Donald Trump has become arguably the world's best-known real-estate icon. He has undoubtedly worked hard for the honor. Trump routinely wakes up at 6AM, at which time he reads the morning papers before arriving to work by 9AM. He'll make anywhere from 50 to 100 phone calls daily, and will hold a dozen or so impromptu 15-minute meetings throughout the day. But Trump's work ethic is only part of the reason why he has come to define the quintessential real estate mogul.
Donald Trump provides for our benefit his eleven Trump Cards of success. They include thinking big, protecting the downside, maximizing options, knowing your market, using leverage, enhancing your location, getting the word out through a public relations/marketing campaign, fighting back, delivering the goods, controlling costs, and having fun. Yet even these Trump Cards fail to fully illuminate what it is that makes Trump so successful.
A great deal of Trump's success can be traced back to his father who built and sold homes throughout New York City, most prominently in Jamaica Estates. Donald would learn on the job from a young age about managing costs and putting together a working symphony of various real estate professionals. After transferring from Fordham University to the University of Pennsylvania to complete his undergraduate degree in business administration, Donald and his father bought Swifton Village in 1968, a 1200-unit FHA apartment complex in Cincinnati, Ohio. While the scope of a 1200-unit apartment complex may seem unfathomable to many, for Donald it was just the beginning. These formative years convinced Trump to look beyond NYC and take the next progressive step, which for him was to develop commercial real estate in Manhattan and later casinos in Atlantic City.
Trump approaches business very straightforwardly. He believes that the art of business can be reduced to the simple formula of buy low sell high. Trump writes, "Much as I like the [Beverly Hill's Hotel] I'm interested in it only if I can get it for a much better price than they're now asking" (12). Trump will walk away from a very good property if the numbers don't match up. Trump makes a point of surrounding himself with the best talent when making these hard decisions. In fact, he attributes much of his success to surrounding himself with the best talent available. Throughout the book Trump writes:
"I'm just looking to hire the best talent, wherever I can find it (6) [and] I have a very simple rule when it comes to management: hire the best people from your competitors, pay them more than they were earning and give them bonuses and incentives based on their performance. That's how you build a first-class operation" (220).
Simply, there exists no room for second best. In this respect, much can be learned from Trump and applied to our lives. However, there exists another more intangible component of Trump's success that underscores the need for of a heightened sense of intuition.
This sense of intuition can be interpreted by many as self-confidence, the experience of feeling comfortable in one's own skin, or going with one's gut. In any event, this feeling transcends many areas of Trump's life, including a pervading sense of justice:
"I hate lawsuits and depositions, but the fact is that if you're right, you've got to take a stand, or people will walk all over you (7) [and] You have to be very rough and very tough with most contractors or they'll take the shirt right of your back" (38).
A sense of intuition cannot be underscored enough. Trump believes in it so strongly that he writes, "You can take the smartest kid at Wharton, the one who gets straight A's and has a 170 IQ, and if he doesn't have the instincts, he'll never be a successful entrepreneur. Moreover, most people who do have the instincts will never recognize that they do, because they don't have the courage or the good fortune to discover their potential (46)." Trump's remarkable history of deal making should embolden us to apply some of the very same business principles that made Trump so successful to our lives in an effort to discover our own true potential.
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