result of his mentorship and success, Alex is now known as the go-to person for helping entrepreneurs ascend the Billionaire Code and understand how to plan strategically. Throughout all of this, Charfen’s mission is to empower entrepreneurs to grow and scale their business and make their greatest contribution.

If you want to learn more about Alex and his incredible work with Simple Operations, visit www.charfen.com.

Key Moments:

03:00 - Alex's tumultuous childhood in Mexico City

10:40 - Tony Robbins and Wayne Dyer make Alex even weirder

14:01 - adversity as a precursor for massive success

15:26 - a basic definition of The Entrepreneurial Personality Type

16:06 - Ronan's tumultuous childhood

17:44 - entrepreneurs are information seekers

20:00 - how entrepreneurs are often persecuted by the system and then want to fix the system for everyone

22:00 - momentum as a key determinant in an entrepreneur's happiness

23:26 - what's wrong with me?

27:10 - changing the entrepreneurial scoreboard

32:44 - the three elements of momentum

38:19 - Alex's own brush with insolvency

45:49 - Alex's phoenix rising from the ashes, and near collapse

56:27 - stillness in momentum

1:00:24 - a new definition of success

1:05:44 - some thoughts on Bill Gates