barbaracorcoran

Barbara Corcoran Inc.212-937-1000 / barbara@barbaracorcoran.com200 East 94th Street, Penthouse 9New York, NY, 10128www.twitter.com/barbaracorcoran

ALL ABOUT BARBARAIntroduction for Barbara Corcoran& Barbara Corcoran Inc.

BARBARA IN THE NEWSThe Real DealHouse & GardenThe New York Times Sunday StylesFortune MagazineTime Out New YorkOprah's "O" MagazineThe New York Times Real Estate

BARBARA'S BOOKIf You Don’t Have Big Breasts PutRibbons in your Pigtails

Founder, The corcoran group

chairman of Barbara corcoran inc

best-selling author of If You Don’t Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons in Your Pigtails

Barbara Corcoran’s credentials include straight D’s in high school and college and twenty jobs by the time she turned twenty-three. It was her next job, however, that would make her one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the country, when she borrowed $1,000 from her boyfriend and quit her job as a waitress to start a tiny real estate company in New York City. Over the next twenty-five years, she’d parlay that $1,000 loan into a five-billion-dollar real estate business named The Corcoran Group. She sold the business in 2001 for seventy million dollars.

Barbara is the author of If You Don’t Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons on Your Pigtails, an unlikely business book and a national best-seller. In it, Barbara credits her struggles in school and her mother’s kitchen-table wisdom for her success in the business world. The book is a fresh, frank look at how to succeed in life and business and is as heartwarming as it is smart and motivating. Her second book, Nextville, Amazing Places to Live the Rest of Your Life, is fast becoming another best-seller.

Barbara is a ‘shark’ on ABC’s Shark Tank and the real estate contributor to the NBC Today Show. She is also a columnist for the New York Daily News and MORE Magazine, and appears on HGTV’s Top Ten and Price Fix on LXTV.

As a speaker, Barbara brings her front-lines experience and infectious energy to every audience she addresses. Motivational, inspirational, and sometimes outrageous, Barbara Corcoran’s tell-it-like-it-is attitude is a refreshing approach to success.

About meBarbara Corcoran

Barbara Corcoran Inc.About

Barbara Corcoran Inc. was founded by real estate entrepreneur Barbara Corcoran in 2005 as the latest endeavor in her high-profile, multi-faceted, and highly successful career. This multi-media company blends Barbara’s real estate expertise and her growing media presence in a one-of-a-kind package that taps Barbara’s many talents.

As founder of The Corcoran Group, Barbara used her ingenuity, quick wits, and solid instincts to turn a $1,000 loan into a multi-billion dollar business. In the 28 years Barbara ran the company, she honed her skills in marketing, negotiating, innovating, and surviving in the lean times and thriving in the good times—everything you need to know to establish, run, and grow a business. Then, in 2001, Barbara sold the company for over $70 million.

Barbara next put her entrepreneurial knowledge down on paper, penning the best selling, unconventional business book If You Don’t Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons on Your Pigtails. The book is aptly sub-titled And Other Business Lessons I Learned From My Mom, as Barbara credits her mom’s good sense and positive vision with giving her the tools she needed to succeed so fabulously in the notoriously cutthroat world of New York real estate. Her second book, Nextville: Amazing Places to Live the Rest of Your Life, is fast becoming her second best-seller.

As a much-in-demand motivational speaker, and now a best-selling author, Barbara has successfully transitioned from her role as head of The Corcoran Group to that of popular television personality. Today Barbara is the real estate contributor to NBC’s Today Show and a ‘shark’ on the ABC reality show Shark Tank, and can be seen on HGTV’s Top Ten and LXTV’s Price Fix. She has continued writing and is author of a weekly real estate column in the New York Daily News as well as a regular column in MORE Magazine.

118 September 2006 www.TheRealDeal.com www.TheRealDeal.com July 2006 00

What is your name?Barbara Anne Corcoran.

When is your birthday and what’s your sign?March 10, 1949. Pisces.

Where did you grow up?I was born in Teaneck, New Jersey, and grew up in Edgewater.

What is your greatest achievement professionally?Building the Corcoran Group and all the people that came along for the ride. [Corcoran founded the firm in 1973 and officially left last year.]

What do you think of your old firm under the new management?They’ve grown tremendously. I never saw it as anything other than a city firm. They’ve grown the Corcoran brand to different cities and states, and I could’ve never envi-sioned that.

How much money do you have in your wallet right now?You are asking me on a bad day, but I have $37 in my wal-let right now.

Do you feel rich? Successful?I’ve always felt successful. I’ve never felt rich and still don’t. But, I guess relative to a lot of people, I am. My fam-ily tells me I am rich.

But you are a legitimate millionaire?I didn’t worry about money when I didn’t have any, and I don’t worry about money when I lose it, because it’s not so important. The only thing important is love, and money makes everything more lovable. Helps out. It takes away the edges.

Since you became rich, what is the most nouveau riche thing you’ve acquired? I got all new slipcovers for both my house in the city and in the Hamptons.

What has been your biggest contribution to society?I don’t think I’ve made any contributions to society as a whole. I give a million little donations to a million little people but nothing that you could build a hospital with.

Are there any public buildings, parks or structures bearing your name?Not a chance. Not a chance.

If you were mayor of New York, what is the first thing you would change?I would definitely put mature trees on every block and have bike lanes on every avenue.

What’s your idea of the perfect Sunday afternoon?Sitting on the beach with my 2-month-old daughter Kate in her bucket.

What’s been your greatest disappointment and how did you cope?The first thing that comes to mind is not being able to have a baby. The seven years of in vitro trying to have my son was very disappointing. I coped with the help of my hus-band and was fueled by the determination that I wanted to have a baby.

What’s your favorite street in New York?My favorite street for me is where I am living, be-cause I love my home. And I’ve moved like 20 times. But I guess Fifth Avenue along the park - but, then again, because I live around there.

Who is your consigliere?My husband of 16 years, Bill.

What’s your biggest pet peeve?My husband, Bill. He can drive me crazy. He is exactly my opposite.

Will you ever recreate the sort of success you had with the Corcoran Group?I will because I need to. I just need to be involved in a big creative project. And I need a lot of at-tention. I probably need a shrink, but instead I’ll build a business.

But you are already on TV, radio and in print.Yes, but Barbara Corcoran Inc. [television produc-tion company started last year] is not as powerful of a brand in that medium as the Corcoran Group brand was in real estate. I have to match that.

Going back to the time when you sold the Corcoran Group, would you still sell?I would still sell it, because I had accomplished my goal to become the number one firm. After that was done, I was like, “OK, now what do I do?” It was time for a change. I had worked that beat for 30 years, which is long enough. It was almost like raising a family where the kids were mature enough to be on their own.

What time do you get in on Mondays and what time do you leave on Fridays now?I don’t work in the summers, I just come in for the TV appearances. But, normally, I come in at 9:30 a.m., which is very hard for me. I used to always be at work at 8 a.m.

What do you read every day?The truth is, nothing. Ever. I never read the pa-pers. I love being unplugged and always have. It makes space for creative thinking and being dif-ferent from the next guy. Ignorance is bliss.

What gadget can you not live without, besides a cell phone and e-mail?I can definitely live without my e-mail and cell phone. I don’t even read or answer my own e-mail. The gadget I can’t live without is my DustBuster. I love to be tidy.

How do you size up people when you first meet them?I have two categories and two sub-categories for everyone. First, if they are good or bad; then, if they are an expander or a container. Expanders want to push out and create bigger things. Con-tainers want to control, and they are both good. One is not less important than the other.

How do you deal with antagonists? Confront or ignore them?I avoid them. I run from them and hope they go away. I am terrible at confrontation.

Do you prefer to be feared or loved?Who wants to be feared? I want to be surrounded by people who want to give me kisses.

What was your biggest obstacle on the path to succeeding?My belief that I had the right to be there. TRD

The Closingwith...Barbara

Corcoran

PHOTOGRAPHS FOR THE REAL DEAL BY HUGH HARTSHORNE

Real Estate SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2005

By PENELOPE GREEN

YOU can see the twin towers of the Eldorado, across Central Park from the west-facing windows in the dining room of Barbara Corcoran's three-bedroom Park Avenue apartment, lording it over the foamy tree line and the steely reservoir below. It's a view that's a gift - this iconic piece of the Manhattan skyline - and just the right accouterment for the self-styled queen of New York real estate.

Not that it's fancy up here on the 14th floor; Ms. Corcoran's home - all pale blue, cream and yellow with a smatter-ing of white-painted Swedish country furniture - is as bright and accessible as Ms. Corcoran herself. "Classic seven? Three-bedroom? I don't even know how to describe this place," she said, while Kim Quiero, her makeup artist for the last 10 years, used a bit of artifice to widen and brighten Ms. Corcoran's already wide pale-blue eyes for a photograph; Max and Becky, two caramel- and cream-colored Shih Tzus, growled continuously about their feet, engaged in a furious, snarly tug of war with a much-frayed chew stick. "When I was a broker I never showed

anything like this, I only showed small apartments," said Ms. Corcoran, legendary for being the most well-known name in New York real estate and for having personally sold only three apartments. "Tome, it's just my dream. All my life I've wanted a pretty house, and I never could afford one. Of course, the only thing my brokers could agree on when I bought it was that I had overpaid." Ms. Corcoran spent $3.5 million on the 3,500-square-foot apartment in July of 2000. This is her 16th home in 32 years, if you count as her first a week's stay at the Barbizon Hotel for Women in 1973. In September of 2001 - unbelievably, the papers were signed Sept. 9 - she sold her own firm, the Corcoran Group, to the real estate giant NRT, an arm of the Cendant Corporation, for an estimated $70 million, ceding her chief executive's duties to an associate, Pamela Liebman, and assuming what she called a figure-head role as the company's chairman.

On Nov. 15, she will shed that role completely, resigning from the company she founded in 1978 with a $1,000 loan, and will start a television production company called, predict-

ably, Barbara Corcoran Produc-tions. At 56, Ms. Corcoran seems to have hit her stride - confident, exuberant and with seemingly no regrets at leaving the game she invented so many decades ago. She obligingly played market sibyl for a few moments, allowing as how she's always been eager to spot a bubble breaking and call it first. "My goal was I want to get the bubble over with," she explained. "I was always highly leveraged, and I know the worst thing is if people don't knowwhich way the market is going to go, they just sit there. Nothing is worse for our business than uncer-tainty."That said, she continued: "If I was asked last night, I'd say there's a lot of negative feeling out there - the war in Iraq, Katrina, our taxes - fodder for people worrying in the evening. The good news is... (Continues over)

The Real Estate 'Queen' in her Hive

...The ‘Queen’ in Her Hive continued

there's still not enough inventory to go around." Which seemed to be a way of saying you won't hear a loud popping sound any time soon.

She mused about techniques, too. Ms. Corcoran wiggled an industry away from its tonier, more exclusive, dinner-party antecedents - the Alice Mason model - to a more conventional business paradigm, using old-fashioned advertis-ing. "It's still about being noticed," she said. "For all my agents, whatever their circle of influence, when real estate comes up, I want their name to be first on everybody's lips. I still think market-ing and the media is the way to do it." She explained how each of Corcoran's 2,000 agents is ministered to by Ms. Quiero for the full Corcoran treatment, which includes head shots on the Web site as well as their business cards. She proffered her own as an example: there was the iconic smile and pixie cut washed with a chic gray screen. "Of course we airbrush, too," said Ms. Corcoran, who has a gift for self-deprecation, "but you'd swear I wasn't any older than 30, wouldn't you?" You would, indeed. "There's nothing tackier than a real estate broker's card with their picture on it," Ms. Corcoran continued, explaining how she experimented to make her company's cards look better. "So I worked hard to find the right color to wash these in. I used Danny De Vito's photograph and hit it with every color. He looked best in gray." Last Monday, Ms. Corcoran had

decided that blue looked best in newsprint, and had dressed accord-ingly. (A look in her roomy, walk-in closet revealed none of her trademark red suits, but a soft portfolio of yellows, pale blues and creams, the palette of her apartment.) "I was besmitten," she went on to say, explaining how she "bid myself up from $3 million to $3.5 million because I saw us making a home here.""Bill, who was born with a large silver spoon in his mouth and grew up in a mansion, could have cared less," said Ms. Corcoran, meaning Bill Higgins, a retired Navy captain and former F.B.I. agent, and her husband of 17 years. Their 11-year old son's school is only a few blocks away, so the "play-date factor" was big, too, said Ms. Corc-oran, who requested that his name be kept out of print for privacy's sake. Ms. Corcoran seemed most excited about her plans for a back bedroom here, perhaps more so than the launch of her new company. A maid's room just off the kitchen has been a constant guest room, Ms. Corcoran said, and an unused home office. "I never work at home," she said. "I kept thinking, 'Well, when I retire.' I'll never retire. Now I'm excited about making this into a baby's room, God willing."

Ms. Corcoran and her husband have been hoping to adopt a child for the last year or so - following a clutch of mothers in an open-adoption process, a particular and newly painful parent-

ing odyssey, she said. It took eight years of fertility treat-ments, she said, before she was able to have her son."I never saw myself as a protected person," said Ms. Corcoran, adding that she grew up in a two-room apartment in Edgewater, N.J., the second of 10 children. "I come from humble beginnings, and I feel like I always get along better with the doorman than the M.B.A.'s. But I knew nothing about America, about how people can struggle, till I walked in these women's shoes." One mom-to-be, she said, had come upon Ms. Corcoran by chance, an encounter that still makes Ms. Corcoran wince at the chasm between the haves and the have nots. "She'd set off to visit relatives in North Carolina, in a broken-down car with her two kids," she said. "When the car broke down, she walked five hours with those kids until she found a Subway restaurant, begged for a phone call and a glass of water, because she'd brought no money with her. She had no money to bring. While she was waiting for help, she read our ad in a local newspa-per." It was not a real estate ad."Do you want your child to spend summers at the beach and winters in the mountains?" It read. "Lovely couple looking to adopt." As it turned out, the woman's child was adopted by someone else. But Ms.Corcoran is ever hopeful. She knows it pays to advertise.

Stepping Into a New Role

February 28, 2006By David Whitford

“These are so pretty, right?” says Barbara Corcoran, the self-crowned queen of New York real estate. She’s referring to the red flowers on our table. We’re at the Cafe Pierre on Manhattan’s East Side. It’s a narrow room, lushly draped, thickly carpeted, all decked out in white table linens and adorned with gilded wood and etched glass. Band music from the 1940s plays softly. “The way they’re tied together,” she continues. The flower stems are tightly bound top and bottom with rubber bands. “Reminds me"--she’s giggling--"of S&M. You get my point, right?”What I get is that Corcoran, 56, has me right where she wants me, shocked into paying very close attention to her. She recently attended a bash marking her depar-ture from the Corcoran Group--a real estate brokerage firm she founded 35 years ago with $1,000 and sold in 2001 for $66 million--wearing, as the New York Times reported, a “buckskin miniskirt, gold cowboy boots, a fringed shirt, a gold sheriff’s badge, and a minia-ture toy pistol tucked under a red garter belt.” When sales of her business book, Use What You’ve Got, proved disappointing, she came up with a juicier title for the

paperback: If You Don’t Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons on Your Pigtails. “You’re easy!” she squeals, when I respond appropri-ately to her shtick. “You’re a good audience! Why don’t you come for dinner tonight?”she does regular advice spots for Good Morning America and The View. ("The top of the market is really stalled right now because rich people don’t buy when they think they can get it for less.") But she has launched her new venture, Barbara Corcoran Productions, in the hope of snagging her own series. “I have a very good reality TV show idea that I love that I won’t tell you,” she says firmly, then immediately halfway relents. “But I’ll tell you the vehicle I travel in: a little car that’s shaped like a bubble. I’m hoping to go through little towns in the middle of America, waving. ‘Here comes the lady in the real estate bubble.’ You get it?” The pilot has been shot.

Corcoran taught herself how to command center stage while grow-ing up in a loudmouthed family of ten kids. “I really was convinced I was stupid,” she says. Eventually she was diagnosed with dyslexia--a

learning disorder that she says helped her succeed in business. “I felt capable because I could use my mouth, not my writing or reading ability.” Dyslexics sometimes think in pictures. “If you can picture it, you can get it,” she says. “It’s a great business talent, because I could always see it all right away--the timetable, the money, me being successful.” Nowadays, “I see my little smiley face on a television screen,” she says. “That’s sort of what my business plan is. I hope I haven’t lost my touch.”After dessert Corcoran asks the waiter if she can take the flowers home with her. But of course. As I escort her to the door, her bouquet falls to the floor. I’m on it in a flash. While I’m down there, she man-ages to dislodge her right shoe. Before I know it, I’m kneeling in the hotel lobby, flowers in hand, slipping a shoe on Barbara Corcoran’s stockinged foot. “Oooh,” she says. “My fantasy! I’m Cinderella!”

A real estate queen seeks fame on the TV screen.

I'D SEEN HER JUBILANT FACE ON billboards for years. Barbara Corcoran, founder of the Corcoran Group, one of New York's top real estate agencies, had a dynamic, larger-than-life image. I expected to be intimidated by her when we met. What a surprise, then, when I was greeted by a pixie of a woman, overflowing with warmth and a little self-deprecation. She invited me into her office, a beautiful space with windows facing Central Park, and asked me to help her get organized. She wasn't comfortable here, she said, because the "chaos" filled her with dread. Aside from dozens of small piles of papers, I

couldn't see what was so discombobulating. But the more she talked, the more I realized that the real issue was she was still sorting out the inner turmoil of the past few years. In 2001 Barbara sold her business, which she'd grown for nearly 30 years from just one agent (herself) and $12,000 in annual revenue to 800 agents and $4 billion a year. As part of the sale, she was awarded this corner office, a part-time schedule as a spokesperson and company chair, and the freedom to try new things. For a year, she threw herself into writing a memoir (If You Don't Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons on Your Pigtails),

but when the final chapter was written, she felt lost. The stacks of new business ideas, drafts of motivational speeches, charity literature, and memorabilia were spread about her office like so many possible new selves. When I asked why she'd sold the agency, she gave me a pragmatic answer: After three extraordinarily profitable years, it was a good time to cash in. I sensed a deeper reasoning though. She'd accomplished her goals for the business and couldn't see where else to take it. In our 20s and 30s, we search for our selves, and if we're lucky, we find our niche in the roles that bring out our best - (Continued on next

She sold her wildlysuccessful real estate

business and suddenly,for the first time in herlife, felt lost, muddled,

unsure of what to donext. JULIE MORGENSTERN

helps a directionlessdynamo get pastthe empty-desk

syndrome andsort out a new life.

Barbara Corcoran andher rescued poster

Barbara Corcoran's Second Act

mother, businesswoman, wife, and so on. But when those roles reach maturity in our 40s and 50s (kids leave, careers shift, marriages may end), we feel lost, scared, and unsure. We wonder, Was what I left behind my best expression of myself? Fortunately, Barbara had made enough money to be financially independent. But emotional independence, she discovered, is a different thing. One day she glanced in a company trash bin and saw the poster with her picture that had always hung in the reception area. This felt like a death, she said. She rescued the poster and put it on her office wall.

BARBARA'S INITIAL EFFORTS TO reinvent herself were jerky and frustrating. She threw herself wholeheartedly into each idea she came up with, only to discover that it wasn't what she wanted. Her first impulse was to become a real estate investor, renovating office spaces. But after purchasing one huge, vacant building, she felt such a profound loneliness that she dropped the venture. Next she decided to create a talent pool of women interested in job sharing. Three months later, she got distracted by the desire to start a school for dyslexic students (having struggled with dyslexia as a child.) She bought a million-dollar building to house the school - and then realized this was a 20-year commitment she wasn't ready to make. The building still sits empty.

Barbara grew angry with herself for being fumbling and weak. Before founding The Corcoran Group, she had careened through 22 jobs. Now she wondered whether her real estate success had been only a matter of being in the right place at the right time. She was gripped with fear that she'd sold the golden goose and would never again have anything solid and successful to call her own.

A TURNING POINT CAME IN 2004, when Barbara was asked to be the motivational speaker at the Corcoran Group's annual sales conference. Her plan was to entertain and uplift the audience. Instead she found herself describing how hard the transition had been for her - that she'd discovered she didn't know who she was, that every morning when she opened her closet, she didn't know what to wear. She empathized with the staffers who told her they missed her doting touch and who worried that the company had become too corporate. But then she reminded them that the agency had always welcomed change, and she recounted the risks they'd taken together, which had brought the fulfillment of unimaginable potential. As she energized the salespeople, she felt encouraged about her own future as well. Barbara realized that she didn't have to start from scratch. There was a wealth of outlets for the skills she'd acquired over the years: motivational speaker,

business leader, TV guest expert. The agency was one golden egg. She, Barbara, was the goose that produced the gold. She brainstormed a list of TV ideas, shot them off to her agent, and landed a spot as a regular contributor on a news show. She was ready to explore other avenues, too, but the mechanics were not in place. That's when she called me. As we dug into her papers, I asked about each, "Under what circumstances would you look for this information?" By the end of our second session, each document fell into one of three categories - TV segments, speeches, business ideas - and we divided her files into the time-sensitive and the evergreen. Although I didn't feel I had done much, she said the process of working together was like clearing the static in her brain. When she was running Corcoran, she'd always had people to think out loud with, but she'd told herself that at this stage of her life, she should be able to go it alone. Now she got it: She worked best with others. Two months later, Barbara called to tell me that she finally felt empowered in her office and was finding her voice as a TV expert. But, she said, she was still not quite fulfilled. I wondered aloud which fusion of talents and desires the agency had encompassed. Her answer came quickly: She loved the fact that she could birth a team. Her joy lay in helping people succeed in ways they'd never dreamed of. This touched a place deep inside her: the dyslexic student who worried she'd never amount to anything. I suggested that the TV gig was a good one - but I had a hunch she might still start that school or talent pool. For Barbara, the need for reinvention was a conscious choice. Others find a change in circumstances sneaks up on them. However it comes about for you, the challenge is not to create a completely new identity. It's to find fresh ways to express your whole, rich, complex self. You won't find the answers just sitting in your living room but out in the world interacting with people who can reflect back to you who you are and where your light shines brightest.

Julie Morgenstein's most recent book is Making Work Work (Fireside).

What's Next for You? When you're going through a transition: Ask yourself what skills, talents, and passions found their expression in the role you're leaving behind. Brainstorm other activities that would be good vehicles for your strengths. Balance introspection with action. Road test your ideas. Give yourself time. Reinvention after, say, a career change or divorce is a process that takes, on average, two years.

Second Act Continued...

Copyright 2005 by Oprah Magazine. Reprinted by permission.

Real Estate SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2005

BIG DEAL: A Gun, a Gallop and a Goodbye

By WILLIAM NEUMAN

BARBARA CORCORAN, one of the matriarchs of New York real estate, has never seemed like the type to ride off into the sunset. But that is more or less what she did at her going-away party at Chelsea Piers this month, when she got on a white horse and rode away. After waving goodbye to the hundreds of brokers who came to the sendoff, she rode the horse out of sight and dismounted at a waiting car.''It was such a foggy day, we couldn't see the sun,'' she said, when asked about the symbolism of her ride, which occurred an hour or two before the sun actually set. ''Who the heck knows, but that was the idea.''She said she paid $1,000 to rent the horse, although she rode it for only a few minutes.Ms. Corcoran, 56, started her com-pany, the Corcoran Group, in 1973 and sold it to the real estate conglomerate NRT, an arm of the Cendant Corpora-tion, in September 2001, for what she said was $66 million. She has stayed on in a reduced role as chairwoman but recently announced her full retire-ment from the company. Her last day will be Nov. 15, though her going-away party was held on Oct. 21.

Ms. Corcoran usually gives two big parties for her brokers each year and people are often asked to come in costume. This party had a cowboy theme and Ms. Corcoran went in what she called her ''Annie Oakley outfit'': buckskin miniskirt, gold cowboy boots, a fringed shirt, a gold sheriff's badge and a miniature toy pistol tucked under a red garter belt. She arrived on a rented fireboat, with streams of water shooting into the air.Ms. Corcoran, who has cut a wide swath across the real estate scene, said later that she forgot to prepare any remarks and burst into tears when the time came to make a speech.''And then finally I thought of some-thing to say and I just thanked every-body for making me rich and they seemed to like it,'' she recalled.Ms. Corcoran then raised some eyebrows when she told the brokers that if they were not treated well in her absence, ''my noncompete expires in 14 months and they could all come to work for me again.''But Ms. Corcoran said in an interview the next week that she was joking and that she had no intention of going back into the brokerage business. ''I'm not good at repeats,'' she said. ''I like fresh new things. I like to see what else I can do. It wouldn't be my style.''

Ms. Corcoran has started a new venture, a television production company, although she said it was too early to talk about any specific projects. This month, she and her husband, Bill Higgins, also adopted a baby girl, whom they named Kate.It has been a few years since Ms. Corcoran took an active role in the day-to-day manage-ment of her company, but her face, with its broad grin under a platinum pixie-cut, has remained the firm's signature image.Ms. Corcoran said that will change next month with her departure. ''You won't be seeing my face there,'' she said. ''It will seem like I disappeared into the sunset.''

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