Barbara Corcoran's Secret Recipe: Transforming Hits into Home Runs in Business

I think if you could be yourself in all that it is, what typically happens is people like you. Show me somebody who could take a hit, and I'll show you a good entrepreneur. Because you know what I found? I found desk space was just like closet space. It never stays empty for long. They told me about they're gonna have an amusement park one day, a Tom and Chee amusement park. I'm like, okay, they're definitely on dope. What I've learned to get myself through business and build my business is a new tape, and it goes like this. Fuck you. All I wanted to do was get a hold of her to let her know we'd figure something out. I didn't know what, but I knew we'd figure something out, don't worry. That competitive spirit drives you through all the things that don't make any common sense in life. When you're young, you're too stupid to know any better. You've never jumped off a cliff and fallen flat on your face. If you could work as a free slave, even, for a licensed top salesperson, just sitting next to them being their slave or servant, you're gonna learn everything. The most underestimated tool used in business today is the fun card.

She's an American businesswoman, investor, author, and television personality. She's one of the investors on ABC's hit show Shark Tank. She has an estimated net worth of $80 million. She's Barbara Corcoran, and here are her top 10 rules for success.

The upside when you're getting much older, and I've gotten stronger and stronger in this way, as I— by the year, by the minute, okay? And I wish I knew it earlier. It's to be yourself. Because people, even if you're weird, a weirdo is often the most loved person in a team. I think if you could be yourself in all that it is, what typically happens is people like you because they can sense it's the real deal. It's the airs, the phoniness, the trying to impress, the insecurity, all the stuff that we all strive so hard for when we're young that gets in the way. You know, there was actually a 2-year period where I had my hair poofed up and didn't wash it all week to try to fit in with the society ladies, you know? My scalp itched like crazy. I had to get rid of that haircut, you know, that poof thing once a week. Hello.

The bouffant.

All right. Yeah, yeah. And the only time my business ever fell behind was when I was so busy watching my competition. I analyzed everything. I had the listings on a chart by category, by size, who had what, who was my target, da da da. I was like a genius at my field. It was the only year of my whole career I never pushed the business ahead. I was so busy watching the next guy, I wasn't watching me. Right? So being yourself, I would say, would be the most important thing. Let me tell you, rejection is the big kahuna in all entrepreneurship. Okay? Show me somebody who could take a hit, and I'll show you a good entrepreneur. I don't know if I made that up, but I think I did. But it's all in how well you get back up. And you know what I have found, by the way? Because if you think about it, great salespeople make a couple million dollars a year selling apartments in New York City. Which my great salespeople do, are great entrepreneurs. All the business comes from them. They manage their own business, they hire staff, they're entrepreneurs. And you know what I found is the only difference between the superstars making the millions a year and the person who's barely getting by, the only difference, not contacts, not how hard they work, some people work just as hard and don't make any money, right? It's how long they feel sorry for themselves once they get hit. Some people could take a hit and milk it for 2 weeks. They're at their desk, they look like they're working, but they're not working mentally. I'm not there. The great salespeople take the hit and then they jump right back up as though they've been hurt just as much as the next guy, but they work right through it and keep going. Let me tell you, if you have that skill, you should be an entrepreneur because you will be paid well for it. The single best thing I do, more than anything else I can do in building businesses for myself and these other people, well, just speaking for myself, is I fail well. If I fall on my face, let me tell you, nobody's better at pretending I'm not, thinking of a quick cover-up, trying to keep moving. And you want to know, in that act itself of getting back up fast, you always stumble onto something good. And you want to know one other thing? This is— I'm not a religious person because I was raised so goddamn religious, I don't want to ever think about it again. But I do believe once you put your mind on going forward on anything, there's almost like a battle cry that goes out in the universe and the world rallies around you. You're right. It just comes to you for— again and again. So to have that kind of good faith that I'm just getting back up, you know, I'm gonna get slammed. Life is fair in its own weird way in that way in building businesses. You will be swept up by some lucky chance. It happened to me every time I got back up. Expand before you're ready. My mom always said it was never a good time to have a baby, and she had 10. I don't ever remember her not being pregnant. She was always pregnant, in my memory, pregnant, she's always pregnant, right? I practiced the same philosophy with building my business. I found it was never really a good time to expand, but I always expanded. And the thing that I practiced religiously that helped me grow my business, 'cause you have to realize, if you're the little guy and you got the big guy up here, you can't do the same, you've gotta do like 5 times more to catch up. So what I practiced, if I had a sales organization of 25 people and I thought, you know what, I'm gonna hire an office that could hold 50. I'm gonna double the size. I never hired the office or rented the office that needed 50. I went out and killed myself to get an office that held 100. I doubled my expectation because you know what I found? I found desk space was just like closet space, it never stays empty for long. You get all those desks waiting for bodies, your whole focus is on finding salespeople. Your whole focus is on training them fast and better to get them productive. And I found that I was able to leapfrog over my competitors because I was super aggressive in expanding before I was ready, and I trusted that somehow it would all work out. It always did work out because you have a gun to your own head and you have to run like crazy to catch up to yourself. And so it took a little courage or stupidity on the front side, but without it, I could have never grown and become the number one firm in New York. It just wouldn't have happened. It was too long in catching up. Everybody was in business much too long for me to ever catch up. So that lesson is expand before you're ready. When I met Tom and Chee, they were— had just come out of selling their grilled cheese on donuts out of a tent in Cincinnati, right? What was so interesting about them, however, they weren't talking about a tent. They were talking about a franchise of hundreds of franchises selling cheese on donuts. Okay, right? What do you think happened? They told me about they're gonna have an amusement park one day, a Tom and Chee amusement park. I'm like, okay, they're definitely on dope. These people. All right? But I don't think so anymore. I can't wait to go to the amusement park. They have 171 franchises across America. Exactly what they envisioned. They got exactly the picture in great detail where they were gonna do it, how they're gonna go to the other side of the river in Cincinnati, which is another state, I forget which one it is, how they're gonna come cross back, ba ba ba ba. I'm like, okay, well guess what? I should have believed them, okay? They have big pictures in their head. And every entrepreneur might not have a business plan with everything. In fact, none of them really do. I think they're grossly overrated, but they sure have a movie in their head of who they're going to be when they grow up. All right. And when they can't express that movie on Shark Tank, I'm always out. If I can't— if they don't see it, how am I going to see it and believe it? And they're not going to get there. And if I even walk into like a cocktail party or something and I meet someone and then it's like they're into each other and they go, nice to meet you, and they turn away. That little quarter turn, I'm embarrassed to admit it, I'm like dying. It's like, oh shit, they don't like me. Oh my God, you know, this isn't my crowd anyway, I shouldn't have come. But what I've learned to get myself through business and build my business is a new tape, and it goes like this: Fuck you. I have just as much right to be here as you. I'm just as smart. I'm as smart as you are. You might not think I'm smart, but I know I'm smart. Guess what? I've done a lot. Don't you dare look down on me. What? Ba ba ba. I do this whole thing on myself. And you know what it gets me to do? It gets me to step forward one more time and get just a little bit more confidence for that circumstance. But I'm so grateful that I've had to come out of that hole to do it. Carrie Chiang had, I would say, 90% of her business coming out of Taiwan because she spoke Taiwanese. Chinese, and she sold condominiums. And then one day I'm watching the news early and I see the Taiwanese stock market, if there's such a thing, some big Taiwanese thing crashed. I'm sitting there like, oh my God, Carrie is going to be over here. She was producing single-handedly, I must have had maybe 150 salespeople at the time, she was single-handedly producing 80% of my income. This is important. All my eggs were in the Carrie basket. I immediately called Carrie up on her first cell phone, her second cell phone, her home, her office, her Chinese cousins. I cannot reach her. The next day I can't reach her. She's disappeared. I know Carrie has committed harakiri. All I wanted to do was get a hold of her to let her know we'd figure something out. I didn't know what, but I knew we'd figure something out. Don't worry. She finally marches into my office as she always does, like she owns it. She always insulted me a little, but what the heck, she's making money. —marches into my office. I go, Carrie! I go, I'm going to say you're alive, but I didn't. I thought she was dead. She goes, "Ababa, Ababa, you know what I do?" No, Carrie, what did you do? She said, "I up all night. I call every one of my customers. I say, you got to sell. You got to sell now. I got 132 listings." What do I have to say to that? Poetry in motion. Sales. Can Carrie take a hit? She didn't let a hair grow under her foot, or a grass hair, or whatever those things are called. She saw the opportunity, and what do you think Carrie did? She hired two Japanese-speaking assistants within, I'd say, a week and a half. How did she even find them, right? Because the Japanese market was booming, and she had them as the interlay as she showed apartments to the Japanese. And let me tell you, I found out in that chapter the Japanese really don't like the Chinese, and they loved buying the Chinese apartments at a steep discount. And Carrie, like, doubled her business. No one sells more property to the Japanese today than Carrie Chiang. No one sells more Chinese. And if anything happens to those markets, I'm sure she'll go to school and learn how to speak German or Russian or whatever the heck she has to learn how to do. A wonderful example of someone who takes hit. Competitive. If I tell Jim from Cousins Maine Lobster— I don't have his picture here, but you know I talked about him before— if I tell him one little thing about the guy he used to compete with on the hockey team— Jim was a semi-professional hockey player and had some injury or something in the minor leagues, if I'm telling that right. But anyway, his archenemy on the other team was a guy named Luke. What do you think happened? Luke's from Maine, Jim's from Maine. Luke went into the —lobster business. All I have to do to double sales is say, "Hey, did you hear Luke opened another restaurant?" Talk about competitive spirit. He's ready to kill. He doesn't stop working. He hates the idea that somebody might beat him at a game. It's his DNA and his partner, Saban, is the same way. All I have to do is tell Grace and Lace, who makes beautiful lacy socks and shawls, and my most successful business by far in terms of making money, And what do I have to do to get them going? Hardly anything. All I have to do is say, "God, got a big check from Cousins today." Do you know I'll get a check from her like within the week? A bigger check. They're winning. We're more successful. Why? I didn't say compete with my other— That's the way they're wired. Competitive. You get an entrepreneur who doesn't feel the heat of competition, he's not going to be good on his feet. She's not going to come to the fore when she really needs it. That competitive spirit drives you through all the things that don't make any common sense in life. That's what it does. The best time to start your own business is as quick as you can. And I'm gonna give you two reasons why. When you're young, you're too stupid to know any better. You've never jumped off a cliff and fallen flat on your face, so you have courage. Once life gets a hold of you, you learn exactly what to be afraid of, what you might not succeed at. Everything gets nipped in. So I think the best time to start a business, quite frankly, is while you're in college. What do you have in college? Why is that the perfect time? You're open to the universe. You have a tremendous support system of professors with all different backgrounds ready to help you, and you have colleagues with different strengths around you, the fellow students, and you're hungry. You're hungry to prove something. So in short, the best time is the earliest time you can possibly do before you have the wife, the kids, the husband, and the mortgage. And the most fertile time is right when you're in school, even before you get out. That's what I believe. But my boyfriend is trying to break into the real estate industry in New York, and he's finding it a little bit challenging. So I just wanted to know what advice you would have for somebody who's trying to start off. Yeah, well, the first thing you should do is go and work for a top salesperson. Best way to go in. The easiest job to get in New York if you want to go in real estate is to go to a rental company. It's like the bottom feeders right there. It's terrible. But you know what's great about it? And I ran a rental company for 7 years before I— 8 years before I went into sales, thank God. And you know what's great about it? You get 100 times at bat. In other words, you answer 50 calls. Is that apartment available? That apartment available? Different when you're selling. It's a slow motion. So you get a lot of practicing. If you could work as a free slave, even, for a licensed top salesperson, just sitting next to them, being their slave or servant, You're gonna learn everything. You can't learn in a real estate school. You gotta be on the street and learn it. And so that's the most important thing. Fun is good for a business. Back to my dad. I mimicked my father's bizarreness and it gave me a company culture that no one could compete with. At first, my competitors made fun of us. They called us the Corkettes. They said we were like a Midwestern firm, which isn't a compliment in New York City. It's supposed to be sophisticated, you know? And so how did I use fun to build my business? Easy. The first fun event I planned, we were like 7 or 8 people. I think we have a picture of it here if you want to go back, maybe one slide, you'll see it. Oh, we're already on to something else. All right, we got exciting slides today all over the place. Okay, but anyway, I'll paint the picture with my words. I told everyone to dress in your best outfit, absolute best outfit, really deck yourself up in wear your best jewelry, do your makeup fresh, like 4 o'clock in the afternoon, not just wear it from the morning. We're going somewhere special. I gave them the invitation 2 weeks early. People talked about it for 2 weeks. Excitement of looking forward to something is half the joy of anything fun, as you know. Da da da da, what are you wearing? What are you wearing? They came down to the street on Madison and 60th Street where our office was, and I had an old clunky double-decker bus waiting for them. Looked like it should have been retired 100 years ago. I said, "Come on up, come on up." They sat on the top, 'cause it was open air. And then I took those fancy ladies and one of my salespeople, a gay guy who dressed better than all of us, we couldn't compete. We took those fancy ladies right up to Harlem on a slow tour of Harlem when Harlem had to be the scariest place in the universe. Totally different now. They were groping the jewelry. They didn't say a word. I never saw Fancy ladies under pressure, they're no good. They were terrible. I had, thank God, at the time only one black salesperson, V. Wilson, with the biggest soul in the world, and I cued her in on where we were going. She was my companion here. We get up to 145th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, and the bus driver leaves, says the engine's broken. We planned that. They leave us for 10 minutes in the middle of the summer. People were nuts. Do you know? V. Wilson, I mean, we cannot talk about this without crying and laughter all over like it was yesterday. Okay, how many years ago was it? V. Wilson describes that. She said when the bus driver left the bus, she said, I swear I was a maypole. Wait, what did she say? A maypole? Like in Sweden, they have maypoles, the kids dance around, I think. She said, whatever, say flagpole, but that's not what she said. She said, I swear I was a from Maypole flagpole with 8 white women clinging to me. They were like, "Ahh!" Here's what happened. We go back to the office. You couldn't— they weren't even talking to customers the next day. Nobody could talk about anything but the trip to Harlem. They were laughing, sharing what they were thinking, da da da da da da da da da. And I looked at my 8 salespeople and I thought to myself, I thought, "Wow, what a team." They had been in trouble together, they laughed together, they were reflecting together, and for the first time I realized I had a culture going. And so I became the queen of fun for the rest of my life. I probably spent as much time planning the details of ridiculous fun frequently as much as I did with any other part of the business, because I saw it as a power tool. And guess what I surprisingly got out of it? I never expected. I became the creative, the creative, like, hotbed company in New York. All the creative ideas came out of our company. We tried everything first. Why did that happen? Because we thought of all the ideas when we were having fun. I never had a good idea at my desk. I thought I did, but the really winning ideas always came on the way back from the movie theater. When we were having a management meeting, I made everybody sit under the table and said, to sit out their chairs just to move it around. Anything that was bizarre, get up on an elephant. When people were laughing and laughing and laughing, they went, you know what we should really do? We should blah, blah, blah. People were free, we're all equal, we're all playmates. And I created a powerful team as a result of fun. The most underestimated tool used in business today is the fun card, in my opinion. Nobody really has fun. People's idea of fun is having a cocktail, happy New Year, hallelujah, fancy place. It's not fun. People do a million things like that. I had my February parties, and what happened? My February parties, you weren't allowed in unless you dressed for it. Dress 1940s. Okay, how do you dress? And figure it out. They look forward to it. They couldn't get in unless they're in 1940s. Dress in pink. I'm a guy, dress in pink, right? Cross-dress. The very last party, do you know how exciting it was to be at the Waldorf Astoria ballroom after my straight men swore they would We're not coming. This is it. You've gone too far. I'm not cross-dressing. I knew they were going to cross-dress. They didn't want to miss the party. They were the best parties in town. But do you know how thrilling it was for me to be at the Waldorf Astoria, the grand ballroom, all that fanciness, and see all these people I couldn't recognize? That you, Harry? It's me, Barbara. It's me under here. It was bizarre. But you want to know what happened And they would go out and show the listings of the other brokers, say, "You know where we were last night? You know what happened at your party?" I could have sold every ticket to my competitors for that party for $1,000 apiece if I could, if I would have. Everybody envied our parties because they were bizarre, okay? And on and on and on. I think I told you— and by the way, you know what's great and still true today in New York? I imagine it's true in Dallas or wherever you're from. Do you know that the venues in New in New York are at half price in February because it's the worst month for parties. So you get half price, okay? Tax time, the most depressed sales month of the year in every business, February. I don't know why it is, but it is. It lifts everybody up and you get everything at half price. Okay. Fun is good for business.

Thank you so much for watching. I made this video because Victoria Faux asked me to. So if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, Leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which of Barbara's top 10 rules hit you the hardest, is gonna have the biggest impact on your business and your life. Leave it in the comments and I'll join the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.

But I was dumping the pasta one night into the sink and all of a sudden, Raymond, Simone, He walks in and he says, "You know, Barb, we have something serious to discuss. I'm going to marry your secretary." I'm like, "Tina?" She went from Tina the wonderful secretary— I won't even put a label on her, okay? I just couldn't believe my ears or my eyes. I'm like, "What? How's that possible?" He said, "Take your time moving out." I took about a minute, grabbed a toothbrush, and walked out the door. I moved in with my girlfriend Kathy, who was living on East 79th Street in a studio, and she let me stay there till I got my feet back under me. I should say that for the first time in my life, I don't know what hit me, I guess that hit me, but I can't believe I managed it so badly. I felt like I was a nobody. I went from a somebody with a successful business to nobody because I was turned out for a younger woman. Tina was 5 years younger than me. I had to admit she was prettier she had real blonde hair. I was already highlighting. I hated her for that. She was calm and pretty. I hated her. But I went to work every day. I wanted to fire Tina, but Ray reminded me he was the controlling partner. I couldn't do that. Tina moved into my desk in Ray's office where I used to sit, and I sat out with the salespeople. And every day I went in smiling like like a puppet, but in my heart I was running around a broken heart and loss of confidence. I just thought to myself, my God, I was nothing before Ray found me. He picked me up, found me, he was my mentor, he gave me confidence, he gave me the money to start the business. Everything good that had changed my life all led to one place, which was Ramon Simone. And I thought, he's right, I'll never succeed without him. But I can't even remember what clicked in my head, maybe desperation, but one day I just decided I'm not gonna do this anymore. And I walked in and I said to Ramon Simone, you know what, I'm ending this business and here's how we're gonna do it. We're gonna chop up the 14 salespeople like a football draw. You can pick the first person, I'll pick the second. We'll do it fair. If you wanna move out, you can move out. If you want me to move out, no problem. You wanna keep the phone number, no problem. Or I'll get a new phone number, whatever. You go first. He picked Norman Hirsch, our star salesperson. I picked Esther Kaplan, a not-so-star salesperson, but I had a plan for her. And we went right down the line, and I would say within maybe 6 minutes, we ended a partnership. Boom, like that. We had $37,000 in cash. He wrote me a check for half the $37,000, and as luck would have it, it was a real estate recession we were just about to dive into. And why was it great? Because commercial space wasn't leasing well. He was on— the 8th floor where my old office was, I rented the identical space on the 11th floor above him. There's a little ego in that, I'm sorry to say. How needy was I? And by Monday, this was on a Thursday, by Monday I moved my salespeople in because in those times you could rent black desks, rent phones, bang, we were in operation and my 7 salespeople moved in and that was the birth of the Corcoran Group. Right before I left Ramon Simon's office that day, or I should say Ray and Tina's office that day. And by the way, you know what his real name was? Wasn't even Ramon Simon. I found out from his mother Vicky his real name was Ray Simon, and he wasn't from the Basque Country like he always told me. He was from 145th Street, Harlem. Go figure. Alrighty, well anyway, so right before I left the office, that's when Ray gave me the gift of a lifetime, when he said to me those words that reflected in my head for the rest of my life. It still gets me going. "You'll never succeed without me." I'm telling you, I don't believe in negative motivation. I'm a positive person like my mother, but he really knew my number. If he had said, "I know you're going to be amazing," I'm sure I wouldn't have stayed in business in the tough times. But it was that scolding tattoo in my heart, "You'll never succeed without me," that every time I was near death growing my business through the ups and downs of the real estate recession, being overextended, being overleveraged, owing money, blah, blah, blah. That same phrase got me going again. He gave me an insurance policy for success by insulting me. Thank God he did. I have thanked him a million times. What happened to Ramon Simone? He married Tina. They have 3 kids together. They are so much more happily married than myself and my husband Bill. They were meant to be together. They were destined, okay? But still, thank God he gave me that insult to assure my success for the rest of my life. Every great entrepreneur is a salesman. You can't start a business if you can't sell your product or service. And so if it's not your nature to convince somebody to come around to your way of thinking, you're not ever going to get your business off the ground. Perception creates reality. I'm sure you've heard that before, or another version of a more simple version is fake it till you make it, right? My mom, when we were raised, was very Catholic, and she always said, remember, the meek will inherit the earth. No need to brag, just be a great person, people will recognize it, and you'll always do well. That was my mom's philosophy, but she had never been to New York. Let me tell you, New York, the nice people got mowed over. I saw that the first week I moved in, right? So my mother's philosophy didn't work in the business world. May have been great for the home, but it didn't work in the business world. You know what I witnessed right away? That the big mouth with less talent inherited the earth. And so I had to develop for myself a really big mouth, right? And I did it very easily by creating a report. And I should say, my first perception lesson I learned when I got my first I ran over to Bergdorf Goodman's and blew it. I only had $1,000. I spent $340 of $1,000, you know? I blew the whole money on the fanciest coat I could find. I bought the fanciest rat hair collar, cuffs, buttons, fancy. But you know what? I wore that coat for 4 years and I felt like the queen of New York real estate. Covered up my bad clothes, I just stomped around town. And you want to know something? People responded differently to me. Differently to me than when I had my other coat that was from New Jersey. They treated me differently and I saw the difference. So I learned to really create the image of success whether I had it or not. I was sitting around, my salespeople were coming into my office, it was another real estate— yet another real estate recession, they were complaining about me not advertising for them. How can we sell if you don't advertise? Well, I have no money, that's how I don't advertise. We're out of money, you know, we're lucky to have the rent. Na na na na na. I thought if one more salesperson came into my office and complained, I was going to run away, get an illegal gun, and kill them. It's really how I felt. I had had it, right? And so in desperation, I'm thinking, okay, how do I get people to notice us? I thought, oh, I know what I'll do. I took my 11 sales for the year, I divided by 11— thank God I was good at my 11 times table, the only one— came up with an average price based on the 11 sales we have for the year. And I typed on my Selectric typewriter the Corcoran Report, an analysis of statistics and blah blah. It was so long I don't even remember what it was. But anyway, and I put average New York City apartment price, $54,600, whatever it was at the moment. And I folded them and mailed them out to every reporter that wrote for the New York Times that day. No cover note, just a simple one-page report, one statistic, name named after me. Never got a call. Hey, hey, big deal. It took me a couple of hours, you know, that's all it took. Hand-addressed the envelopes. Two weeks hence, I'm at home on a Sunday, open up the New York Times, the front page of the real estate section, which was read by everyone. The headline was New York City house— no, houses price— no, New York City prices hit all-time low. I read the first line. It was a Catholic miracle. According "Talk to Barbara Corcoran, president of the Corcoran Group." I'm like, "What?!" I cut that out. I went into the office that Monday. The world had changed. I'm telling you, it was a bellwether change for my business. I saw my salespeople hustling on the phone trying to get listings. You usually called on owner ads, "Can I have your listing?" There was no MLS. "Can I have your listing?" I heard it day in and day out. Oh, let me spell it for you. C-O-R-C-O-R. I always heard my name spelled. It was a difficult name, so it repeated itself. And that was the first day I heard John Beckman, my German salesman, sitting there go, "Oh, you've heard of us? Corcoran, you've heard us?" Everybody stopped. He didn't have to spell the name. I'm like, "That's weird." You know, in people's minds, we went from a nobody to a somebody in one day in the life of New York City. And I said, whoa, I get it. I have a partner and it's called the New York Times. And so I churned out the reports. If you could advance the slide a little bit. I churned out the report, got a new red suit that became my logo. You just saw it there quickly, all right? And I became the star. Statistician of numbers in New York. I churned out a report on anything I could think of. I churned out a Madonna report because I read in the Post that Madonna was looking for an apartment. She was pregnant. I'm like, we don't have her, but I'll write about her. I put out a Madonna report. What would Madonna be looking for? Top security. She was the Lady Gaga of the moment, had to have security. A doorman building, of course, you know, she needed the protection. Views, of course, anybody Everybody with oodles of money wants views. I just took the usual laundry dream list that everybody wants when you got money. I was on 4 different television stations in one week. Why? Because Madonna was in the news and the media was willing to gobble up anything that they could get their hands on because Madonna was in the news, and I just happened to provide it. All right? Do you know no one asked me if I was working with Madonna? Do you know the last guy who introduced me on the 11 o'clock news News, that stuffy guy that was fired a few years back, I forget why, some conflict, very stuffy, very revered. He actually introduced me without moving his lower lip at all. Barbara Corcoran, celebrity broker. I'm like, celebrity broker? Did I get Madonna? No. Wouldn't that have been nice? Actually, she never moved. She only moved 2 years ago to a double townhouse, but that's so many years later. She never moved. I moved, of course. But who I did get is a call from an agent or an attorney, I actually don't know who he was. The very next day I was on that last news channel and he said, "You seem to be very comfortable working with celebrities. I wonder if you'd consider helping my celebrity find a home." Okay. Richard Gere. Who would you rather have, Madonna or Richard Gere? That's me. I put my head in her shoes. What did he buy? Sadly, not something expensive. A one-bedroom that he ripped the wall down and converted to a temple. He was in his temple phase. Little weird guy. Alright, we resold that apartment like only 3 or 4 years ago. I don't know why he held it, but— what was great— how did it happen that I got Richard Gere? And then when we got Richard Gere, Richard Gere, poor Richard Gere, the minute he bought something, I did a Richard Gere report, leaked it to the press. Richard Gere! What's he doing? It's a temple, don't tell anybody. He's making a temple. Juicy, went on and on and on. Richard Gere got me other people, they got me other people, they got me other people. So what came first, the chicken or the egg? Certainly I created the perception and then the reality followed and I found I did that my entire life with anything I dreamt of becoming, I put it in the public eye, figured a way to get it in the public eye, and then you know what's great about it? You have to run like crazy to keep up with yourself. You're going to make it happen because you don't want to get caught in a lie, right? It's like a deadline. Ha ha ha ha. And it worked again and again and again.