Trump: How to Get Rich

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.