The World's Best Negotiator Returns To The Contrarians

22:43So in the initial offer, you really want to put all the storytelling issues in that tell a story about how to my differentiator solve your problem. That's in the initial offer, along with every contentious issue and every tradeoff issue. You would never hold one of those in a bucket. It'll just blow up a deal when you add it in at the end. But in the bucket, you have some storytelling issues that you know would be valuable to them, but might not be in the initial offer. So I'll give you two examples. One in my work, a lot of times we will throw in consulting at the end. We want to do consulting.

23:16We are uniquely qualified to consult on deals. We do it every day. You might have been talking to me about doing a session, and I throw consulting in to make it go over the line and finish it. And it's something I want to do with you anyway. That's a bucket issue. A lot of times bucket issues come up in everyday negotiations too, though. When we were doing a deal with a house, a bucket issue that was there was something that allowed people to show off their work. So this is a very common bucket issue that I use. I use it with every contractor all the time. So we were putting in a pool and the bucket issue that I put in is that they could show off the quality of their work and have people tour through it.

24:01I use bucket issues like that all the time to like throw in and get it over the line and finish it. Can you tell one of my favorite, I've got a lot of favorite Vicky stories, but one of the favorite ones you told about this YPO thing was when you bought your house. I think Jackson and the guy didn't want to sell it to you. Can you just quickly go through that story? It's such a great story. So when I was buying a house and, and this story shows up in my book, but it shows up in my book, I'm disguised as Hawaii because, you know, I do have neighbors, right? And so I, it's disguised as Hawaii. So we'll talk about it as Hawaii.

24:32So in Hawaii, when someone was, was, was selling their home, I, I was helping someone who was buying it, which was me. And so I was helping someone and. So the vendor didn't know you were buying for yourself. They thought you were buying for someone else. No, they thought I was buying for me in the real, in the real world. Um, but I, I was in this situation where they had another, they had another person that was interested and the person that was interested was actually an investor and the investor, you know, brings a lot of money. Um, I didn't have a lot of money. They bring a lot of certainty.

25:05I needed to get a loan. Um, and I wanted to make sure that I could get a loan. I didn't even know what it took to get a loan on a second house. So like I had some uncertainty in my side. And the other thing that an investor brings is quickness, speed, right? I did not bring speed. I had not yet mentioned to my husband that we were thinking about buying a house. Like not just, I didn't mention the house. I hadn't mentioned the concept of buying a second house. Like that was not even in our discussion point, but I decided that we needed this house. And so I had like options. I had other houses, but I decided we wanted to do this, but I certainly didn't have speed on my side.

25:41So I wanted, I wanted to have, I wanted to do this deal and I wanted to make certain that I did it with more timing at a lower price point. And I wanted to have contingencies like an attorney approval contingency and an inspection contingency. And most importantly, a financing contingency, because I had no idea if I could get a loan on a second house. So I needed a lot and they had an investor that was interested, but I thought hard about what they wanted, what they needed. And the investor was paying more or you're paying the same? The investor was paying a lot. The investor was paying more than what I paid.

26:13In every respect, you're giving a worse offer. In every, well, in every respect from your perspective of what you just defined, but no, not from mine. Not from my perspective. I thought it was giving a much better offer because what I knew is that they were building another home in the same neighborhood and they were building a magnificent home. It was absolutely spectacularly gorgeous. And I knew that I would not do what an investor might do. An investor might rent the house, right? An investor might have people come in and out of the house. And I wasn't going to do that ever. I am a germ-phobe.

26:47I would never rent my house. Like, nobody would ever be in my house except for me. I'm an absolute germ-phobe. I carry around wipes all the time. I should have stock and wet ones. And so the reality is I was never going to let anyone rent. And I added that into the mix, that I could certainly pay a higher price if I was, you know, able to make it like an Airbnb and just rent it out every day. Or I could limit the amount of times I would rent it and I would charge like, I would pay a middle amount, but I would, I would absolutely be willing to guarantee him that I would never rent it. And I made that all about him, about how it would decimate the property value in the neighborhood if there were rentals right across from his brand new, beautiful home.

27:28And so I made that about the story. And I think that that is key, is making it about the other side. And I threw in some extra issues at the end as bucket issues. What was the bucket issue? The bucket issue was a guarantee on that, that I would never do it. So I had put it into the initial offer as some way that I would not do it. But then I offered to guarantee it in writing that I would never do it. Did he know that he cared about that issue before you raised it? I don't know that he knew he cared about it. But what I know he did care about was the value of his new home. There's no doubt that he cared about that.

28:00And so sometimes that's a really good question. When you're doing this, you don't have to be sure that you know what matters to them. You can make a reasonable assumption of a guess and you can make it about the other side. And then you get feedback from them if they don't care about that or if they do care about that. And I think that that is the key is to figure that out. Right. The greatest, I mean, the greatest weapon of all is coming up with a solution where it's set somewhere below kind of the conscious threshold of the counterparty. And all of a sudden it puts you in this unique position because you've introduced this issue that makes them feel very safe or good about something that every other party has ignored or hasn't addressed.

28:43I find that to be very advantageous. I agree. And I'll use another example that's another bucket issue example, because I can tell you like this idea of the bucket issue. So another house buying, house buying way long ago in my life when I had like no money and we were moving from Ithaca, New York where I could afford a beautiful home to Chicago where like the same house that would be in Ithaca on a lakefront with outstanding views of the water. I literally could not even afford to buy a dilapidated ranch that wouldn't pass inspection in Chicago. Like it was a huge price challenge. And so we were looking at lots of houses.

29:19We looked at 150 houses before we made an offer. We had to look at a lot of houses to find options. We had three different options, but we were looking at this one house and we had gone back and forth many, many times. And it was a house that was being built by a small custom builder. It was still at spec level so we could make changes. And it was one of the three houses we were investigating. And we had come to this situation where I felt like we were at risk. I felt like it was possible that we were going to come to an impasse. And he was clearly losing patience with me. We had gone back and forth many times.

29:53I was using multiple offers. He was clearly like, he was ready to say, take it or leave it. And I was nervous because I'd used up my bucket issues. Like I had things in my bucket, but I put them into the deal throughout to keep him moving and keep bringing down the temperature when he was getting warm and hot. And so I had run out of bucket issues. This was absolutely the builder himself. This was the builder. It was being done through an agent, but I was definitely communicating with the builder. So the builder then, um, he was getting irritated and I could tell it and we had nothing left in the bucket.

30:26And then one day he said to me, Vicky, um, could we take photos of the house if you bought it? And I was like, what would you do with the photos? And I always say, never let an issue remain unexplored, like figure out why do they want that? What's in it for them? Why do they need it? And so he said, well, you know, I'm a small custom builder. I sell everything that I build. So I would love to have photos so that I could show off the quality of my work. So that gave me this idea. So the next day I said to him, you know, I'm wondering if you have some houses I could walk through because you said something yesterday that really struck me, which is you said you like to show off the quality of your work.

31:02You clearly see the quality of your work, but I haven't been able to walk through anything. You said you had nothing you're currently building and I've been able to see the quality. Can I walk through some of your places? I think that would narrow our gap. And he said, Vicki, I've got nothing to show you. I'm a small custom builder. I sell everything that I build. I said, well, what about something you've sold in the past? Maybe I could walk through. He said, I gave you those addresses. Didn't you drive by? I said, drive by. I drove by. I sat outside. I waited for dark. I looked in the windows.

31:31It's lucky I wasn't arrested for stocking. But I can't see the quality of your workmanship from looking in. Like you say, it's about your woodworking craftsmanship. I can't see that from looking in. I want to like feel your banisters. I want to walk down the stairs. I want to open the cupboards. Do you have something to show me? And he said, I don't. I mean, that would be really valuable to me, but I don't have anything like that. I'm a small custom builder and I sell everything. Well, that gave me the idea, right? That's the bucket issue. The bucket issue is going to be showing off my house. And so I could have put it in that day, but I didn't know whether we could close it.

32:06And I always say, you've got to have a closing bucket issue. So this is like a really good one that's going to finish it and take it over the line. And so I held it. And I didn't have to hold it for long because the very next day he lost his temper. And he said, take it or leave it with a whole bunch of words that my mommy said I'm never allowed to say. So I'm not going to say them on this podcast. But it was clear he was finished, like with me, with our family, with everything he was done. And that was when I threw it in. And I said, you know, I was thinking about how horribly challenging it has to be for you as a small custom builder.

32:36The price of land is ridiculous. You need a model house. You can't afford to have a model house in this crazy market. You're losing deals to your competitors who have model homes because they're high-scale builders, but they might not even have the same workmanship as you. Why don't you use my house as your model? And then I offered three options where he could show it off different amounts of times. You know, one at 12 times across the next two years, one at eight times, one at four times across the next two years. or another option, which is no ability to show the house and no photos, right?

33:10My husband hated this offer. He hated it. He was like, you're going to let people walk through our house and see all of our valuables? But I pointed out what was true. We had none, not a single thing. You couldn't do this, Adir. You have too many valuables. I could do this. I have no valuables. I had nothing. I had nothing. And at that point in my life, we literally had nothing at all. So I had nothing to worry about. You know, the price you paid for that is it turned you into a germaphobe. That's why people can't go into your house now. You know, I was going to say this. You know who's very good at bucket issues is venture capital.

33:42So venture capital knows that founders, they care about headline valuations. They absolutely do. And venture capitalists, they are smart enough to know headline valuations is not high on their list of care. What they care about is terms predominantly and preference shares. I think they use that really well. I was going to ask you this question. I just want to say one thing on that. They absolutely do do that. And one of the things I would say is they often will put in contingencies and the contingencies are actually, you know, going to diminish that headline value share in big ways, right? Well, they do diminish it, right?

34:16And that's going to really take that down. But founders care about the headline number.

34:31with your house example you effectively rented your house back to him in really tiny little increments so he essentially gave you a discount and you paid back that discount with implied rental actually he took the option without the ability to show off the house oh really which told me he was at his bottom line. He had said, this is ridiculous. I'm losing money on this deal. Like I cannot do it. That's a great signal. So he took it without the ability to show the house, which I knew was valuable to him. So that was a good sign that we had gotten there. And I did that deal. You obviously had this was a long process of swearing at you.

35:05How much did you value the fact that he was still speaking to you? So if he had another buyer, if Adir was going to buy the house, he just sold to Adir. So obviously there was no other real offer. He had no other BATNA, let's say. alternative. How much do you factor that in? The fact that someone's still talking. I absolutely factor that in. So like, that's about understanding the weakness of the other side's alternatives. And you know, Adam, because I talk all the time about understanding the weakness of the other side's alternatives gives you your goal in the negotiation. So you do want to read into that.

35:37Like you absolutely want to think about the weakness of their options upfront, but update on it as you watch the process unfold. Because if they're still talking to you and you know you're frustrating them you know they have weak alternatives right so you you learn as you go and gain information that helps you to update your goal a long time ago i did a deal i'm gonna be very vague about this but like i did something and he didn't let me be vague no i'm gonna be very i'm gonna be very vague and um and so i was very unpopular with this particular organization this could be like a number of people it could There's infinite options.

36:13No one knows who this company is. And you would know who this organisation or company is. Like they're big and they're powerful and they, I think, were quite keen to hurt me for a while. Not physically but, you know. And then I really wanted to do this deal with them. And at one point they called me into like their boardroom and the most senior people in the company sat around the board table, the most senior people, and they basically just abused me for 25 or 30 minutes abused. Like we're going to crush you. We're going to whatever. And I just thought to myself, I'm so happy about this because like these people are all spent, there's like a lot of time being spent of the most senior people.

36:50I'm definitely going to get a deal done here. 100%. That is exactly what I would have thought if I were you. When they bring you in and they're all putting their time in, you know they want this deal. Or they wouldn't have put the time in. They would have just not done the deal. So like that's about updating as you go about the weakness of the other side's alternatives. It's not a static. BATNA is not static. It's dynamic. Their alternatives change over time, and you want to update all the time on the weakness of their options. Was there a small possibility they just really didn't like our dear at the time?

37:20No, they would not have wasted their time on that. No, no, no. Their time is way too valuable for that. So you said something I want to come back to because it's a tricky problem. So you'd have these axes of how much things mean to you in the counterparty, and the top right quadrant is the danger quadrant. and so lots of organisations, I think about political negotiations, like the thing I think about is back in the 90s when there was this Oslo agreements between Israel and the Palestinians, they had this idea which is we're going to leave status of Jerusalem to the end. It's the most contentious issue and the argument was let's build a relationship and trust between the parties.

37:59Obviously it didn't happen but that was a particular approach and so what do you think about that approach? It's a flawed approach. It's flawed, right? It's a flawed approach. No, it's absolutely a flawed approach, is that a lot of times, though, people do what you just said. They leave contentious issues until the end because they're so hard and they don't want to damage the relationship. So they think, we'll just save them and we'll settle other things. We'll create a spirit of cooperation and then we'll settle that hard thing. And it's just completely the wrong way to do it. You always want to think package deals, package deals, package deals.

38:35You've got to use the storytelling issues to get what you want on the contentious and trade-off issues. And if you've already put everything in the storytelling quadrant, and I often will refer to it as in a vault, and I've like handed it all to you and you're holding it, and now you've got the vault, you've got the issues, you've got the key. And then what's going to happen now when we go to talk about this contentious issue? It's like you're going to take a hammer on and hammer me over the head over it, right? I mean, it's impossible for me to get that because now I've lost everything and it's all in your vault right now.

39:05The way I feel about that kind of situation is, you know, people talk about low-hanging fruit. So I just think about a tree with lots of fruit. And so it requires no effort to pick the low-hanging fruit. So then at the end, if you have to give up all the fruit, you don't really care. It was all easy to pick. But if you had to climb to the top of the tree to get the best fruit and cut yourself and whatever else, and it took a lot of time, you don't want to give up that fruit. And, Adir, if we just think about that matrix one more time, if you think about it, just because it's easy for me to offer that doesn't mean it's not valuable to them.

39:38And so a lot of times people will go in and they'll settle the easy issues to themselves. This is very egocentric, right? This is that egocentric bias. They settle what's easy to them. And they don't hold on to the things that might be really, really valuable to you that are easy for me to provide. Absolutely. And I want to put those in. But there's an asymmetry to it. Exactly. But I mostly think about what really builds relationships, what really creates a situation of loss aversion. And so low-hanging fruit agreements, there's no loss aversion. Right, right. But if you sit down and hammer out something that was very painful for both parties and you figure out a way to reach agreement on that, nobody wants to go through that and then give it all up and walk away from the table.

40:20That to me is real loss aversion in a deal. Right, no, absolutely. And, you know, I love that you used that word last year. I knew that you would love me using that word. I think that's brilliant. And I do use that all the time when I work with my clients on negotiation. So one of the things that we often talk about is going to the table with three options. And Adam uses three options. You use three options a lot, don't you? So they're called multiple equivalent simultaneous offers. But I just think about them as going to the table with multiple options. And when I've been helping clients to create these recently, I've been really stressing this idea that probably the first option should be an option that includes some kind of bet on your differentiator solving the problem that they have.

41:04Like some kind of bet in some way to showcase I've got this big, unique differentiator that's going to solve your problem, and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is and bet on that. Put that in A. The B option is often a very similar option to A, but without the bet, with what I would call like more predictable, more expected pricing. And the C option then pulls something out of it to create that loss. So often when people go in, they don't showcase their differentiator. They don't talk about how their differentiator will solve their problem. They don't show confidence that it will. And I think that's a very key way to structure it that uses exactly what you're talking about around losses to make it more painful to see what you would be giving up if you didn't work with us.

41:46And so when we do this, we often find that that B option is the one that's selected. You usually put that bet in. If you don't want to end up with bets, you just price bets really high. You don't end up with the bet. But what you end up showing is the confidence that you have that you're willing to bet on it. And I always say you bring that same confidence to B and C, you're going to solve that challenge for them, and then you see what you're losing with that C option as you take some of those pieces away. And that is using loss aversion in the negotiation itself. So this is my other political question.

42:17Did you notice how I avoided the political point? That is absolutely going to be my habit. I'm trying not to get into the politics of the – because a lot of politics involves negotiation, and you don't have to get caught in the politics of it to think about the negotiation side of it. And so at the moment, like, there's some challenges going on in the world with the US and Iran, for example. And so we don't have to get into the politics of the US, but what we have at the moment, I'll give you like a hypothesis. You tell me if you agree or not. So all we have is a Western country that behaves in particular ways that Western countries behave, predominantly putting the emotion aside.

42:52One way or another, they generally tend to come to rational ways of thinking about things. And a country that has a different set of values and maybe has an ideological way of thinking. And my view is that today Iran is not ready to do a deal. They have not been put in a position where they feel they have to do a deal to get their best possible outcome, i.e. the BATNA of doing a deal is actually better than the outcome of doing a deal. And so, I mean, to take that one step further, I'm going to ask a particular question. But I would say really either the US is going to accept a loss or they're going to have to ratchet things up so that Iran really is under pressure.

43:33And so my question is not should they do that. It is you must confront situations where your side wants to do a deal and the other side is just not yet ready to do a deal. And so what do you do in that situation? So I think that your observation of that idea reflects your experience as an entrepreneur, which is the smartest negotiators recognize that they should always evaluate, does the other side actually want to do a deal? Many more novice negotiators than you would actually approach every negotiation thinking the other side wants to do a deal. And that is absolutely not true. Sometimes people don't want to do a deal because they actually want to do some other deal and they're trying to distract you.

44:17So they go do the other deal while you're not paying attention. That is absolutely a real thing. Or they just want to play for time, right? All the time. If you want to play for time, running people around in circles in a pretend negotiation is a great way to buy time. It absolutely is. And sometimes in partnership situations, people will put out that they want to do this partnership when they're really trying to do this other deal over here. And it is completely distracting that potential partner and keeping them away from doing this other deal that I want to go do. So you have to hypothesize on that.

44:50In other times, I think people don't want to do a deal because they actually want to make you look bad. And the more visibility there is around the deal with the hypothesis that I don't actually want to get to one, it creates a forum where you could end up looking really bad because people always assume that the other side wants to do a deal. And that is a very false assumption and a very dangerous assumption. So when you say that, I was going to ask you about your business, right? So would you ever say to Adam when he was trying to do a deal with a supplier, for example, a hotel, you know what?

45:22They don't, at the moment, you give them all of this value. They don't need to do a deal with you. They're getting all of this value. Turn them off. They'll do a deal once you've turned them off. You need to make them feel what it's like where a deal becomes a better option than the alternative. So I think about Adam's business more with a view of long-term relationship in that situation. So I, and reputation of luxury escapes. So I might not suggest exactly that, but I would suggest that you don't throw a whole bunch of things in and give them to them as all trials without them doing a deal because now they're getting everything and they don't appreciate all that you're doing.

46:02I mean, think about how many times people go into negotiations and they like give things away to show off what they're capable of doing. And then what people do is they devalue all those things that you're offering. I think consulting firms do that all the time. They do a lot of free work to show off what they're capable of doing. And then they are ending up with people who don't value the work that they do. Adam, that's why we never do it for free. Just in case you were wondering. I guess in our situation, we have a marketplace business in our legacy, our exclusives business. And everybody wants to be on marketplace because the same as booking.com and you're getting it, it's a lower cost for them.

46:38But we obviously want people to do both. So we're happy happy on marketplace, but we want you to do the exclusive deal as well, which is a deeper discount. We sell a lot more and want more quickly. And there's absolutely time to all turn people off marketplace if they won't do a flash deal. And that's partly also out of fairness to our other partners who are willing to do it. And I think that is very appropriate because, because you're putting them on and giving them all this visibility on a marketplace that is incredibly valuable because you have so many viewers. So taking them off of marketplace, if they're not your partner is not only reasonable, it's rational.

47:08Because otherwise you're putting people on who are not your partners. And that devalues the partnership that other people have. They're free riding, essentially. They are free riding. So I think that makes sense. But just turning them off to create the need to do a deal, I think is more of a relationship burner. But doing that, to me, seems like a very rational thing. Do you agree that you can't do a great deal unless you're prepared to lose the deal? I think the willingness to walk away is key. But I would actually argue that too many people focus on the idea of being willing to walk away. And what they miss, and I think it's the biggest miss, is they miss thinking about the weakness of the other side's alternatives and setting ambitious goals.

47:47So in an egocentric way, again, this egocentric bias is really a nasty bias, right? It gets me to focus on myself. I don't think about differentiating. I don't put the right issues on the table. But the other thing I don't do is I don't set ambitious goals because I'm not thinking about the weakness of their options. I'm thinking about my own reservation point. And I think that's really dangerous. So I think you have to have a willingness to walk, but I don't want you to focus on that reservation point. I want you to focus on your goal instead. Do you like being personally, like in terms of personal enjoyment, do you prefer being the weaker party or the stronger party in a negotiation?

48:21I mean, clearly I like to be strong. I like to be strong. But I think that power is flexible. I don't think it's fixed. And I think that there are ways to increase your power based on information and based on adding more issues into the mix, I actually think it changes power. And so I would argue that if I am in the weaker position, I will try to change that position before I negotiate. I always say, I don't think you're not good at negotiating if you can do a deal where the other party has no option, but to do it or they, you know, like the key to negotiating is to be in a position where the other party feels that you're in the weak on the weakest side of it and still be able to walk away with the good outcome?

49:02A hundred percent. So, Adir, what you just said is a hundred percent true, and I say this all the time. The measure of a negotiator is not someone who has all the power and can get what they want. It's somebody who can negotiate when they have lower power. That's where you see do they have good strategy. You cannot assess strategy from someone who is only in a high-power role. That's disruptor versus incumbent in a way. So if you're a startup, you're counter-positioning to an incumbent. Right. You're almost always the weaker party. You are weaker, but you often have a lot of what the other side needs that's allowing you to be the disruptor.

49:36Yeah, I agree. When you work with McDonald's or the Google's without specific instances, are you – obviously you work with sales teams around the world, but you also sit with CEOs and head of strategy and in negotiations. How does that play out? What's your role in that? So it depends in different companies, and everything is confidential. But in different companies, in different situations, you know sometimes they are thinking about a new market that they want to move into or they're thinking about a launch of a new product and we often strategize on like the launch plan or the market plan but sometimes they're really concerned about their sales team and you know the reality is I mean everyone needs to generate revenue and a big cost is if your people are not generating revenue based on ambitious goals because that's going to just mark down your bottom line so a lot of times we also might think about that at the highest level and then break that down into how can we help their company to improve or drive that.

50:33How cultural, how are the cultural differences between saying Australia, US, UK, you imagine you work in Europe, who are the best negotiators? Americans have this great reputation of being great negotiators. Is that true? Are Europeans weak? Is that meme sort of a real thing? So I think that there's a few dimensions on that. So the first one is what Americans are is very direct. We're not the most direct in the world. You know, people in Amsterdam are more direct than people in New York. I personally get with Germans, by the way. Germans are pretty direct. Pretty direct, right? So, like, there's big information exchange differences across the globe.

51:09And so Americans will very directly ask for what they want, and they will directly answer questions. And as you move, like, even north from the U.S. to Canada, you see a big difference. They're far less direct than U.S. people are. As you move across to England, they're even less direct. When we go to Asia, they're less direct. So that's one dimension. It's like how direct are we when we exchange information? Another big difference, though, is how much do we perceive things to be negotiable? So when you look at some countries where negotiation is really common in everyday life, they perceive everything.

51:45India or Israel, right? Where things are all negotiable. They perceive there to be lots and lots of opportunity to negotiate. That's where a place like Germany, although direct, doesn't perceive as much to be negotiable. They think of it as more fixed, more given. In business transactions, they see deals similarly. But in everyday life, they see things as much more fixed. So that's another cross-cultural difference is sort of what could be negotiated. But I think one of the reasons that I like multiple offers so much is that they actually bridge those cross-cultural differences. So when I go in with multiple options, I have a great way in an indirect culture to figure out what's important to you without you ever answering a direct question.

52:26I think that's a great – And I have a great way of showing flexibility. It is multiple offers. You know, I said to you, like, I took a lot of things out of the last time we caught up. I think multiple offers is one of the things I'll take about this. I like that because when I've got a business and you're pricing stuff on a website – You have a SaaS – you've had SaaS businesses, right? Like, you do it already without realizing. Yeah, we play all the games called behavioral economics, like have the starting price, then have a second price that makes the lowest price look terrible, then have a jump that's quite big but put some essential feature that some part of them are.

52:57Like we know all these games, right? Right, right. And so – but I've never thought about it in face-to-face negotiations before these kind of multiple offers for an opportunity. You should get my book, Adir, and read Chapter 7. I didn't even know you had a book until now. Chapter 7. It is – you know what it is now? When did you write this book? It is now a national bestseller in the US. Well, that's good. It's called Negotiate Without Fear. Chapter 7 is the chapter for you. We'll put this in the show notes. It came out in 2021. Why you didn't talk about this last time you were on the podcast? I think we did talk about it.

53:26I would have bought the book. He loves books. He would have bought the book. I will send you a book, Adir. I will send you my book. I was getting there, Avent. You think that you're the other one who could negotiate. I know. I know you're a negotiator, Adir. I'll send you that book. I'll send you that book. I think every Luxury Escapes employee almost has one of these books, or whatever reason, it's a bestseller. Yeah, well, we've turned it into a bestseller in Australia as well. We'll put it in the show notes for sure. You'll be able to jump on. It's for, what,$30 or whatever it costs. I don't think you're going to get many thousands, 1 ,000 and 1 ,000.

53:54My favourite story, after I saw Vicky and the YPO thing, I was buying my first house. Obviously, a property bear refused to buy a house until I was like 38. And I was buying a house and the owner – I'll make up these numbers. They're not accurate, but for argument's sake. Let's say the owner wanted$3 million and went to auction, passed in. So we have a lot of auctions here in Melbourne. Melbourne's the auction capital of the world. Now the property market's dead because the government stuffed it, but we were the auction capital of the world. And it passed in at$3 million, and then they wanted$2.5.

54:21They realised$3 was too much. They asked for$2.5. And I didn't want to pay$2.5. I'm a property bear. I think it was going to drop. I went and offered, and I thought, I'm happy to pay$2. But if I offer$2, they're probably not going to accept$2. So this is your sort of anchoring point. And it's such a round number, right, too. It's a terrible number. Well, I offered a somewhat round number. I said, I'll give you$1.5. To a bit like your point. I never expected a million years for them to accept 1.5. I thought if I offer two, they're going to go for 2.25 or whatever. And they went straight to two.

54:49And it was done in like a problem. Very fast. Very fast, right. I hate round numbers, by the way. I just want to point this out. When I say round numbers in a spreadsheet, I know that they're a lie. When someone pitches me a round number in a negotiation, I know that that's not their number. Like I think round numbers are the biggest tell of dishonesty in my opinion. How many people do you have on your team at Catapult? I try to have no people reporting to me whatsoever in life. No, I mean in the company. In the company. A thousand maybe? A thousand? A thousand? I'll send you 1 ,015 copies. Will you?

55:20After. No, you can buy those from me. Yeah. After I send you my free one for you to do. I thought you were going to. 1 ,015. I will. Well, I'm definitely going to recommend you into Catapult. I know what Catapult should use. But I can't. Hang on. Should we be on the corner? I can't believe this just passed unnoticed. Yeah. I just went on a rant about round numbers. You said how many people in the company? I said 1 ,000. and you let that go? No, I didn't let it go, Adir. It's definitely not 1 ,000. No, I didn't let it go, Adir. I didn't let it go. I told you that I was going to give you 1 ,015.

55:46Okay, that's very good. That's right. I was a bit slow to pick up. No, no. Exactly. Thanks for your time today, Adir. That was really fantastic. I mean, we really enjoyed that. That was amazing, Vicky. We love having you on. This is for, not just for our, we have a lot of CEOs and VCs and PE guys and girls who listen to the show, but there's a lot of people who aren't necessarily. we have teachers and small business owners and trades people and they get a huge amount from just for the lessons you've been able to teach. If you're a tradie going to clients charging a thousand bucks, you couldn't sit and charge for 1 ,500 bucks.

56:18That can be game changing to your business. It's not just the McDonald's and the Googles who can benefit from what you say. 100%. And you know, Adam, I have to tell you, like one of my favorite things to do is when I run into people that are in everyday roles and they take one negotiation tip and they can use it and it impacts their life, that's a huge win. And everybody who's listening can take this into their personal life as well as their professional life. But I do believe it's important to see the opportunity to negotiate and have the confidence to negotiate. And when you're using the right strategies, you have a lot of confidence and you don't have to have any fear.

56:53And that's why my book is called Negotiate Without Fear, because I want to take the fear out of negotiation for everyday people as well as for senior executives. We could have had you on for 10 hours, but we have to wrap it up now. But that was amazing. We'll get back to our team downstairs who are waiting for you, but that was incredible as always. Thank you so much for your time and thanks for inviting me. It was a blast to be on your podcast. We love having you on. Thank you.