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From the intro to Bill Ravies’ new book: “The Way of the Entrepreneur”

December 1, 2015 by The Inside Press

“I was having breakfast with a friend one winter day earlier this year at Jane’s, an outdoor café in Naples, Florida, a few blocks from my winter house in Port Royal. This enclave of 600 estates–ten and 20, 30, even 40,000-square-foot temples to capitalism at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico–is a tropical Newport, Rhode Island, and the only place of its kind on the continent. It also happens to be home to some of the wealthiest individuals and families on the planet. Many come from the world of finance and big business–investment bankers, retired corporate CEOS and CFOs, hedge fund guys–but as many are entrepreneurs, men and a few women who have built business empires (as I have) and made their fortunes in highly individual, innovative ways. They’ve all hit it out of the park.

Which is one of the main threads that run through this book: The way entrepreneurs determine their success by virtue of individualism and an unwavering belief in themselves and their passions.

The subject appears to be timely. More than ever, America is a land of limitless entrepreneurial opportunity. At the same time, it remains the immigrant’s dream, a country in which you can do anything and be anyone you want. All you have to do–aside from working really, really hard–is embrace the immigrant-like ideals of belief in oneself and one’s vision and be embraced, in turn, by family and extended family and friends.

In the end, in fact, it is that community of believers and supporters who help make American entrepreneurs what they are, not only business schools or MBA programs or investors.

It also helps, by the way, to reside outside the corporate mindset. As you’ll see, the distinction between entrepreneurs and corporate executives matters. A lot.

I’ve been out to breakfast and lunch with other business people, some of whom never make eye contact with the servers, much less engage them in conversation. But like entrepreneurs in general, I seem perpetually interested in learning about other people (and, if I’m reading Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath accurately, which admittedly may be iffy, the majority of entrepreneurs are like me in another respect: We tend to be dyslexic).

So I view encounters with a waiter or waitress as an opportunity to connect not just with another human but, more often than not, with a young person who has his or her own passion, vision and dream.

Our waiter at Jane’s that sparkling, sunshiny morning was a young man in his early-to mid-20s with Slavic features and a strong Eastern European accent. His name was Piotyr–Peter, for convenience in America, he told my breakfast companion and me–and had come from Moldavia three years earlier. After hearing from a Ukrainian friend about life in Naples, he had driven 1,000 miles from Maine with his girlfriend on the dream of one day opening a restaurant of his own, and he had stayed.

“Why leave?” Peter told us. “Is so beautiful!” Then–perhaps taking in our clothes, or the Bentley parked in front, or the fact that we were free to take a late breakfast in the middle of the workweek–he voiced a sentiment that either hasn’t been uttered, or I haven’t heard, in a very long time: “Thank you,” he said, “for building this country!” He was speaking to us but he might as well have been talking to the founders of the nation and the heroes of the American Revolution, who were entrepreneurs in the truest, fiercest sense of the word.

My entrepreneurial journey happens to have been mapped through real estate and a family-owned company, but it could just as easily have been in any industry and any entity. What counts is what you bring to a business–vision, passion, imagination, determination, sheer courage–not what it brings to you.

Our young waiter is on his journey, as I was 40 years ago, practically to the day. Although I live the rest of the year in an equally exclusive community in Fairfield County, Connecticut (one of the richest communities in the United States), I grew up a town away in one of the poorest and roughest sections of one of the poorest and roughest cities in the Northeast…”

Bill Raveis’ The Way of the Entrepreneur is distributed by National Book Network (NBN) and available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble in-stores and online, and independent book stores nationally.

In 1974, Bill Raveis opened the first William Raveis Real Estate office in a room above a grocery store. Today, William Raveis Real Estate, Mortgage & Insurance is one of the top companies in the nation and a full service real estate, mortgage and insurance brokerage with over 3,600 sales associates and 114 offices throughout the Northeast, annual real estate sales of nearly $8.1 billion, 3,000 corporate relocation transferees a year and a total mortgage volume of $10 billion.

Chappaqua Teens Start It Up

May 28, 2015 by The Inside Press

Turning Point Tutors, left to right: Alex Kogan, Sami Burack, Divya Gopinath, Mel Benson, Jen Semler, Izzie Gutenplan, Calder Fontaine, Michael Doppelt, Jake Horwitz

by Deirdre Cohen

In today’s tough market, young people everywhere face stiff competition for local jobs. But here in Chappaqua, teens are trading in on their skills from the arts to academics to athletics to launch full-fledged businesses complete with official looking websites, business cards and mobile credit card readers. What’s more, these entrepreneurial students are offering their  services at much lower prices than those of their adult counterparts.

Possibly the oldest and most successful student-run business in town is Turning Point Tutoring which was started five years ago by Robbie Horwitz and is now carried on by his brother, Greeley senior, Jake Horwitz. Turning Point provides some of the very best students at Greeley who know the coursework and teachers for tutoring. Approximately ten tutors are chosen through an application and interview process. Horwitz says, “What surprised me the most was how important customer service is to a business. A lot of my time is devoted to getting back to clients as fast and thoroughly as I can.” This year has been one of the company’s best. In the month of January alone, they had 108 tutoring sessions. The company is so profitable, Horwitz will continue to run it from the University of Pennsylvania next fall. www.tpointtutoring.com

Utilizing their business and athletic skills, juniors, Jake Cohen and Matt Neuberger, captains of the football and soccer teams respectively, recently launched Varsity Sports Trainers offering top Greeley varsity athletes to provide sports training for kids including one-on-one, small group training and sports birthday parties. The enterprising 17 year-olds have 13 varsity athletes on their roster, covering a wide range of sports from soccer to lacrosse to field hockey. Neuberger says, “We started our business because we saw an untapped market in Chappaqua where student athletes can work with kids at a reasonable cost.” In their first week, they booked eight training sessions and one birthday party. www.varsitysportstrainers.com

Sophomores, Matthew Reisch and Jack Panzer, run TeenAgency, a job placement company created over three years ago by Greeley grads, Jack Strougo and David Shimer. The company connects families in the local community who are in need of a variety of services with high schoolers who can do the work. The bulk of their clients ask for babysitters and tutors, but there are also requests for unique tasks like setting up a baseball batting cage, shoveling snow and teaching violin lessons. Resich says, “With a Facebook group of 80 teen members, it’s fairly easy to find a student to do a job, and if we can’t find someone to do it, Jack or I will do the job ourselves.” They also donate twenty percent of the company’s total earnings to charity. www.Teenagency.org

Varsity Sports Trainers Matt Neuberger (L) and Jake Cohen(R)

Chappaqua also has creative teens that are using their artistic gifts to provide useful services and products. Like Tess Greenberg, a Greeley junior, who started a successful business called Tess Arden Photography taking pictures for small events like kids’ parties, bridal showers, christenings and confirmations. Greenberg says “I was inspired to start a business to make some money and do something I love to do.” www.tessarden.wordpress.com

Greeley grad and Duke University freshman, Carly Stern, who started College Kicks last year, uses her artistry to draw college logos and designs on canvas sneakers. “I enjoy getting immersed and lost in the project. I like to see how my designs evolve and change for every job, ” explains Stern. Each one-of-a-kind pair takes her about 5 hours to complete, the perfect side job for a busy college student. To see photos go to Instagram, @carlyscollegekicks or email her at carlyscollegekicks@gmail.com

Greeley junior and entrepreneur, Brad Neufeld invented the SCREENZ, high top basketball sneaker covers to protect expensive sneakers from bad weather. The proactive teen worked on all phases of launching a product onto the market, including, shoe design, manufacturing and marketing. Neufeld says, “the biggest challenge with introducing a new product to the market is advertising without spending tons of money. I’ve had to get creative by marketing my product at basketball tournaments, sneaker conventions and on social media.” Sold on the web, Screenz has had sales as far away as Alaska and California. www.bballscreenz.com

Carly Stern with her own College Kicks kicks

Although not a Chappaqua teen, Robert Karp, a senior at Briarcliff High School and one of the most accomplished young business owners in our area, counts on his Chappaqua clients for a third of his company’s revenue . As founder of Karp Enterprises, the 17 year-old frequent flyer guru runs a booming travel business, which specializes in utilizing clients’ points and miles. Karp who works approximately 20 hours a week says the key to running a business while going to high school is to learn how to work as efficiently as possible. “I learn to use every minute. When I’m on hold with an airline, I do homework. When I’m waiting in a doctor’s office, I’m returning emails and researching travel options. But I stop work at 5 p.m. every Friday and Saturday because I’m careful not to let my work over take my life.” Karp will be heading off to Cornell next fall where he plans to continue running his company. www.karpenterprises.com

Armed with a strong innovative and entrepreneurial spirit, more and more Greeley students are showing that success can come at any age. So the next time you think about shopping locally in Chappaqua, you might also want to think about hiring talented local teens.

Deirdre Cohen is an independent network news producer and the mother of two HGHS students (including one of the founders of Varsity Sports Trainers). Over the years, the Cohen family has hired many gifted students including: a jazz trio of former Greeley grads to entertain guests at a 75th birthday party and a young math whiz to take over after two adult tutors failed to do the job.

Barbara Corcoran’s Secrets to Business Success

May 27, 2014 by The Inside Press

Corcoran’s talk for The Business Council of Westchester’s KeyBank Speaker Series, kicked off the second-annual GROW 2.0 Conference. GROW 2.0 is the largest gathering in the region for business owners, entrepreneurs and professionals to attend networking, training and workshops centered on business development and strategy. (L-R): Barbara Corcoran, Marsha Gordon, Ruth Mahoney

Or…How a Waitress from Joisey Found her Power—and USED IT!

By Grace Bennett

Real estate mogul and ‘Shark Tank’ celebrity Barbara Corcoran opened a talk at Westchester Community College in May opining about the one person who may have figured as her most prominent influence: Her mother.

“My mother ran our household like a boot camp. You didn’t dare cross her,” Barbara said, also pointing out her “phenomenal organizational abilities” managing a family of ten children in a modest, two bedroom apartment in New Jersey.

Barbara also related that her mom was uncanny at “nailing” each of her kid’s “gifts,” including dubbing her brother as “the kid who could dance.” Noted Barbara: “Tom is now a ballet dancer for Alvin Ailey.” As for Barbara herself, her mom aptly declared her daughter’s gift: “a wonderful imagination.”

Another pivotal figure was an older (by ten years) and charming fellow named Ramon Simon who showed up at a Jersey diner one day where Barbara was waitressing (after receiving straight Ds in high school!) Apparently girlfriend hunting, “Ramon chose me over another waitress, ‘Gloria,’ a stacked dead ringer for Dolly Parton,” said Barbara. “Men would line up to catch a glimpse of her.” The experience taught Barbara early on that “men are just as attracted to the great white virgin as they are to the bombshell.”

Barbara Corcoran with the co-communications team.

Ramon and she ran off to the city–causing a major rift with mom…“She hated him; it broke my mother’s heart,” she said. For seven years, Ramon and she worked building up a business until mom’s intuition bore fruit. Barbara said Ramon announced he was leaving Barbara for their secretary. Barbara was devastated. The breakup, she said, and Ramon’s own cruel declaration, “You know, you will never survive without me,” steeled Barbara to prove him wrong and employ the imagination her mom was so clear about. “One day, I found my power,” she said, and set up an office with a meager $1,000, calling it, simply, “The Corcoran Group.”

Through the ups and downs of the market, Barbara would adapt accordingly. “I would just think of Ramon laughing at me.” She proved him dead wrong when she sold the company for a whopping $66 million.

A key wisdom gleaned from years of successful real estate selling and marketing: “Perception creates reality.” On a hunch, in the Corcoran Group’s early days, Barbara sent her now landmark “The Madonna Report,” to media outlets, hungry, she said, for facts and figures in a record low NYC market.

“I knew nothing about Madonna,” she laughed. Still, a producer invited her to appear on TV as an expert right away. From that point on, Barbara’s name, as she put it, “rose to the top of the food chain…If you can be the person churning out the numbers on a constant basis, they will call you their drug supplier!” Another secret to Barbara’s success was differentiating between “expanders” and “containers” at work. She looked for the ying to her yang, and found it in a woman named Esther, a clear “container,” who kept Barbara on task  and organized.

She advised attendees to also get better, not just at hiring, but also at firing, and warned about the dangers of “dead wood” to any company’s bottom line. But showing a softer edge too, Barbara added that she also prided herself on personally coaching fired individuals on careers they were perhaps better suited for.

Finally, she described a culture of sheer fun in her company “that made us the company you wanted to be in.”

“Fun is the most underutilized tool in business,” she said, and builds camaraderie “even amongst the most competitive real estate agents.” To that end, she would routinely organize outings, “the wackier and more shocking, the better,” she said.

Barbara’s final pointer was encouraging hiring persons who are “great at failure. I look for the people who can take a hit and get up again. They don’t spend time feeling sorry for themselves.” And there you have it…a condensed version of Barbara’s secrets to success. The gathering ended with many hungry for more, and lining up to purchase a copy of her hot, new book, Shark Tales.

Grace Bennett is Publisher and Editor of The Inside Press, Inc., dba Inside Chappaqua and Inside Armonk  magazines since 2003. She has spent the last four years successfully publishing in a down print market.