What does it take to build a successful business? Barbara Corcoran would know. She sold the real estate company she built for $66 million. She’s now a shark and an executive producer on NBC’s Shark Tank.
This past week, she posted a short video to Instagram. It’s only about 10 seconds, but has onscreen text of some wise advice she’d give her younger self. The video is well worth watching, though you may want to pause it to read all the tips she shares. Here are some of the best.
1. Your first idea might flop
“Keep going,” she writes. “The next one could pay the bills.” She’s very right, especially when it comes to starting companies. Bill Gates and Paul Allen first teamed up to create a company called Traf-O-Data that provided reports using data from traffic counters. It was only because this idea failed that they started Microsoft.
Starting a company or any new initiative is rarely trouble free. So it can be hard to know whether to keep forging ahead with a new business that hasn’t yet caught on, or if it’s better to cut your losses. Ultimately, what matters more is this: If you know you want to be an entrepreneur, and the first company you start doesn’t make it, regroup and try again. Failure makes you much smarter than you were before, so you’ll be in a better position to succeed the second time around.
This Morning
The daily digest for entrepreneurs and business leaders
2. Charge what you’re worth
“Don’t negotiate against yourself,” Corcoran writes. As entrepreneurs, we constantly worry about pricing ourselves out of the market. But unless what you’re selling is a commodity, price is rarely the only thing that makes or breaks a sale.
This point was hilariously proved by negotiation expert Fotini Iconomopoulos, CSP in a session titled Command Your Fee at this year’s Influence conference for professional speakers. Iconomopoulos needed someone to do a snow-clearing job at her home. From preliminary research, she knew a typical fee for what she needed would be about $400. When she posted the job on social media, someone offered to do it for $800.
Knowing that was twice the going rate, Iconomopoulos didn’t bother to respond. But her silence apparently frustrated this man, because he got back to her immediately with an offer of $700. Unimpressed, she still didn’t answer him. And he proceeded to offer lower and lower bids, until he got down to $300. By that point, she was thoroughly convinced that he was unprofessional and likely had no idea what he was doing. So she still didn’t hire him.