Negotiating to Resolve Business Problems

Dispute Resolution

Disputes between individuals, partners, or companies often pass an unfortunate tipping point after which the principals to the dispute can longer communicate and negotiate effectively with each other. A professional business negotiator is frequently the most efficient and cost-effective way to resolve such problems.

Combining decades of transaction experience with a calm professionalism, ASiQ is unusually skilled at developing creative win-win solutions crafted to at least meet the needs of the people in conflict if not all of the wants. This methodology is a hybrid of two parts business professionalism and one part mediation methodology.

Our clients have expressed gratitude and relief that they did not end up in arbitration or litigation—both of which lead too often to loss of transaction control, common sense, opportunities, and money, as well as producing outcomes in which everyone appears to lose except the attorneys.

Negotiating or Re-negotiating a Contract

In the same way that optimizing a company’s performance requires ‘getting the right people on the bus,’ so to optimize the outcome of a contract negotiation, a company CEO must place the right people at the table….. and the right people away from the table.

For example, when a small company sets out to negotiate a contract with a larger company, the negotiation table will too often have the CEO from the small company sitting across from a junior executive from the larger company. This asymmetry almost always works against the smaller company.

The larger company’s representative at the negotiating table rarely has the authority to make major decisions that the smaller company’s CEO does. The representative of the large company typically does have instructions or outcome guidelines from the senior executives to whom they report that may be unreasonable or unrealistic. Since the large company negotiator is equipped and empowered to get but not to give, the smaller company’s CEO is not negotiating with a peer.

Contracting an ASiQ professional temporarily on staff, many of our clients have had the benefit of preserving the CEO’s control of the outcome, creating a matchup of aligning an ASiQ contract employee who is expert in negotiation across the table from a person who is likely to also be expert, and preserving the CEO’s option of calling the larger company’s CEO peer-to-peer if an impasse occurs.  

Real Life Negotiation Lessons

Theorem: Direct communications from peer to peer have the best chance of resulting in the best compromises when deadlocks occur, whether at the negotiating table, or upstairs in the CEO's offices.

Corollary: When the large company negotiator is faced with an adversary who may advise his CEO to break a deadlock by conferring peer to peer with that negotiator’s CEO at the large company, the deadlock will almost always be resolved quickly at the negotiating table before that call is made.

Corollary: If the small company CEO is representing himself at the table, the large company CEO will either not take the call or, right or wrong, support his employee acting at the table.