properties inexpensively and made a lot of money. I began to think it was easy.
In the late eighties, I lost focus. I’d fly off to Europe to attend fashion shows, and I wasn’t looking at the clothing. My lack of attention was killing my business.
Then, the real estate market crashed. I owed billions upon billions of dollars—$9.2 billion, to be exact. That’s nine billion, two hundred million dollars. I’ve told this story many times before, but it bears repeating: In the midst of the crash, I passed a beggar on the street and realized he was worth $9.2 billion more than I was. I saw a lot of my friends go bankrupt, never to be heard from again.
The media had me for lunch.
I’ll never forget the worst moment. It was 3 A.M. Citibank phoned me at my home in Trump Tower. They wanted me to come over to their office immediately to negotiate new terms with some foreign banks—three of the ninety-nine banks to whom I owed billions.
It’s tough when you have to tell a banker that you can’t pay interest. They tend not to like those words. An ally at Citibank suggested that the best way for me to handle this difficult situation was to call the banks myself, and that’s exactly what they wanted me to do, at three o’clock on a cold January morning, in the freezing rain. There were no cabs, so I walked fifteen blocks to Citibank. By the time I got there, I was drenched.
That was the low point. There were thirty bankers sitting around a big table. I phoned one Japanese banker, then an Austrian banker, and then a third banker from a country I can no longer remember.
In
But I learned my lesson. I work as hard today as I did when I was a young developer in the 1970s.
Don’t make the mistake I did. Stay focused.
Maintain Your Momentum
William Levitt, the master builder of Levittown, taught me the true meaning of momentum.
In the 1950s, he was the king. No detail was too small for his attention. He would personally collect stray nails and extra chips of wood from building sites to make sure his construction crews used all available materials.
He sold his company in 1956 to ITT for $100 million, which is equivalent to billions today. Then he made some terrible mistakes.
He retired.
He married the wrong woman.
He moved to the south of France and lived on the Riviera with his new boat and his new wife.
One day, ITT called. The executives in charge of the conglomerate had no aptitude for home building. They had bought huge tracts of land but didn’t know how to get them zoned. So they sold it back to Levitt, who thought he’d gotten a great deal.
He went back into business. And he proceeded to go bankrupt.
I saw William Levitt at a cocktail party in 1994, two weeks before he died. He was standing by himself in a corner, looking defeated. I didn’t know him well, but I approached him, hoping to acquire some wisdom from the master. Mr. Levitt, I said, how are you doing?
Not good, Donald, not good. Then he said the words I’ll never forget. I lost my momentum. I was out of the world for twenty years, I came back, and I wasn’t the same.
No matter how accomplished you are, no matter how well you think you know your business, you have to remain vigilant about the details of your field. You can’t get by on experience or smarts. Even the best surgeons need to be retrained regularly, to stay current on the latest research and procedures.
No matter what you’re managing, don’t assume you can glide by. Momentum is something you have to work at to maintain.
My loyal assistant, Norma Foerderer.
Get a Great Assistant
Surround yourself with people you can trust. I often say it’s good to be paranoid, but not when it comes to your home team.
Ask God for a great assistant. No joke. A great one can make your life a whole lot easier—or, in my case, almost manageable. Norma Foerderer has been with me for twenty-three years. If you want to know what a great guy I am, just ask her. But not on a Friday.
Handling me, the office, and several hundred calls a week isn’t easy. She’s as tough and smart as she is gracious. She’s also indefatigable, which helps a lot if you work for me.
My phones are so busy that I require two executive assistants, and they never stop. They alone handle, on the average, more than 1,250 calls a week. They are not only efficient and fast, but also very pleasant and beautiful young women.
You don’t have to be beautiful to work for me—just be good at your job. I’ve been accused of admiring beautiful women. I plead guilty. But when it comes to the workplace, anyone who is beautiful had better have brains, too. You need competent people with an inherent work ethic. I’m not a complacent person and I can’t have a complacent staff. I move forward quickly and so must they.
Once, I wanted to know how fast a new employee could work, so I told him I was leaving in fifteen minutes and needed something done within that time. I wasn’t actually going anywhere, but, sure enough, I had what I needed in fifteen minutes. Machiavellian? Maybe, but both of us learned something that day.
One final piece of advice on assistants, which I learned from experience and which, I admit, may not be as relevant to your career as it’s been to mine: Find a receptionist who can speak English. We had a breathtaking European beauty out front who could easily rival Ingrid Bergman in her heyday, but I discovered that her ability to recognize well-known people in the United States was limited to myself and maybe President Bush. She wasn’t so familiar with the likes of Hugh Grant, Reggie Jackson, George Steinbrenner, Jack Welch, Paul Anka, Mohamed Al Fayed, Regis Philbin, or Tony Bennett. Their calls never got through to me and their names were placed on her psycho list.
But you should have seen her. What a knockout. She’s since moved on to better career opportunities, but we’ll never forget her. Neither will anyone who ever called in. Or tried to.
Remember: The Buck Starts Here
Set the standard. Don’t expect your employees to work harder than you do. In my case, I don’t have to worry about that, because I work seven days a week and love almost every minute of it. But also realize that your company will sometimes function as an extended and dysfunctional family. It’s only natural, considering that people often spend more waking hours with coworkers than they do with their families.
A visitor in my office once mentioned that the goings-on there reminded him of a family fight in progress. I will admit that the volume level gets high now and then, and he wasn’t far off in his assessment. But if you want smooth sailing every day, move to the Mediterranean.
