If You Don't Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons on Your Pigtails by Barbara Corcoran, Bruce Littlefield Read Free Book Online Page B

five dollars for every idea, and I'll even give you five bucks for a complaint—but only if it's accompanied by a solution. So, here's the first five bucks for John Bachman, who suggested only ten minutes ago that we eliminate the do not disturb signs from the office. Great job, John!" I said, and placed the money in his limp hand.
    I looked around the room, took a breath, and asked, "Does anyone have any questions?" Seven dazed salespeople shook their heads no. "Okay, then, I guess that's everything. The Monday meeting is now over."
    The phone rang, I reached over the reception desk, and answered, "Good morning, The Corcoran Group."
    MOM'S LESSON #6: Put the socks in the sock drawer.
    THE LESSON LEARNED ABOUT ORGANIZING A BUSINESS
    Good systems make plans happen. Here's how the organizational systems introduced at the first Corcoran Group sales meeting would help build my business over the next twenty-five years.
    1. Check the Box
    The commission request form enabled me to get an unprecedented amount of information from my sales agents. Like other

    independent contractors, real estate agents closely guard information related to their clients. But they willingly gave me the information simply because I made the process easy and because they wouldn't get paid without it.
    In New York, change happens in a New York minute, and the back side of my commission request form captured it as it happened.
    Here are three ways to use the power of information to help build a business:
    Early information helps predict emerging markets.
    New York's a town where there's always someone coining and someone going, and the answers my salespeople consistently provided on the commission request form enabled me to stay ahead of those changes.
    In the late seventies, my little checked boxes helped predict the emergence of Manhattan's "new'' West Side. For decades, property values on the West Side had trailed far behind those of the East Side, but in 1979, the margin narrowed dramatically, almost overnight. The answers my sales agents provided showed that the customers moving to the West Side were the children of affluent parents on the East Side, and the young "thirtysome-things ' were fast becoming the norm. Although everybody said I was crazy, I immediately opened a huge West Side office and was positioned to ride the crest of the wave.
    Information positions your company as the reliable source for facts and figures.
    Our Corcoran Group offices became a veritable research center for the numbers-hungry New York press because when a reporter called, I had the answer. And the press called us for information on everything, including stories that had nothing to do w ith real estate. If a reporter wanted to talk to a young Czecho-

    slovakian metal sculptor living in a Greenwich Village walk-up. we could find him in twenty minutes or less. And today, with the advent of e-mail, we can do it in ten.
    Tracking the source of your customers helps you spend your advertising dollars wisely.
    Most real estate advertising money is spent in the Sunday classified section of the local newspaper. By knowing which ads produced the most customers we were able to redirect our advertising dollars as the business changed, placing different-size ads in different publications on different days of the week.
    In short, the back side of the commission request form told me everything I needed to know to reach my target market, place effective advertising, and grab media attention while doing it.
    2. Meet on Monday
    People don't read memos, but they'll listen to a big mouth.
    Every Corcoran Group office has a Monday-morning meeting that serves multiple functions. It gets salespeople out of bed and into the office, and is the single best vehicle for communicating information, broadcasting sales, and promoting new properties. It's also the best arena to publicly recognize individual success within a peer group.
    The Monday meeting is the business equivalent of my mother's