It’s hard to imagine, while watching real estate millionaire Barbara Corcoran cut deals on Shark Tank, that the entrepreneur was ever scared to speak up.
But the 74-year-old recounted her “most embarrassing moment ever” was when her voice failed her and she was left gaping at a room full of bikers early on in her career.
The New Jersey native told her followers on Instagram she had been in business for less than two years when she was invited to give her first ever “expert” speech to a group of bikers.
In 1973 Corcoran had founded her first real estate company with her boyfriend, Ray Simone, while working as a waitress in a diner. He famously gave Corcoran a $1,000 loan to get up and running, before leaving her to marry another woman.
Some three decades later, Corcoran sold the group for $66 million—a figure she chose because it’s her lucky number—and went on to secure her place on ABC’s Shark Tank after battling it out with another judge candidate.
But the mother of two didn’t always have such boundless confidence, explaining to her Instagram followers that when she was asked to do the talk in her early twenties, “I just couldn’t believe my good luck; they wanted me … as the expert.”
She continued: “For the next two weeks I studied my stuff inside and out, and I knew it cold. I was ready to blow that audience away.”
However when the big night finally arrived and Corcoran stood up to deliver her speech, “I opened my mouth to speak, and nothing came out. Not even a word. I lost my voice.”
The next morning Corcoran said she realized she had two choices: “I could feel sorry for myself or I could do something about it. I knew I needed practice public speaking.”
In typical Corcoran style, the real estate mogul dived in feetfirst and “marched” over to New York University, where she pitched launching a 12-week course on selling real estate.
Landing Chiang
The university agreed, and shortly after Corcoran met her future colleague and top-selling employee Carrie Chiang.
“She bragged to me about earning four times the income of my best salespeople,” Corcoran recounted. “From that moment I worked like a dog to impress Carrie Chiang, because I wanted her to work for me. Once the course ended, guess what—I got her.”
To this day Chiang still works for the Corcoran business and has sold more than $7 billion in real estate, with her team frequently appearing among the top sellers of estate in New York. In 2022, Chiang’s team sold more than $212 million in property.
For Corcoran, coming back from an embarrassing moment to launching a course at NYU and recruiting New York’s top broker is a message.
“The lesson here is you’ve got to find a way to get over your failures,” she said. “For me the best things have always happened on the heels of failure. You gotta find a way to stand back up.”
It’s not the first time Corcoran has expressed that when life knocks her back she comes back swinging. Speaking of her intial rejection from Shark Tank, Corcoran previously said: “All the good stuff happened in my life on the heels of rejection. I do my best work when my back is against the wall.”
