Transcriber: Bob Prottas Reviewer: Denise RQ
I am going to tell you the story about arriving in New York City
when I first got out of school.
I arrived in New York City
and my impression of the city was that it was a wonderland,
that it was a city that was built on change.
I remember sitting on the corner
of East 86th Street, where I lived with my 2 roommates,
a newspaper stand on 86th and Lex go in and out of business
probably seven times within the two years I lived there.
And I thought, "Whoo. This is one hell of a city, it thrives on change."
I realized in no due course that the city was a kind of town
that valued the newcomer above all.
They didn't give a damn who you were or where you were from,
most importantly, they wanted to know, "What you could do for me lately?"
And so the thing that I did for 'the City, ' lately,
was start a small rental company
with myself and the help of a $1,000 loan from my boyfriend.
Seven years later after I had started the company
I had a team of 14 sales people
- I call them sales people they were all renting apartments.
But something strange was happening in the City.
The middle class was moving over to make room for the upper class,
the rich people moving into town.
The condominiums were converting into co-ops,
tens of thousands of them in any given year.
And more importantly than all of that,
my business, my world around me was changing
because my boyfriend, for whatever reason at that point in my life,
seemed like the big deal in my life, was trading me in for a young girl,
my very young and beautiful secretary.
And luckily, for that change,
I started a second business called the "Corcoran Group."
It was born out of the change of that year.
And in that year, when I started the business,
I decided right from the get-go
I was no longer going to have rental agents
because the city was sending me a message.
I was going to have salespeople that sold co-ops.
There was also an animal in town with the biggest mouth you ever heard,
something the likes of which I had never seen, and his name was Donald Trump.
And he was selling a new building in town
above the Bonwit Teller building that he constructed.
A tall black building. A sexy building. And he called it Trump Tower.
And he was trumpeting it as the most expensive address of the entire world.
And much to my surprise, he attracted hundreds of people from Europe,
from Asia to come in and buy the new oddball kind of thing
that we had never heard of called the 'condominium.'
And so I followed Mr. Trump's lead
and started hiring people who spoke a different language.
New immigrants that didn't know how to sell, getting them licensed,
hoping they would drag their relatives and friends into my offices;
and that's exactly what I did.
In the mid-80's, of course, there was no Internet.
And there was no public information on real estate in New York City
because there was no Multiple Listing Service
which the rest of the country enjoyed.
And so there was a vacuum in the market for information that people wanted,
so I published a Corcoran Report.
It was simply a one-page report that added up 11 sales I had for the year,
averaged them out and gave an average New York City sales price.
In my own naivety, I didn't realize then that that was not a valid average,
but I published it, I appeared on the front page of the venerable,
vulnerable, whatever you call that word, New York Times.
It put me on the map, gave me a voice in my industry,
and started pushing the growth of my business way ahead
of what I could even keep up with
because I had a bigger voice than I actually had a company.
But I became the expert in my industry
and that started building my brand at rapid speed.
By the mid-'80s, companies that had only had 30 people
that were considered huge real estate brokerage companies,
like Douglas Elliman and Brown Harris Stevens,
had staffs of 300 people, and it seemed overnight,
while I had maybe 100 or 120 people, and I realized I was falling behind,
and could never catch up to the big guys; these big brokerages were amazing.
I realized their vulnerability was they all looked and sounded alike,
and nobody really gave a damn what the differences were.
And so I decided to put my face --
Oops, I'm not so good at this. Please bear with me. Ignore this slide.
I decided to move ahead and put my face on everything I could possibly advertise:
little tiny faces in the New York Times classified,
big billboards when I eventually grew and could afford it,
and I found that people remember our brand and we stood out from the pack,
and that also continued to grow the business
because it was right for the time in a city with huge companies
where there was no personalization.
Then later in the '80s, everything changed in New York.
I never thought a big city like ours could fall, but the stock market crashed.
Interest rates went to 18%, and people stopped buying.
Just stopped, and we had no sales,
not one sale for 8 months, and I was clearly going out of business.
I owed $350,000 to Citibank,
two hundred and some odd thousand dollars to the ad agency,
[and I was] scared to death.
Then I thought about it and thought:
what does this city need in this terrible market?
Why aren't people buying? Because there's no deadline.
Things aren't going up. Things aren't coming down.
And I realized that buyers like to move when things are moving.
And so I created movement in the market by taking 88 apartments
owned by Equitable Insurance Company, convincing them that we should price
all the 1-bedroom studios, and 2-bedroom ones alike,
high floors, low floors, apartments with views and no views.
Let's price them alike and have a 1-day, 1-price sale.
And that was the last slide you saw there that I zoomed by.
That was the sale that brought 350 people to see in 1-hour the 88 apartments.
They all sold and I had one and a half million dollars
or a little more than that in my pocket to spend in the worst real estate market,
paying off my debt and opening 2 new offices.
In the early '90s, I realized that people were confused finding property.
The New York Times classified section spanned 18-pages just to read
every little ad or to figure out what you wanted to even go see was impossible.
And so I put all of my apartments on something called a videotape.
I thought it was so sexy. I called it H.O.T., homes on tape. Hot.
I thought this was an amazing thing.
And I spent $77,000 of my $102,000 first profit that year
blowing it on these video tapes, and it was dead on arrival.
And so, looking for a place to save face in front of my sales people
with my sales meeting coming up, I was talking with my husband Bill
he had just come back from South Korea
where he played war games as a Navy Captain.
He said: "This year was amazing.
We bombed out the North Koreans in real time.
We pressed the button, and they blew up,"
- this is what they do with our tax money- "All the guys were screaming and yelling."
He goes: "This new government thing. It's called the Internet."
So I announced to my sales people:
"We were taking our apartments into cyberspace."
[I was] simply trying to save face.
We're going to put all those videos into cyberspace.
And I registered the URL corcoran.com.
And within the first week we had it up online,
these old apartments, most of them were already sold.
Boom, boom we had 2 sales out of London. Sight unseen, people bought an apartment.
I realize I had just stepped into the big Kahuna that was going to cause
more change to the real estate market than anyone could even imagine.
I registered all my competitors URLs, 17 of them to be exact
because you could do it then, not because I wanted to own or control them,
but I wanted to find out when they would wake up to this new thing
knowing they would have to call me.
And one-by-one they called me and asked for their URLs back.
And do you know the largest competitors call the latest?
Proving that the little guy has the corner on creativity
when the big guy has the corner on money. And the little guy caught on first.
Those were the businesses that started to build and become my new competitors
not the big guys at the top.
I sold my business on the Friday night before 9/11.
And I think it was divine intervention,
just had me sign that deal that night, thank God.
And that was the end of my real estate chapter.
I said good-bye to that, looked for a new job,
and figured I'd go into the TV business; and that's what I did.
And as luck would have it after 4 years of failing at everything I did,
I got a great invitation from a show called "Shark Tank"
that they were going to try out for just 3 months on ABC.
I signed up for it and I became a Shark on this new TV show.
It failed for the first 2 years,
it was constantly being threatened to cancel until the third year.
And what did I get from the Shark Tank? A new opportunity in living.
What I got was the opportunity to see people like myself,
young versions of me starting all kinds of businesses,
and having the opportunity to be an actual investor
and help them get there.
I knew it was for me. And so what did I do with my people?
I did the same thing I did
with all my agents and managers at the Corcoran group:
I insisted they have fun.
I knitted them to together: pie companies, technology companies,
you name it, we had it, 27 companies in total.
And I made sure I never bought into an entrepreneur
who wasn't willing to change.
How did I cause that change with my entrepreneurs?
The same way I made change happen at the Corcoran group.
Because I had learned that if you can cause fun in the work place,
take people out of their comfort zone,
make them feel ridiculous, look silly, be silly, make them drink too much,
- whatever the hell you have to do to shake them up -
what really happens is they become an innovative team.
I was looking for fun in my business.
What I got instead was not only fun - which is the best part of living,
I mean, who would actually die and say: "I'm regretful I had so much fun." -
but what I got for the fun making that I was very, very good at,
the more bizarre the better it was.
These slides should be working and they're not. We'll see if they do.
Here they come. Let's keep our fingers... Yeah, we got it.
Parties where you couldn't be let in unless you dressed in pajamas,
or crossed dress, or dressed as 1950s.
Whatever you had to do: picnics where you didn't have hot dogs,
we had camels, elephants, hot air balloons 15 race horses in full garb.
Whatever could shock people: come as dressed as a nun
- that was not a big hit, but at least I tried it -
but it's really weird to see 700 people dressed as nuns at the Waldorf Astoria.
Believe me. All right. Everything to make my people have fun.
And that's exactly what I do with my entrepreneurs on Shark Tank:
I get them to wrap their arms around change.
And how do I create that environment?
By making sure they stay loose as a goose, willing to see what's coming their way,
and switch left, right, whatever they have to do to accommodate the change
because that is the secret sauce, the fun that makes people accept change.
It just wires them that way.
And that's what I've done for these entrepreneurs.
Today I sit on Shark Tank and each Shark there has some advantage over the other.
A money advantage, an intelligence, a financial advantage.
Everybody's got something.
The only advantage I have is I know how to build a team.
And so I've knit these people together to build a team on the basis of fun.
And that's all I do for these people.
But as a result of it, I have some hugely profitable businesses
and much more important than that, I am having the best time ever
because I have many, many more people to play with and thank you for listening.
(Applause)