The Trump Card

Playing to Win in Work and Life

Ivanka Trump

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781439155646
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

From the daughter of business mogul Donald Trump and a rising star in the Trump organization, this New York Times bestseller is a business book for young women on how to achieve success in any field, based upon what Ivanka Trump has learned from her father and from her own experiences. Inspiration. Success. Confidence. Passion. No one is born with these qualities, but they are the key ingredients for reaching goals, building careers, or taking a blueprint and turning it into a breathtaking skyscraper. In The Trump Card, Ivanka Trump recounts the compelling story of her upbringing as the ultimate Apprentice, the daughter of Donald and Ivana Trump, and shares the life lessons and hard-won insights that have made her a rising star in the business world. Whether it's landing that first job, navigating the workplace, or making a lasting impact, Ivanka's valuable, practical advice for young women shows how to: • Use uncertainty to your advantage—thrive in any environment
• Step up and get noticed at work—focus and efficiency will open doors
• Create a strong and consistent identity—your name and reputation are your best assets
• Know what you want—get the most out of any negotiation. Ivanka also taps into the wisdom of today's leaders, including Arianna Huffington, Russell Simmons, and Cathie Black, with "Bulletins" from her BlackBerry. "We've all been dealt a winning hand, " she writes, "and it is up to each of us to play it right and smart."

NINE BUSINESS AS UNUSUAL

Unless a man undertakes more than he can possibly do, he will never do all that he can.

—HENRY DRUMMOND

Timing is everything.

When I first joined the Trump Organization, it was a great time to be a real estate developer—not only in New York but all across the country and in overseas markets as well. Financing was so readily available that we were able to purchase, develop, manage, and brand a number of properties around the world, so we had a steady stream of projects in various stages of the development cycle. Basically, if we could find an architect to design what we wanted and if we could persuade the local municipality to grant us the desired zoning, there was a very good chance we could get our project built. Our batting average during this period, measured by our number of hits divided by our overall plate appearances, was pretty darn good.

One of our architects in Dubai summed it up best. “In today’s environment,” he said, “the only things holding developers back are gravity and imagination.” Indeed, there was a feeling among us developers that the sky was the limit, but times have changed. Rather quickly. That’s the way it goes in business. What’s up one day is down the next. Opportunities that seem wide open one year are all but closed soon enough, and it’s left to the market leaders to regroup, retrench, and reimagine their businesses if they hope to maintain their edge and remain relevant in the new economy.

More often than not, that edge stays with companies agile enough to respond to such sudden shifts in the marketplace. At the Trump Organization, this meant an overall rethinking of our core business strategy. Even though we still regard ourselves as a real estate development firm, the term real estate developer has become a bit of an oxymoron in our sluggish economy, and it was clear to all of us that we needed to be willing to take off our hard hats and make room in our closet for a few new styles. No one is developing new urban towers in this climate, as construction financing has essentially disappeared, so we reconsidered our options. We could cling to our background as developers and waste a lot of energy and resources searching for the funding to get new projects off the ground—business as usual. Or we could reassess our basic model and discover new ways to utilize our unique resources and capabilities in an environment where nothing new was getting built—business as unusual.

Happily, we chose the latter, and it’s been an interesting shift, one that stands in contrast to our response to the recession that nearly capsized our industry more than fifteen years earlier. Here, the constant has been that we’re still making deals, even as the tone and tenor of those deals have changed. One of the most noticeable changes to our overall game plan has been our approach to the hotel business, where we’ve found some incredible opportunities. The trend in the hotel industry in recent years has been for developers to affiliate with non–real estate brands such as Nobu and Armani, in the hope that the partnership might yield some interesting benefits to the customer experience. In theory, I suppose there might have been something to this line of thinking—but in practice it usually turned out to be an ill-considered mess. At The Trump Organization, we looked on with bemusement at some of the odd pairings, because they seemed to be built on little more than high hopes, general brand recognition, and a smooth PowerPoint presentation. Some of the newly formed “hotel management” companies had no background in the hospitality industry, yet they somehow managed to convince developers that their brands and skills would translate well into the hotel business.

Inevitably, something was lost in the translation. For the most part, these brands didn’t understand the hotel management and development business. They didn’t understand how to program the right ratio of conference and meeting space to rooms. Or how to design the back-of-house space. Or how to set up and manage a reservations system, or how to hire and train staff in advance of opening, and on and on. They were new to the industry and out of their depth, which would have been fine if all they were doing was lending their name and the strength of their brand to the partnership, but very often the ventures called on their management experience as well—management experience that wasn’t directly relevant. People seemed to buy into this flawed model: property owners, licensees, transient guests … For a while, in a thriving economy, it was possible for some of the deals to work, but as the market grew tighter and more competitive the inexperience of some of the new management teams became glaringly apparent.

Now, it appears, the pendulum has swung to where many developers are having serious second thoughts about doing business with flags that don’t add any tangible and quantifiable value to their projects. Flag is an industry term for a hotel brand, and these days I spend a good deal of my time identifying developers who have suddenly become disillusioned with one-off flags and are looking instead to partner with an organization with the infrastructure in place to drive a property’s success; from construction to management, from marketing to reservations. The good news is that while I’m out looking for these developers—waving the Trump flag!—they’re out looking for me. Objectively, the Trump Organization is one of the few “brandname” real estate companies with a depth of experience in the development, operations, marketing, and selling of hotel, golf, commercial, and residential properties.

I’m like my dad, I guess, when it comes to singing the praises of our projects and properties. Of late, one of my primary initiatives at the Trump Organization has been to spearhead our hospitality-driven projects, which are now grouped within our Trump Hotel Collection division. Working together with my brothers, Don and Eric, it’s been my biggest area of concentration since signing on. (Our joint effort is even reflected in our hotel company’s slogan: “The next generation of Trump.”) Through our hotel management company, we’re currently gearing up to manage projects in Waikiki and in Manhattan’s fashionable SoHo district to complement our signature properties in New York, Chicago, and Las Vegas. In future years, we’ll be up and running in Toronto, Panama, Scotland, Dubai, the Dominican Republic, and other business and vacation destinations all over the world.

A fundamental objective of our hotel division is to ensure that each new property positively reinforces the Trump “brand,” which has come to represent the highest caliber of luxury and excellence, in our hotels, condominiums, and golf clubs. When we work with a local developer to manage a hotel, we’re not only planning an outstanding new resort or urban facility and generating a strong new revenue stream; we’re also building and extending our brand. That’s something we pay close attention to, and I’m betting it will occupy more and more of our time going forward.

So far, the downturn in the economy has worked out just fine for us. Typically, it’s easiest to grow a hotel portfolio in a hot market; however, in today’s climate, the lack of available financing and the general decrease in travel spending have placed a number of new or half-built hotel projects on hold. With few new hotels being built, we look to team up with disillusioned developers to rebrand and reposition their existing hotel properties. Part of our pitch is that, as developers ourselves, we understand their particular needs and sensitivities and will work with them to achieve their goals. What that means for us is an opportunity to draw on our unique skill set and proven track record to rescue deals from the newly minted management companies and rebrand and reposition the properties to the owners’ satisfaction. We expect to see more and more of these types of deals in the months ahead as more and more failing assets appear in need of rebranding.

Another primary focus of my organization these days has been looking for distressed properties that might be available for purchase at a steeply discounted price. In a down economy, there are always great bargains to be had for investors with resources and vision—and perhaps the stomach (and balance sheet!) to carry an asset through a prolonged downturn. Such deals can be tricky from a timing perspective, since you want to buy at or near the bottom of the market, but we’re constantly on the lookout for the right opportunity. In this way we’ve managed to purchase two world-class golf courses, just in the past year, and we expect to find opportunities in the New York City commercial office market in the near future. When we do, we’ll be ready to move on projects that are partially built or completed but have fallen into foreclosure or bankruptcy, or have run into some difficulty or other. Yes, we’re able to do a deal at an attractive price, but we’re also helping investors or lenders get out of a commitment that no longer makes sense for them—maybe not at the terms they envisioned going in but at the prevailing market rate.

In recent months, we’ve seen the failure of quite a few condominium developments, wiping out the developers of these projects and leaving the banks that financed them in possession of buildings that they don’t have the time or the experience to manage or sell. That’s been a particular area of windfall opportunity for us, because we’re fortunate enough to be in a great cash position. We are constantly meeting with these bankers, looking to acquire properties that they have wound up in possession of. There’s not a whole lot of competition for these distressed properties, and banks are more willing to make discounted deals than the desperate developers who are still hanging on and hoping for an upturn. At the end of the day, banks don’t want to be stuck with a portfolio of properties. They have no interest in being in the development or asset management business, but we certainly do.

After all, it’s one of our strengths.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably read dozens of business books talking up the benefits of going against the grain. Of zigging when everyone else is zagging. Of trying a new approach that runs counter to the market and to conventional wisdom. I wrote about this earlier, in a different context, but in a way I think the strategy is somewhat oversold, so I’ll avoid the temptation to offer more of the same. It might be easy to dismiss this instance of the Trump Organization going its own way and doing what it can to buck a downward trend as an example of zigging in a zagging economy. But there’s more to it than that. We haven’t succeeded in redirecting our business because we’ve taken a contrarian view; we’ve succeeded because we’re nimble enough to respond to changing market conditions. Being ahead of the curve is sometimes better than building a new road, it turns out. In the end, it simply comes down to being in a position to respond forcefully, as has been the case here. With cash on hand, we’ve recast ourselves as buyers in a marketplace of sellers because we’re in a position to do so—and because doing so provides the best opportunities available to us in the current climate.

An explanation for our favorable cash position is in order. Years ago, my father predicted the current market downturn. We discussed it as a family and agreed that real estate prices were grossly inflated. Rather than continue to acquire real estate and borrow large sums to finance the construction of new developments, we grew our branding, licensing, and management models to eliminate some of those risks. We used Trump International Hotel Tower in New York as the flagship for our newly christened Trump Hotel Collection and meticulously assembled the infrastructure needed for a scalable hotel management company. Most of the expertise we needed to run the operation was already in-house, in areas such as construction management and sales and marketing, so we looked to team with other developers and license our name and our know-how and management services to build our collection of assets.

Realize, hotel management companies generally don’t own the assets they manage. They don’t build the properties either. They simply receive a lucrative, incentive-driven fee for their services. For example, Four Seasons and Ritz-Carlton are not ownership-based hotel companies; they are primarily for-fee managers. Under this model, we could be conservative with our cash, at a time when other developers were not, which allowed us to remain whole and viable when the market turned. We were able to keep money coming into the company coffers through our management and licensing deals, without any significant risk to our bottom line. By bucking the trend and drawing on our strengths and resources, we redirected our company in such a way that we were well positioned for a difficult economy.

If you’d asked me when I started at the Trump Organization what my focus would be in five years, I would have said without hesitation that I’d be building new towers and developing new properties. That was my vision coming in, and it would be my vision going forward. Or so I thought. Ask my father or my brothers, and they would likely have said the same thing. We would never have guessed that we’d be looking to work with other developers to manage and rebrand their ill-positioned projects or that we’d be seeking to acquire them outright from struggling banks—because back then, of course, developers and banks were on top of the world. My passion was, and remains, development and construction. Indeed, that’s our passion as a company. We know how to build and how to create a whole lot of value in the process. But why build new product when you can buy a revenue-generating building for far less than the cost of construction? It doesn’t make sense for us to build right now, so the thing to do is to play the hand we’ve been dealt. Not to zig while everyone else zags, necessarily, but to learn from all that zigging and zagging and apply those lessons to our bottom line. To take what the market gives us and respond effectively. And, be prepared to change our emphasis yet again in the coming years, when the development pendulum swings back and it will make sense for us to start building again.

What I’ve never questioned, as my father’s prediction of a looming recession began to come true, was the underlying strength of the Trump name. As I said, it’s one of our chief assets, but it took having to tough it out in a terrible economy for me to recognize the intangible value of what my father had built—of what we will continue to build together as a family.

EXTENDING THE REACH

Here’s an odd picture: my father, onstage at the 2005 Emmy Awards, singing the theme song from Green Acres with the actress Megan Mullally. Even odder, he was wearing a straw hat and overalls and holding a pitchfork. It was an absurdly funny scene—one for which our international partners would have had absolutely no frame of reference. What in the world was Donald Trump, one of the world’s leading real estate developers, doing onstage in a musical comedy skit?

I had no answer. All I could do was think, This is not normal. It was entertaining but not normal. My father’s not normal. We are not normal. This wasn’t at all how things were supposed to go in the typically staid world of business, but then I guessed this just meant we weren’t typically staid businesspeople. Well, we were and we weren’t. We were making deals, but at the same time we were making a name for ourselves—a name that would carry a certain amount of weight and announce our interests long before we even had a chance to weigh in for ourselves.

Don’t misunderstand, it was a harmless, funny sketch, and I loved watching my father do his thing—he was such a ham!—but at the same time it was such a weirdly surreal moment. I caught myself wondering how I might describe it to any of our overseas associates, who might not have had such a nuanced appreciation for how my father had positioned himself here at home at the intersection of business and popular culture.

Early on in his career, my father recognized a unique opportunity to harness the power of the media and use it to his professional advantage. Good for him, right? He cultivated his public image in such a way that the Trump name would come to stand for excellence, luxury, and the very highest standards. Good for business, right? He himself took on the same characteristics, because he knew that people wouldn’t distinguish between his business and his persona.

My father is a very smart guy, but even he couldn’t have seen all of this attention coming his way. He didn’t set out to be a media personality. Being famous wasn’t one of his goals. Rich, maybe. But famous? Not so much. He’d set out to be a successful developer, just as his father had been before him, and he surely was. But the more successful he became, the more he started to interact with the press, the more he realized his growing celebrity was an asset waiting to happen. He projected a winning, vibrant, upmarket persona, and people seemed to respond to it in a big-time way. And it fit hand in hand with the impression he wanted people to take from his properties. A positive public image, he began to realize, would help promote his buildings and enhance his reputation as an entrepreneur. He came to represent a lavish lifestyle and a brash, bold way of doing business that quickly became the American ideal.

Uniquely positioned as a celebrity businessman, my father was given great media exposure, so he made sure to hold up his end. He lived large. He threw legendary parties at Mar-a-Lago and attended the fabulous parties of others. He bought an airline—the Eastern Shuttle, which he renamed the Trump Shuttle. He bought a football team—the New Jersey Generals, of the upstart United States Football League. He acquired and refurbished a storied yacht—renamed the Trump Princess, for yours truly. He wrote a book. He took over a city landmark and rescued it from oblivion. Then he did it again. And again. When my parents’ marriage broke up, he became New York City’s most eligible bachelor, and his comings and goings were front-page fodder for the tabloids.

At one point he looked up and realized he had become a brand—a commodity, even. Just like one of his buildings or resort properties. The Trump name had come to represent one of his biggest assets as a businessman. It was bigger than any one deal, because it transcended every deal. It got to where he could launch a development in the middle of Manhattan and another in the middle of nowhere, and both projects would make international news. After all, he was news. With each new building, he told another chapter of his story. Every successful venture offered an exclamation point to every previous venture and speculation about the ventures still to come. Without really intending to do so, my father had become a celebrity, and his celebrity couldn’t help but enhance the Trump brand. Other developers spent millions of dollars trying to gain exposure for their projects, while the Trump Organization spent virtually nothing. Actually, we hardly ever advertise our properties—at least not in a traditional sense. Why buy an ad in a magazine when we can grant an interview to that same publication and possibly land a cover story? That’s the kind of exposure no amount of advertising dollars can buy.

One of the best examples of my father’s ability to grow his success as a developer through the media is The Apprenti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• One: Family Matters
• Two: Finding the Angles of Opportunity
• Three: Learning by Example
• Four: Creating Values
• Five: Modeling a Career
• Six: Recipes for Success
• Seven: Making an Impact
• Eight: Navigating the Workplace
• Nine: Business as Unusual
• Ten: Reaching Out, Plugging In
• Eleven: Going it Alone
• Epilogue: Putting it All Together
• Copyright