Active International prides itself on being a successful company ”“ with a heart.
The privately held firm, with world headquarters in Pearl River, has close to 400 employees and 16 offices around the world and $1 billion in annual revenues, making it one of the largest employers in Rockland County.
And, the company encourages its employees to donate their time to charitable causes in the community.
“The goal was any employee of our company who was involved in a cause could come to the company and ask for backing; and Active would back their involvement in those causes,” said Joe Allen, senior vice president of community affairs. “It helped it spur community activism on the part of our employees, and it helped us in recruiting because we helped establish ourselves as a positive company, a company with heart, a company with great participation in the community.”                  Â
Originally founded as a corporate trading company 25 years ago by Alan Elkin and Arthur Wagner, Active acquired underperforming assets, such as inventory, real estate, sponsorships and capital equipment and helped its clients use these assets to fund normal business expenditures and create cash savings and economic benefits that otherwise would not have been achieved.
Today, the company continues to acquire assets, but has evolved into a diversified marketingbusiness solutions provider. and
“Our employees own a portion of the company through an employee stock ownership program,” Allen said. “Our folks here are really motivated to make sure the company does well, because they participate in the profitability of the company.”
Elkin and Wagner are still the primary owners who actively run the company.
“They believed in one philosophy for this business, and that is if you took everything or most of what you made and put it back into having the things that your clients need when they want to redeem their credit, you”™ll have repeat customers,” Allen said.
 “In the early days of this industry, the companies were willing to take a client”™s asset but using the credit was not so easy, which led to a lot of single-transaction relationships,” Allen said. “But seventy five percent of customers are repeat.”
As for Active”™s clients, “the standard profile is a huge company with a large real estate or inventory issue.”
The company has traded everything from trucks to natural gas, and in addition to advertising, which represents 85 percent of what clients use credit for, clients often use those credits for things such as freight, importing products from overseas, retail marketing and warehousing.
Prior to founding Active Cares in 1997, the company was doing a lot of philanthropic work on an as-needed basis, but there was no coordinated plan.
“They”™re people of great heart, so they were very into giving back to the community, but they were doing so on a rather shotgun-type basis,” Allen said.
Allen said there are 700 501(c)(3)s in Rockland County, which made it challenging to keep track of company involvement in philanthropic efforts.
Active Cares has provided contributions to more than 600 nonprofits since it was founded.     Â
Active Cares has helped cardiovascular patients who need immediate care and previously had to travel to Manhattan, Westchester or New Jersey for heart care.
So when Good Samaritan Hospital in Suffern needed help building a cardiovascular institute to serve the community, Active Cares was there.
“It was a simple decision,” said Alan Elkin, co-founder and chief executive officer of Active International. “We quickly came to the conclusion that the reason we wanted to do this was to save lives.”
Active International donated $2.5 million toward the $25 million building, called The Active International Cardiovascular Institute.
There have been more than 400 open-heart surgeries performed since it opened on June 30, 2007.
“We had identified that people in Rockland County were dying at a rate 12.5 percent higher than the national average, which was a result of them not having access to advanced care,” said Deborah Marshall, vice president of communications for the hospital. “Now we have the statistics to prove that we are one of the best in the nation according to the Society of Thoracic Surgeons data which links us with 800 of the best of the best programs in the U.S., and we have one of the top ratings.”
