If You Don't Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons on Your Pigtails (10 page)

Spring. The front steps.

Mom came out of the screen door and leaned her broom against die bouse. "Kids!" she shouted, her belly protruding beneath her blue housedress. "Your dad will be coming down the hill any minute now with a big surprise!" We ran from the side yard to the front steps, each of us reaching our own conclusions about what the surprise might be. Mom stood on the top step with Baby Mary Jean on her hip. and we all sat beneath her and waited.

We heard Dad s green Rambler before we saw it. It clanked and git>\\led like an old tanker. The used car salesman had told Dad the Rambler "operates great in low gear! So Dad had kept it in low gear for the entire three years he'd owned it.

"Here he comes!" Mom shouted, pointing left up Library Hill. We watched as Dad made the turn off Edgewater Place with Uncle Bobby in the passenger seat beside him. They were honking and waving from beneath what looked like a mountain of six-foot boxes atop the car s roof. Piled at least five high, they were bouncing and flapping as Dad's Rambler came down Library Hill.

"Those suckers are moving V Eddie yelled, as Dad waved excitedly and we all waved back. The boxed tower leaned dramatically to the left when Dad swerved to the right, and the Rambler screeched to a halt in front of our house.

"Avalanche!" Eddie yelled as ten twin mattresses thump-thump-thumped down the windshield and flipped onto the hood like dominoes. Uncle Bobby and Dad were still smiling and waving like beauty pageant winners on a wrecked float, their front doors webbed shut in clothesline.

.Mom handed Mary Jean off to Denise and bounded down the steps two at a time. She arched her back and put her hands squarely on her hips. "Eddie! You have no common sense. None! Why didn't you tie the rope in both directions? I'm telling you, Ed, you're just like your father!

"Sweetheart," Dad charmed with a smile as he leaned through the clotheslined window. "Couldn't you get a knife or something and help get us out of here?"

While Mom ran up for the knife, swearing she'd use it on Dad, we all stampeded down to get a better look at our new mattresses. Some of them had little red stripes, some had blue ones, and a few had small green polka dots. In a mad frenzy, we each staked a claim on our own mattress.

A mile of clothesline later, Dad and Uncle Bobby were cut out of the Rambler and they began taking the mattresses two at a time into our house.

Mom could always figure out a way to squeeze one more child into the boys' or girls' room. When Dad had told Mom that the Holy Angel's Academy for Girls was closing, she had immediately sent him to get ten of its best twin-size mattresses and then spent the morning mentally rearranging our beds toe-to-toe along each wall like railroad cars. Using her broom as a measuring stick to stake out each bed's space, Mom had calculated how to fit four beds into each room. As Dad and Uncle Bobby hoisted the mattresses into the house, she pointed out exactly where they were going.

"Girls' room!" she commanded, "against the right wall. Boys' room"—she pointed—"to the left of the closet." Dad and Uncle Bobby huffed and puffed and followed Mom's instructions until four twin-size beds were neatly arranged in each room. "Now, put the crib in the living room between the wall and the sofa," she finished, "and take the last two mattresses to the basement. We may end up needing them."

Esther sat with her hands neatly folded on her lap and her ankles crossed beneath her chair, primly waiting for my answer. "The reason we're interviewing salespeople, my dear Esther, is because I've figured out a way to add more desks," I said smugly. "Probably thirty percent more! It's the old 'toe-to-toe' routine, and I'll show you how it works.''

I held up a manila folder on which I had drawn fourteen rcctan-gles labeled "Desk." and fourteen small circles labeled "Chair." "Here's a picture of what we have now," I said. "Seven desks on I lie left side and seven on the right, all fourteen facing in the same direction, separated by the aisle in the middle."

Then, allowing the folder to drop open like a hatch door, I revealed my drawing on the other side. "Voila!" I said. "And here's our same office with a total of twenty desks. Ten on the left, ten on the right, and the same aisle down the middle."

I pointed to my sketch and explained, "The key, you see, is the space between the desks. If we place the desks front to front, facing each other, we eliminate every third passageway behind the chairs, and it gives us three more desks on each side."

Esther studied the "After" drawing with suspicion and counted the rectangles and circles once more. "But will we still have the same eighteen inches for each chair to move back and forth?" she asked. I assured her we would, as we went out to measure the sales area.

I grabbed the office broom and turned it horizontally to measure the depth of a single desk including its chair. Then I clasped both hands on the broomstick to mark the measurement, and, turning the length of the broom back and forth, back and forth, I measured and counted off the imaginary desks as I went. The salespeople looked on, some smiling and others bewildered.

"... eighteen, nineteen, twenty," I finished, and turned to Esther and said, "See? They'll fit. So let's hire those new people before someone else does!"

MOM'S LESSON #10: There's always room for one more.

^

THE LESSON LEARNED ABOUT GROWING A BUSINESS

We expanded our company much like my parents expanded their family: When Mom announced, "Eddie, Fm, pregnant!" Dad brought in another bed. The Corcoran Group grew from six salespeople to sixty in the first five years, and I learned that the secret to growing a business quickly is simply not waiting until you're "ready."

1. Hire great people, and then worry about where to put them.

When I meet a great person I want to hire, I rarely have the room for them. But when the new person arrives, I always find a spot. We've divided a conference room four times to squeeze in more people, and I divided my own office twice.

Finding a great new person is a lot like finding a beautiful new dress. If you buy the dress, you'll find a hanger to put it on.

2. Open the next office before you're ready.

I always open my next office two years too early, while my competitors wait for the "right" time to expand. It's an easier ride to follow the pack into a proven territory, but it won't allow you to take the early lead and distance yourself from the rest.

Common wisdom dictates that businesses often fail because they grow too fast and outstrip their cash flow. I have found that businesses get bigger faster when forced to run like hell to pump up their cash flow. Just as it's never really the right time to have a baby, it's never really the right time to open your next office. For me, now always proved to be the best time.

3. Move into a space much bigger than you need.

Moving into a bigger space is the equivalent of putting a gun to your own head. It forces you to move faster, think quicker, and

find a way to pay the rent. With the enormous pressure of increased overhead, you're forced to double your business or die.

With every new office we opened, I made a habit of renting twice the space we actually needed. When I moved my first seven salespeople into an office with fourteen desks, I had to fill seven more.

In short, if you want to grow fast, put a gun to your head.

4. If they ask for a private office, give them a phone booth.

As New York rents climbed and office space grew tighter, our individual desk space shrunk from fifty-four inches to forty-eight inches to thirty-six inches per person. When our salespeople complained that our office had gotten too crowded and noisy, and their negotiations were no longer private, we answered their need for privacy by installing two free phone booths. The phone booths offered a quiet spot for personal calls and confidential negotiations, with the added benefit of less personal time wasted on the phone.

Private offices are no good for the sales business because a sales team's lifeblood is the free exchange of information. If you're tucked away in a private office, you're simply out of the loop. Also, privacy is expensive and one private office inevitably opens a Pandora's box of six other staff members wanting the same thing.

5. Share an office.

All good salespeople spend most of their time out of the office, leaving latitude for flexible desk arrangements. When offices are shared, information is exchanged and a lot less time gets wasted on memos, e-mails, and phone calls. Most of our top salespeople share offices with their assistants and/or other salespeople.

For years, I shared my office with Scott Durkin, my chief of staff. Hearing my conversations throughout the day enabled him to execute my orders while I was still on the phone promising

them! Our shared space left absolutely no room for error, and made him such a quick judge of what needed doing that Scott is now the chief operating officer of the company.

6. Extend your territory beyond its natural borders.

Every good boxer knows that if he's going to pack a powerful punch, the target's not the face, but a full foot behind the face. Business lies beyond every office wall, and to grab it, you need to reach beyond your physical space. Here's how our business was able to extend its reach:

• Open houses in somebody" else's house. After we filled our conference rooms with sales desks and had no room to meet our customers at the office, we began to use our "apartments for sale" as satellite offices. We were the first company to publish specific property addresses in our Sunday "open house" advertisements, and, contrary to our competitors' dire predictions, it never led to muggings and thefts. Instead, we quadrupled the number of buyers responding to our ads and got to sit on some lovely settees in some of Park Avenue's most expensive homes.

• A virtual office is virtually free. With every inch of space filled and every salesperson productive, we still hired. Instead of a desk, we offered the new agents specialized training, access to our database, and business cards with the snappy new title of "virtual agent." As our virtual agents operated from their homes, we saved on office space, phone bills, paper clips, sodas, pens. . .

• Referral directors (a.k.a. the ladies who lunch). In the real estate business, the person who controls the property controls the marketplace, and finding a property to list is often a result of who you know. We widened our company's circle of influence beyond our sales force by establishing a second-string sales team called

the "referral directors." These socially well-connected women introduced us to their friends, so we could secure the listings of their apartments and houses. In return, the referral directors got a commission, a real estate license, a business card, and part-time hours compatible with their very busy social agendas. Our prestige listings skyrocketed, and the referral fees were negligible when compared with the increased commissions.

7. Use a big hook to catch a big fish.

Even though she had no interest in joining our company, I pursued a top-selling, high-end agent from another firm by making the unconventional offer that she could take 100 percent of her own commissions for the first year. I also offered to pay half the cost of a chauffeured Bentley. She said yes. By hiring her, our company stepped into the high-end market, and her car and driver became a moving billboard for luxury buyers. Over the next five years, the top salesperson from almost every one of my competitors joined our firm at our regular commission rate.

We often set boundaries on ourselves and cause bottlenecks that cost money.

Every business can hire more people, open new offices, and lease bigger spaces before it's ready. It's the only formula I know for aggressive growth.

As my cab turned the corner onto Riverside Drive, I decided I'd better plan a vacation for them.

Winter. The side yard.

"Snow day!" Mom shouted from the living room.

Nothing could compare to the mornings wed wake up and hear Moms rare pronouncement of those most spectacular words. "Snow day" meant "no school."

We popped out of our beds, jumped into our plav clothes, and headed for the front radiator, where Mom had already set up her snow day station. Our gloves were already toasting on top of the radiator with our rubber boots warming below. By the front door, Mom had lined up old cardboard boxes, her biggest cookie pans, a trash can lid, and anything else she could dig out of the basement or kitchen that could serve as a sled. We put on our boots, gloves, and mittens, grabbed a 'sled," and Mom gave us the once-over before pushing us out the door with her usual "Go play outside!"

Minutes before frostbite set in, we'd rush back in to the radiator's warmth where Mom, like a pit crew in a car race, got us in and out in thirty seconds flat. She yanked off our wet gloves and tossed them on top of the radiator to dry, giving each of us a pair of dry socks to put on our hands. She pulled off our boots, replaced our wet socks with dry ones, and sent us back outside. By day's end, the sock drawer was empty.

As traffic couldn't make it up or down River Road, Dad had the day off. too. Mom handed him Mary Jean and said, "Ed, take a dish-pan and fill it with snow for Tommy. He's feverish, and I'll help him make snowballs inside."

After taking Tommy a dishpan of snow, Dad packed a snowdrift hard against the front retaining wall that separated our yard from the sidewalk. He dragged his two-story wooden ladder up to the very

end of our backyard, the part that merged into the cliff behind our house.

"HEY, KIDS!" Dad yelled down, holding the ladder in place against the hill. "Hop on!"

We all raced to the top of the hill. "I call front!" Marty shouted, getting there first and taking the lead rung. The rest of us climbed on behind, locking our heels onto the wooden rungs.

""Oh, ho., you don't!" Eddie declared, pushing Marty off the ladder into the snow. "I'm the oldest, so /get the front."

Marty sprang up in a flash and reached back toward Eddie, his fist cocked. "Cut it out, boys!" Dad commanded. "Marty, either get on the ladder and have some fun, or we're leaving without you." Marty pouted into place on a middle rung. "Ready!?" Dad hollered, as we all stared downhill, clenching the side rails with our hands.