Barbara Corcoran

Ryan Serhant:	Welcome back to another episode of Big Money Energy, where we talk to super successful and self-made people to find out exactly how they did it, how they went from nothing to something. I’m Ryan Serhant and today I’m joined by one of the stars of ABC’s Shark Tank. A bestselling author, and extremely successful business woman, Barbara Corcoran. We discuss how growing up in a family with 10 kids teaches you how to survive in a competitive business like real estate. Why New York real estate will stay strong even in a down economy, and the golden ticket to building a successful company. Let’s get into it. Welcome to another episode.
Ryan Serhant:	Hi, Barbara.
Barbara Corcoran:	Nice to be here, Ryan.
Ryan Serhant:	Thank you so much for coming in. You are the first Corcoran “agent” well, also the first Corcoran to come into our new office here.
Barbara Corcoran:	I’m the Corcoran to be in.
Ryan Serhant:	The one, yeah, the one.
Barbara Corcoran:	Not an agent.
Ryan Serhant:	I have a thousand questions I want to ask you. Most of the people who work with me, especially a lot of the women who work with me, when they found out that you were coming in here, my phone… I think I’ve turned it off now so there’s no issues. I could ask you questions for 10 hours because they have so many. One of our agents actually, Rachel in San Francisco, nearly jumped on a plane just so she could be here to meet you. I think you spoke at Barclay’s awhile ago when she was working on the trading floor there and you changed her life. I hear that from a lot of people, which is really, really incredible. So good on you for doing that.
Ryan Serhant:	Before I get into a lot of the real estate questions that I have, and obviously Shark Tank questions and everything that I think goes through my mind about you. I want to go back for a second because I have three sisters and two brothers. I was born in Houston, Texas, grew up there, bounced around Long Island, outside Boston way before I ever came to New York. And I was basically the middle child. I had older siblings, and then I had my little baby brother. I had that, I guess, middle child syndrome, even though I didn’t think I did when I was growing up. But you’re one of 10.
Barbara Corcoran:	I’m curious, what’s a middle child syndrome?
Ryan Serhant:	Middle child syndrome is the kid in the middle who doesn’t get all the attention because they were the first born and they’re not treated like a baby because they’re the last born. They’re the one in the middle who like, “Okay, did you eat? You ate? Okay, great. You’re going to live.” Or, “You went to school? Okay, great. You’re going to live.” You have to figure out things on your own. I read about it once.
Barbara Corcoran:	I would think it would be the best position. I was a middle child.
Ryan Serhant:	I knew it! See, I knew it.
Barbara Corcoran:	You get to be yourself, no expectations on the top or the bottom. It’s a terrific spot.
Ryan Serhant:	Were you pushed a lot as the middle child? Were there heavy expectations on you. Do you remember any of that from your brothers and sisters?
Barbara Corcoran:	Not at all. The way I saw it, I had an older sister on one side of me who protected me from the top and I had a younger brother on the other side of me and he protected me from anything that was going to come from bottom. I would never switch my seat. But what’s great about growing up with 10 kids, which is an advantage to every child I think, is you only have two parents to go around. You have 10 kids who want attention, so you learn how to compete.
Ryan Serhant:	Yes.
Barbara Corcoran:	If I were to say one thing that prepared me for the real estate career that I enjoyed, it was the ability to compete and I learned it at home. How did I compete? I became the most creative child. I could put on every game on the streets that happened in our neighborhood and I was in charge. I could open up rock stores and sell rocks. I could put on Broadway shows in the basement on a rainy day. I could get my parents’ attention. That was a huge advantage going into this crazy, wacky, competitive business that we’re both in, don’t you think?
Ryan Serhant:	That’s a big part of being the middle child because you’re not guaranteed attention. I think that’s a big deal. And for us in the real estate business, in the sales business, in the television business, all day long I’m trying to figure out how to get more attention from our clients, our developers, our agents, the people we’re pitching. And as you say that about putting on shows and figuring out things to do, I’m reminded of all the times I got my little brother to do things with me, to perform in front of my parents. Magic shows, we’d make little movies and my little brother, I’d forced him to do it so that there always could be attention. Because I didn’t have the throwing arm. My older brother had the throwing arm, he was the quarterback. My little brother had the throwing arm, he was the pitcher and then I was just in the middle, I liked theater.
Barbara Corcoran:	Ryan, you’re nicer than I, because you shared the limelight with your brother, at least. I was never that way. If any of my siblings did anything for me, my sister Mary Jean made my bed every day. My sister Denise did my dish night. I never shared the credit. It was like, “What do I do to get them to do the dishes for me on my dish night?” All you had to do is compliment them when they were doing the dishes the night before. How do you do those dishes so well? So you were a nicer sibling than I, you shared the credit. Not for me, I was out to get the attention. Yeah, that’s short and simple.
Ryan Serhant:	That competitive nature, you graduate college and you get into real estate. But one question I have, because I don’t know what the answer is, that’s why I’m asking it, is a lot of us, I think, who got into the real estate business, it wasn’t our first choice. It was okay, I could try this. Let’s see what happens or do something else. Where would you be today had you not said, “Okay, I’ll get into real estate.”
Barbara Corcoran:	Who knows? Maybe I’d be a waitress still at the Fort Lee Diner where I-
Ryan Serhant:	Is that a real answer.
Barbara Corcoran:	No, but you never know. But I imagine I would own a chain of diners today because I always thought I was smarter than my boss. That I could run a diner a little bit better if only given the chance. But where would I be? I think I would have been in some kind of a career making publicity and using my mouth to make a living. Probably advertising, public relations, maybe even politics, anything that I could sway people with my ability to sell. And you know as well as I do, if you can sell well, you can pretty much enter any field and do well because there’s always a need for salesmen in every spot. When I say salesman, it sounds like it’s not so important, but it’s essential to every business. You can’t sell a product or service, you don’t have a business. So I think I would have just been leading something, using my mouth to lead.
Ryan Serhant:	And you’ve always been a good talker.
Barbara Corcoran:	I was a good talker outside of school, but in school, I didn’t say a word because I never had the answer. It depended on the forum. But in my 22 jobs I had before I started real estate, my gift in each of those jobs was I could talk. I could talk, yeah, for sure.
Ryan Serhant:	Yeah. And why did you stick it out? I mean, I can’t imagine your position in the 1970s getting into the real estate business, which I was not around.
Barbara Corcoran:	Too bad, you missed a great time.
Ryan Serhant:	How did you muscle through that? Because I think people listening to this now, they think things are tough now, but they don’t know what it was like for you building your career and your entire business. What got you out of bed every day when you had a bad day, or you lost agents, lost deals?
Barbara Corcoran:	I don’t think I ever had the thought for a moment that I might fail. The reason for it was I was so busy building that I had no time to give anything any thought. Much like a teenager that gets in trouble if the hands aren’t busy, my mind was so occupied with building that business every day that I never had the thought that it could fail. There was one juncture where I actually, I guess I’d have to admit that I warmed up to the thought of going out of business. I don’t know what year it was, but nothing was going on. Two thirds of the competitors in New York City were down. I had no cash, I had no receivables, I had whining salespeople. I actually thought of actually announcing the business was closing.
Barbara Corcoran:	I tried everything, but funny enough about adversity. Popped into my head the one day, one price sale and I made over a million dollars one week later in two hours selling 88 unwanted apartments at the same price to a line of people that didn’t know they wanted to buy until they were going to [inaudible]. And boom! I opened another office that same week as my competitors continued to go out of business. That was probably the only 11th hour duress I had. But thank God I did because you never know what you’re made of until the chips are against the wall. That’s where you find your greatest courage, or you find your greatest graciousness to admit defeat one or the other. But you only have a black or a white way to go. And fortunately, I thought of a creative idea. I always thought somehow to save the day so to speak. I created a market that everybody said was not there.
Barbara Corcoran:	And I must be honest, I was half surprised by it myself. I thought it could work, it can work, but let’s give it a shot, throw it against the wall and see what happens. But that morning, when I went around to our makeshift, temporary office on 83rd Street on 1st Avenue and saw 200 some odd people waiting in line for 88 apartments that nobody wanted the day before, I’m like, “Holy shit! Look at this.” And of course I was smart enough to have pre-signed contracts in giant stacks. People walked in and said, “They’re going fast.” Nobody asked who signed those contracts? Are they real contracts? But there’s something very alluring in the real sales concept [inaudible] markets and [inaudible] markets. That everybody wants what everybody wants. Nobody wants what nobody wants. So we took the nobodies and made them somebodies and everybody wanted them that morning.
Ryan Serhant:	How did you convince the developer to do that sale and to do that at those price points? I mean, I think that all the developers I have now were post COVID. There’s a lot going on. There’s a mass over supply of new condo inventory. You could see a lot of it from our window here in Tribeca. There’s stalled projects left and right. I wish I could go to all of them and say, “Hey, here’s the thing. We’re going to lower all prices to $1 million bucks a unit, down from whatever their Schedule A prices are and let’s get it going.” But they would have lender pushback, it’d be tough. How did you do that?
Barbara Corcoran:	I’ll tell you, what’s defeating you on it, if I might say, is your own limitation saying it can’t be done. There is a way, there’s always a way. What you have to appreciate more than anything in a terrible market is everyone’s needy. The same guys that wouldn’t be open to something a year before when things were rosy, are totally open. I mean, I had those units owned by Equitable Insurance, very powerful company in town at that point. Financing the job along with Bernie Mendik, who was the biggest developer of that day. But they had nothing to lose by trying something. They had nothing in hand, the bank had nothing in hand, the developer had nothing in hand. It was like, “Hey, listen, we’re not lowering the prices. We’re evening out the prices. Because it doesn’t make sense that people could grab a one bedroom, two bedroom, a studio at the same price. Once the two bedrooms and one bedrooms go, believe it or not, if there’s not enough to go around, people will want the studios.”
Barbara Corcoran:	And that’s exactly what happened. They were level prices and you had to wait in line and there wasn’t enough to go around. So they took a shot at it because what did they have to lose? All I asked them to do was to give me two years free maintenance because I needed a sales incentive. And why did they give me two years free maintenance? Because they weren’t going to sell those suckers in two years anyway and they knew it. What was I really asking for? I was just taking the cards and reshuffling the deck and they gave me a shot and it worked, and it worked.
Barbara Corcoran:	They got out of trouble, I made my little more than $1 million. I made my million dollars plus, and I was able to stay in business, thank God. You got to revisit your story here, if you don’t mind my saying. You could edit this out if you want, but you got to revisit your story and your headset on this one. Come on, look at everywhere I look, there’s a problem. There’s a problem.
Ryan Serhant:	We do. And I think if you were to ask the brokerage community in New York City now, they probably know us mostly for our out of the box ideas and creative thinking. We were doing auctions in the city by lowering prices to below cost numbers to freeze out the marketplace so that street easy would be completely useless. So that buyers wouldn’t pay attention to other inventory. They would just say, “Okay, well now I got to see what’s going to happen to 64 West 87th Street because somehow that just went from 12 to six, something’s going on. Let’s see.” We would then drive traffic that way and put the price up. Then inventory just started changing and then it didn’t seem as exciting anymore. So we change it up over and over and over.
Ryan Serhant:	When did you open your second office? Because everyone’s got their first, but when did you open your second?
Barbara Corcoran:	The second office is the hardest office. I think I had 14 offices when I sold. The second office is the hardest office. It was on the West side, one block from Zabar’s and it was the hardest office because I couldn’t cut myself in half. I didn’t realize till I opened my second office, that I was the power in the shop. I was the mother, I gave the love, I drove the people. And I couldn’t jump back and forth between East side and West side. But it was also my opportunity to learn the greatest lesson in my life.
Barbara Corcoran:	That is, I didn’t have to multiply myself. I had to find someone with talent. And I hired Barbara [inaudible], a sweetheart of a woman on first glance. You wouldn’t think she was a powerhouse, she didn’t have my style, but she knew how to love people the way I knew how to love. And she nurtured those salespeople to become a force on the West side within two years flat. And after that I had the golden ticket to building a giant company. Find the talent and then build an office around them. I never opened offices and looked for talent. I’d stumble into anybody in any walk of life and think, “You know what, they’d be a great mom.” That’s the key to a successful brokerage office. And they would be great at judging people. Then I’d open an office around that talent. That’s how I got in many marketplaces, simply because I found the talent first and built the walls around them.
Ryan Serhant:	Yeah. How many agents did you have at that time?
Barbara Corcoran:	When I opened that second office, I don’t really recall. Probably 30, 35 maybe.
Ryan Serhant:	And the goal was just to physically be on the other side of town because you needed to have that convenient office location?
Barbara Corcoran:	Not really. There was a common belief at that time, which had been true, but I could see it was no longer true, that people wanted East side, wanted East side and people wanted West side. We had territories in town of brokerage firms did one territory versus another. But I could see those markets blending and I wanted agents that knew both markets and no one did. So we cross fertilized across the park basically. We were able to take clients from the East to the West and show them more stuff. Even if they thought that they didn’t want Central Park West when they came in for Park Avenue, we sold them Central Park West because they’d get a park view that they didn’t get on Park. And so we built a bilingual, lingual, whatever that word is, agents who could talk both languages.
Ryan Serhant:	For both sides.
Barbara Corcoran:	Then we did the same thing down in the village. People said the village market was not a purchasing market. I saw it very differently. It was delicious down in the village, then Soho, then Brooklyn early. I mean, it’s just that people, the customer changed and the brokerage firms were the last ones to change their interpretation. So we got ahead of the other firms because we listened to the customer and watched what their new habits were.
Barbara Corcoran:	They were shopping everywhere. Not immediately, but little by little, they started shopping everywhere. Today, you take them East side, West side, downtown, uptown, Brooklyn. You got to be versed in everything as you well know, because you so successfully do it. But in those days, no one believed that would happen. Say, “It’s preposterous,” but no one believed that would happen.
Ryan Serhant:	It sounds so crazy now, thinking about how you even sold real estate then. How would you generate leads? How would your business generate leads at the time? Was it mostly referral, personal networking or were people coming in to the storefronts and going to the file cabinets?
Barbara Corcoran:	Initially we had no storefront and we were in whatever scrappy spaces we could possibly afford. We generated leads through advertising for them. I had a simple ad. It sounds ridiculous because the New York Times classified was the only billboard in town. There was no [inaudible], no internet, nothing. The message was welcome to New York. We trained people on that initial call, how to be friendly. No one expected that from the city, we had friendly agents. Then the minute I could afford a corporate campaign, I relabeled my brokers as the power brokers.
Barbara Corcoran:	But we took full page ads out with them standing with their kids, their dogs looking just like the people you’d like to hang out with. Middle America more than New York City tough guy and people bought into the image and they thought we’d be nice to work with. And they were right, we were great to work with. We had nice people and they weren’t eaten alive, which is what people thought was going to happen when they worked with an agent. So we went counterintuitive to what people expected. And my agents were groomed to be those people that we put out there, which initially was bullshit, but eventually became true, like everything does.
Ryan Serhant:	What was the scariest part about owning your own business? Because something I’m thinking about when you said you didn’t have time to fail, reminds me of obviously that book and the financial crisis and too big to fail. But I like that and I think we operate in the same way. It’s on the 15 minute mark all day long, just go, go, go, go, go. The faster you go, the more you do. We just don’t have time to fail. It’s going to work out and our backs are up against walls and we figure out what those walls are every day. But was it that day that you thought the business might go under and you created that market or was there ever a general fear that the real estate market might completely change and people not want to come to New York? I’m thinking about that obviously in a post COVID world now.
Barbara Corcoran:	Well, [inaudible] because it’s just never going to happen that people don’t want to come to New York.
Ryan Serhant:	Of course.
Barbara Corcoran:	I know because I’ve lived through probably four dramatic cycles in the years I was building my firm. I could tell you that everybody in the end comes to New York. It’s one of those towns because it’s built on change. You think about the essence of the heart of New York City is change. That’s the heart. So you have to expect change. I watched many groups of people leave New York, corporate America left New York. We’d never have corporations in New York ever again, everybody bought into it. Yeah, yeah, Union Carbide went out, a few of the banks went out and two years later they were back in.
Barbara Corcoran:	The Japanese that were fueling our market, the highest prices in condo history left. The Chinese came home, scooped it all up. Okay. Then they left. The Germans came in and then the yuppies came in, and then the whatever. If there’s one thing you have to believe about New York, it’s always here. The heartbeat of the city is change. Without it, it good wouldn’t survive. It needs that flushing in, flushing out all the time. And your markets fly up and down as a real estate agent with it.
Barbara Corcoran:	But I always saw that as an opportunity to make money. Because if nobody’s changing, there’s no deals. If it’s a buyer’s market, seller’s market up and down, there’s always deals. There’s always ability to make your 6%, which I know is diminished a bit today. But there’s always an ability to make money if you have change, that’s why you need a broker. No change, you don’t need brokers.
Ryan Serhant:	How did you lead your firm through those recessions though? You just said you went through four big market changes. As somebody who’s leading a whole group with multiple offices and multiple other moms and people that are calling you every day. I know in the last time that we spoke, you mentioned a good part of your day was nurturing your superstars. How did you keep the business excited? How did you keep people motivated when everyone was talking about how negative things are and the New York Times, every day is saying how bad things are?
Barbara Corcoran:	I stayed close to people to listen hard as to what they’re most frightened about. I addressed those fears smack between the eyes on regular sales meetings, no matter what was going on. I brought my people together and I told them the way I saw the future was short-term future. What their greatest fears were and I gave them my best advice to get over it. I spoke from my heart because I didn’t want to fool anyone or cheer lead anyone. I loved this family, these were my kids, I found them, I groomed them, I supported them. And out of sheer love, I couldn’t mislead them. So they believed me and that’s called inspiration, but not because it’s trumped up, but because it was heartfelt.
Barbara Corcoran:	When 9/11 happened and the world thought that the city was going to be over brokerage wise, nobody was buying a thing. Most of the downtown moved out, we couldn’t get into show apartments. I collected everybody together three days later at the Pierre Hotel. People were crying, people were so upset and I told them they were about to witness the biggest market they had ever seen, which sounded bizarre. But I believed it. I said, “Everyone around the world sees New York City and its bravery and its pain on their TV set every single night. Everybody around the world’s going to fall in love with New York. The deals you don’t have now are going to come back by storm in six months. And you’re going to have an entire international community wants their slice of New York.
Barbara Corcoran:	That’s exactly what happened. Then we all held hands and sung God Bless America today at that moment. Because I know it sounds hokey, it wasn’t a show. It was intended for that moment to make people feel we were together. People went out and believed they were going to make a killing and they did. Within nine months after 9/11 our sales, I think increased roughly 80% over where they were before 9/11, because the world came back by storm and so did the city. I think people are always smarter than you think they are. But particularly with your family, you cannot lie or mislead. You just have to really think what you really believe and share it. I was out to protect my people. They were everything to me, they were my family. They had to be not messed with so to speak.
Ryan Serhant:	The work-life balance question comes up all the time. How did you run a massive business that everyone knew all around the world and still raise a baby at night and the weekends? I mean, how did you do that? How do you make that mental decision of where to put your time?
Barbara Corcoran:	Well, first of all, I don’t think there’s ever, even without a baby, there’s ever anything that’s managing your time like that balance. You just have to chop yourself. So many hours for this and so many hours for that. I had a practical approach. When Tommy was born, I wasn’t at work at 7:30 every day, which I couldn’t wait to get to work. I’m surprised I didn’t get in before the doorman downstairs really, his shift. But I started going to work at 9:30 because I was nursing Tommy and I also wanted to hang out with him for a while. Then I was leaving the office at 3:00 o’clock to get the larger end of an evening with my child. How did I do it? I chopped my day. I had a shorter workday.
Barbara Corcoran:	Now could I have built the Corcoran Group as quickly as I did in those years, if I had had a baby? Absolutely not. Because something else happens when you have children, you get sibling rivalry that plays out in your heart and that’s a threat. It’s this thing; I should be at home, I should be at work. I should be at home, I should be at work and that can be exhausting. I realized that sibling rivalry played at my heart between my top agents who wanted me now, wanted something and I wanted to be there at 150% and my kid who’s crying. I even built a huge office with a playpen, with a nursery. I got it all. I painted that a certain color, my office a certain color.
Ryan Serhant:	So you could have both.
Barbara Corcoran:	But I brought Tommy in one day and realized you can’t be in both places. So I chopped up my day, is how I managed that. Until I sold the business, of course.
Ryan Serhant:	I want to fast forward a little bit in the time that we have left. You sold and was your idea immediately to enjoy the rest of your life? All those crazy hours, the agents. If I were to sell a company for $66 million today, I don’t know, maybe I’d go to Greece. My wife is from Greece and she’s always wanted to at one point go to Greece. I feel like it would be hard for me, for our marriage, for me to on that day, if we sold a company for $100 million dollars to tell my wife, “Yeah, but I got to still do stuff.” I think she might kill me.
Barbara Corcoran:	Well, I’ll tell you something else. It wouldn’t work, as you well know. You go to Greece for a week or two. Big deal, fine. She’ll be happy. Well, what was your question?
Ryan Serhant:	The question was, you sold the company. The world changed obviously, but then you kept at it. You kept working, right? You got onto Shark Tank years later, you’re investing in all these companies. When is enough, enough for you or is it not?
Barbara Corcoran:	Ask anybody on any street corner whether there’s such a thing as having too much fun and they’ll say, “No. I want more fun in life.” I’m the lucky one that had constantly had fun. I don’t go into any work that I don’t enjoy 150%. I don’t dedicate myself to anything I don’t want to do 150% job at. The reason for that is because I like to succeed. That’s maybe a shade of insecurity, but I enjoy success. And more importantly, I can’t wait to get to what other people would call work. I can’t wait to see what the day brings. I’m too curious to see what’s around the corner. Imagine life without corners. Oh, my God.
Ryan Serhant:	Terrible.
Barbara Corcoran:	Can’t imagine. Yeah. No, no, I don’t even know if I answered your question, but there you have it.
Ryan Serhant:	You did, you did. What do you love so much about being on Shark Tank and you’re what 11 years into it later?
Barbara Corcoran:	I can take or leave it to some degree. What I love about Shark Tank is the opportunity to meet the entrepreneurs I meet on that show and to actually become part of their life and help them build a business. Help them become a who they’re dreaming about being. I think I’m very capable of making those dreams come true. I always feel like I’m on that show playing fairy godmother. Bing! You’re going to be rich. Bing! You’re going to be rich. And it’s not just about rich, it’s about success. The more injured the entrepreneur is, the more insecure they are, the more apt I am to fall in love because I have something to prove. And I wrap myself around those people like I wrapped my neophytes at the Corcoran Group and they became superstars.
Barbara Corcoran:	I’m just doing the same thing. I found another family, which is good because I like a family.
Ryan Serhant:	What’s next?
Barbara Corcoran:	Well, right now we’re going to have a TV series on my life. I’m pretty excited about. I hope the series goes on enough seasons so that I die before it ends, so I don’t even get to see the ending.
Ryan Serhant:	That’s a reality show, docu-series?
Barbara Corcoran:	Docu-series. It’s called what’s the halfway between comedy and drama?
Ryan Serhant:	Dramedy.
Barbara Corcoran:	Dramedy. I can’t get that word. That kind of thing, yeah, okay. Of course, I’m in love with my podcast, Business Unusual, because it’s another forum where I meet people who dial into that 888-Barbara number, which is constant. Tell me their business issues, where they’re struggling, where they’re stuck. And I get to use the gift that I’ve realized after all these years of business, I have best. More than my mouth, I give great advice. I know how to get people from A to B and get them unstuck. I get to again, have another phenomenal forum where I help people and boy oh, boy, is it fun. My podcast is my sweet spot right now.
Ryan Serhant:	Busy, busy.
Barbara Corcoran:	Not to be busy. No, no, because the forum-
Ryan Serhant:	But you are busy.
Barbara Corcoran:	Well, I’m not so busy. Well, I’m pretty busy. Well, I could be busier if I don’t sleep, but short of needing sleep at night, yeah, I’m pretty busy I guess. But that taps into my great gift of being able to pinpoint people’s personality and what would apply to that individual.
Ryan Serhant:	My last question for you because I know we want to wrap up and I would not be happy with myself if I didn’t ask this. You’re starting a real estate business in New York City now, by yourself, the weight of the world on your shoulders, what’s the best advice you’d give?
Barbara Corcoran:	The one piece of advice?
Ryan Serhant:	Yeah.
Barbara Corcoran:	You talking about your circumstance with your at so many agents, how to take it from here to there?
Ryan Serhant:	Yeah. We’re building again from the ground up in a very, very different world than even when I started in the business in 2008. My lead gen, when I got into it was Lehman crashed and post ads on Craigslist, meet renters. Hopefully you can turn them into buyers. It was Craigslist all day long. That was our thing. There was no money for ads, at least not for me. Now we’re starting a brand new real estate company. We do a lot of other things, but on the brokerage side, what would your advice be?
Barbara Corcoran:	Well for your specific circumstance, I would say the very important street you must cross right now is a way from the dependence on you for sales. You’re not going to be able to build an empire unless you walk to the other side of the street and learn to sell through other people. It was hard for me. I was a powerhouse salesman when my business was young. When we had 14 agents, only 14, and I was producing 80% of the company income because I was a good salesman, I left it. Leap of faith and I decided I was not going to sell. You can’t do both and I started hiring people to sell for me.
Barbara Corcoran:	Without that decision, I could have never built a powerhouse, never. Your gift is marketing, your good looks and your gift of gab. What you also have, which I think is your greatest gift, is you know how to motivate. Unless you make the time to work through other people and do nothing but motivate the crap out of them, you won’t be able to build what you envision for yourself. That’s a big call. How do you move out of something you do so well that generates money? But I’ll tell you one thing, the minute I did, everybody else made up for it because I had faith in them and they did it. They came through for me.
Ryan Serhant:	Leap of faith.
Barbara Corcoran:	It’s more than leap of faith, it’s a brass set of balls.
Ryan Serhant:	Got it. Leap of faith with a brass set of balls, jump across the street. Thank you so much, Barbara. Thanks for coming on.
Barbara Corcoran:	My pleasure. Really nice time with you. I’m sure you’ll be successful. You already are.
Ryan Serhant:	If you’re ready to take action today based on Barbara Corcoran’s entire blueprint for how she got to where she is, go to big moneyenergy.com/podcast to download an action plan that I put together for you, as well as the show notes. That’s big moneyenergy.com/podcast. Find more podcasts like Big Money Energy on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Big Money Energy is hosted by me, Ryan Serhant. It’s produced by Mike Cascarelli and Joel Laresca and executive produced by Lindsey Hoffman.

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