“He doesn’t get it. He believes his business is worth $50 million when it’s highly unlikely any buyer will pay more than $25 million based on his financials. How can I help him reset his expectations without seeming too negative regarding the sale of a business he...
“It’s your turn,” he said. “I conceded on the close date and it’s time for you to move and extend the royalty term.” This “reciprocity” standard – it is “fair and reasonable” for you to do this for me because I did something like this for you in the past – can be...
I recently reached a dead-end in a negotiation largely involving one major price issue. I didn’t want to come down – and my counterpart wouldn’t go up. And I knew he had reached his end point, because he had already gone back to his boss twice for more, and we had a...
Filmmaker and Phoenix native Steven Spielberg was 13 when, as he tells it, a “local bully gave me nothing but grief all year long. He would knock me down on the grass, or hold my head in the drinking fountain, or push my face in the dirt and give me bloody noses when...
“How much authority should we give our front-line negotiators,” I was recently asked. “They constantly ask for more, but the more we give the more they use. On the other hand, they aren’t taken seriously if we don’t give them enough.” This is a challenging strategic...
You’re the CEO of a company employing a quarter of the city’s employees. Your company provides a significant portion of the city’s tax revenue but neither you nor your company is active in the community’s political affairs. Recently, you decided to expand your...
“We’re going to court,” she told me during a break in my negotiation seminar. “What else can we do? We really want to sell, and my brother-in-law’s `best offer’ for our share of the family business will only give us 10 percent of what it’s worth. Plus, the...
“How can we use our large size and power to get our best deal, yet still avoid alienating smaller companies with whom we want a future relationship? After all, we value our reputation and don’t want them to feel we’re just imposing our terms.” This question, posed by...
Longtime Wall Street lawyer James Freund, counsel in many of the 1980s corporate takeover battles, wrote in his book Smart Negotiating that he almost always wanted to make the first offer on price issues as it sets the “ballpark where the action will...
