Why Lori Greiner Of ‘Shark Tank’ Speaks Spanish: To Do Better Business
Viewers of a new episode of Shark Tank Sunday night may be in for a bit of a surprise. It turns out the “Queen of QVC,” Lori Greiner, speaks Spanish. She converses with an entrepreneur in his first language after guest shark Alex Rodriguez starts to do the same. Apparently, Greiner wasn’t about to let a language barrier get in the way of a potential deal.
So when and why did Greiner learn to speak Spanish? Well, it turns out that was a smart business decision as well. According to the website dedicated to local news in the Chattanooga, Tennessee, area, Nooga.com, she decided to pick up the language way back when she was making what would become her first successful product, the earring organizer.
She told the Mad, Bad and Dangerous conference in 2016 that relationship building was key to entrepreneurial success. After hiring a factory and its workers to mass produce her organizer, Greiner wanted to know how things were going. So she went straight to the factory floor. The women who were making her product all spoke Spanish, so she learned the language as well so she could converse with them and get to know them.
Years before Shark Tank success made her a household name, she learned the power of building relationships. It was those same women on the factory floor that risked their jobs to give her a heads up that some of the product was damaged. Instead of correcting the problem, their boss was ignoring it and simply letting the damaged product go through. The women worked out a system to mark the boxes with defective product with an “x” so Greiner could identify them.
Greiner told the conference she was eternally grateful for what the workers did for her by telling her what was going on.
“The amazing thing, the beautiful part, is that those women risked their jobs to protect me. That was huge. They trusted me. They cared about me. I would never betray them and they knew that. They not only protected me, but they really watched my product every single day. And when you’re in retail, you’re only as good as your product.”
Greiner brings that determination to stay on the ground with her investments to entrepreneurs she’s met through Shark Tank. She told CNBC in September 2017, that part of her daily routine is checking in with those who run the businesses in which she’s invested. Perhaps surprisingly, she said she’s not a morning person. She typically gets out of bed at about 9 a.m. but goes to bed at about 2 a.m. During Shark Tank filming days, however, she’s up at 4 a.m. and in bed at 11 p.m.
New episodes of Shark Tank air Sundays on ABC.
[Featured Image by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images]
