Living The Red Life - The Art of Negotiation

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

Negotiation is a skill that everyone should possess. Some would say it's an art. Rudy Mawer believes that being able to negotiate is as important as being able to communicate. It's a key part of life that will make you better in your business and personal life. Rudy has the skill of negotiation hardwired into his mindset, from being a child and asking for more from his parents, to buying and selling at school. And he still negotiates successfully in business every day. So he's well positioned to advise us on how we can overcome that uncomfortable feeling we get when we are asked to persuade someone about seeing things from another point of view. Negotiation can lead to new perspectives. It can mean that you bring in better staff to your business and that you have more harmony on the home front. Join the Man in Red as he lays it down for us: negotiation is indeed an art, and by harnessing its power, we can become better in business. Let's crush it. "It's going to give you this better structure in your life by simply unlocking this one skill." ~ Rudy MawerThe first 1000 to click here and send the promo code from the podcast can claim one of my courses for FREE!  - https://m.me/rudymawerlife In This Episode:Understanding negotiation as a key part of persuasionWhy is negotiation uncomfortable for us? Appreciating FBI negotiations and the art of de-escalating situations What is up for grabs when you negotiate? Costs and payment termsNegotiating trade exchanges Real-life examples of negotiation from Rudy's workplaceConnect with Rudy Mawer:LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/rudymawer/Instagram - www.instagram.com/rudymawerlifeFacebook - www.facebook.com/rudymawerlifeTwitter - www.twitter.com/rudymawer

You've got to learn negotiation is possible everywhere. Negotiation is going to get you a better life. It's going to get you a happier life. It's going to get you a more lucrative business. It's going to get you a better structure in your business. If you're an employee, it's going to get you into better opportunities, better promotions, better pay. My name is Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast,

and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life. What's up guys? Welcome back to another show. Today I am going to talk to you about the art of negotiation. I believe that learning negotiations is a skill that should be taught in school. It's a skill everyone should possess. It's a skill I'm going to hammer into my children or future children one day, because I really believe being able to negotiate and work through situations is like communication. It's a key part of life. It's going to make you better in your job. It's going to make you better in your marriage. It's going to make you better with your children and your family. It's going to make you a better communicator. And negotiations is the ability to get your point across and keep

someone engaged and ultimately get your own will. And you might go, well, Rudy, why would I want to learn that? Negotiations sound bad. It sounds like a business thing. It's trying to like get the best deal. But you've got to realize in life, if you want to be happy and successful, you've got to be able to persuade people. And negotiations is a massive part of the whole or your point of view. And being able to persuade someone is going to allow you to get more productivity out of your staff. Being able to persuade someone is the ability to have people see different perspectives. It's a valuable skill. Just like negotiation is the ability to get what you want in life. And if you want to be happy and successful, then you're going to want to be able to get what you want in life. And if you want to be happy and successful, then you're going to want to be able to get what you want in life. If you go through life never getting what you want,

then you're not going to be that happy, right? So negotiations is a key part of success. It's important for your own happiness. It's 100% needed if you want to be successful in business. It's needed if you're maybe in a nine to five and you want a better salary, you want to earn more, you want to have a little more money coming in because you negotiated with your boss so you can feed your family, right? Negotiations isn't bad. The problem is for most of you, it's uncomfortable. For some reason, I grew up, I love debating, I love

negotiating, I love kind of pushing different perspectives around and arguing, you know, in a healthy way. I would sometimes argue pros and cons with people just to see how they engaged and reacted, right? And I was always super good at negotiating deals, whether it was like deals with my dad or my parents to give me a little more pocket money. It was deals in school to buy and sell stuff. And obviously, eventually, I got into sales. You know, I was selling as a personal trainer at 17, and I was constantly negotiating with clients, right? And they were negotiating with me, and I had to be the better negotiator, hopefully,

to land a better deal. Now, negotiations has made me millions of dollars, negotiating business structures, business deals, equity partnerships, negotiating salaries, negotiating rates with vendors. It's a massive skill needed in business. If you're not good at negotiating, then you're going to get ripped off. You're going to pay way more. You're going to have less margins. You're going to get worse people because you can't negotiate the good people to take your position. Good people are looking for jobs and they're getting lots of different job offers. Well, if you can negotiate with them to come and work for you, i.e. persuade, you're going to get better people. If you can't

negotiate with your spouse, then you're going to constantly either get overran and be unhappy and think it's a one-way street, or you're going to get in a bunch of arguments because you don't know how to handle situations, right? If you look at people like Chris Voss, a famous FBI negotiator, and if you look at, you know, FBI negotiators, for example, they're often there to de-escalate situations, right? If you look at what real negotiation is, it's the de-escalation. Everyone says that when you say negotiation, when I started this episode, most of you probably thought about trying to negotiate a sale, right? A business deal. But that just isn't what negotiations is. It's a lot more than that,

right? And a lot of it is de-escalation too, negotiating people out of a bad mindset, a bad spot, or if they're on a downward spiral, such as the police and the FBI, right? They're negotiating people, criminals, out of doing something bad or stupid. So it's a massive part of life. You need to master it. You need to practice it. It's kind of like sales that you're going to get better over time. One thing I used to do in my early 20s and when I was, you know, 17, 18, 19, is if I was ever on vacation, you know, all the flea markets and the people selling, you know, merchandise or swag or souvenirs, I would always negotiate. And even if it was like $5, $10, and it wasn't because I needed to save $2, it's because I really wanted to get better at it.

I enjoyed it. It was an art, right? And now even when I'm speaking with vendors and people, I always negotiate, even if I don't need to. And sometimes I actually, you know, if they're a small business, tiny, and they need the money and I don't, I'll often negotiate them and go, hey, by the way, it's fine, I'm going to pay the full amount. But I still go through the process, because I think it's a super valuable process. It's a skill. And it's something you want to keep sharpening,

like sales. And it's something you also want to teach your staff. So one thing I learned, Ty Lopez was really big on this when I was partners with him. And he really ingrained this in me is like really pushing your staff to negotiate. And you don't really think about that because you're good at it. But your staff, especially they just they don't think they have the power to you don't empower, you know, as a boss, you've not empowered them. And they obviously it's not their money. So they care a little less generally. Right. So one thing that we started to do a lot more is now whenever we get contracts, we get vendors, we get agencies working with us. I always say I if they come to me with a price, I say, has this been negotiated or not? Yes or no. If they say no, I say, okay, go back, negotiate,

and let me know where you get to. Always, always. Because again, it's like me training that skill in my staff, right? And that core principle and that belief that I want in my company. So I really encourage you to do the same, right? Whenever you're doing anything price-related, negotiate, everyone, you've got to learn in business, right? If you're speaking to an agency now, a vendor now, you're buying a house, a car, whatever you're doing, they're not ever going to give you their lowest price to start, like never, right? Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. Before we go into the rest of this episode, I'm going to interrupt abruptly and just ask you one big favor.

I hope you're getting a ton of value, a ton of knowledge. I hope you're getting some breakthroughs from myself and the guests. And I want one thing in return. What I would love is for you to subscribe and leave a review. The reviews and the subscription grows the podcast. It allows me to bring you even better guests.

It allows me to invest even more time and money into this podcast to bring you the latest and greatest, the best entrepreneurs from around the world that are crushing life, crushing their business, and giving you all the tools, the mindset hacks, the knowledge, and the environment you need to be successful. So do me a favor, if you've got any amount of value

from today's episode so far, or any previous episode, or any of the content I've done, it would mean the world to me. If you hit a five star review, give us your feedback on the show, the episodes and subscribe and download. Plus, if you do that and send me a screenshot on Instagram at Rudy Moore Life, I will send you a bunch of my free training, marketing courses, sales courses worth four hundred and ninety nine dollars. Yes, five hundred dollars worth of courses for a simple 30 second review. It would mean the world to me. Send me that screenshot. I would love for you to leave that review and I would appreciate it very, very much so we can keep growing this show and make it awesome. So let's get back into the episode. I appreciate you guys and let's dive back in. So if you go in and and you they tell you a price and you

go, okay, and then you just move forward with your life, you've literally paid over what they would have sold it for, because they know some people like me are going to go and negotiate. So everyone has a higher price to start. And if you just go along with it and go, okay, interesting, right, you're never gonna you're always overpaying. So you've got to try and always negotiate. And one thing is obviously you can negotiate lowering the cost, right? That's the obvious one that we all go to. And I like that one.

But sometimes there's even bigger picture ideas like negotiating payment terms at the very least. It's easier for your company to pay 10 grand a month for five months than 50k in one go because that extra 40k you could invest in your business the next three months or whatever or even just this month, spend it on ads, make 60k, so you make 20k back and boom. Now you use that leverage, that money, which is a whole separate conversation we can have another day, but you now leverage that money, which is a whole separate conversation we can have another day, but you now leverage that money to make money and now you've saved $20,000 because that original money, if you didn't negotiate, would have been dead money, right? So always negotiate price, always

negotiate payment terms, always, right? And one thing I like to do a lot of is negotiating trade services, swaps, deals. So if there's anything synergistic where you do something, they do something. Testimonials. Right. There's always stuff people want. So if someone's, you know, offering you a service and you go, well, sure, I would like to do this service, but I see you don't have any testimonials on your website. I would love for you to do the first month for free. And if it's good, I'll repost it and share it. And I'll also give you a great testimonial you can use for life that could make you thousands of dollars, right? Easy way that you can now negotiate a free month, try the service. Their win is they get free exposure. They get referrals from you, which hopefully you can

honor. And they obviously get testimonial they can use, right? If it's a fair trade, right? Say it's a, you know, say you're a personal trainer and you're going for physical therapy, right? When I was a personal trainer at 20 years old, I did not want to spend $100 to get physical therapy, but I played a lot of sport, I did triathlon running, I had injury, you know, wear and tear, right? I know I needed physical therapy. So I became friends with one of the physical therapists in my gym, and we became friendly and I negotiate, he wanted to gain muscle and improve his body composition, which is what I did. And I needed physical therapy. And I said, hey, dude, let's

collab. You know, I'll train you once a week. You give me a physio session once a week and we'll start sending clients to each other. And I negotiated that. It wasn't like a hard negotiation like the word sounds. It was literally a friendly, hey, I got a cool idea. It was a super easy conversation. He loved it. I loved it. We became great friends. We hung out out of work because of that, right? Because we got to spend time with each other. And I sent him clients and he sent me clients. So we actually made thousands of dollars each because of that one simple negotiation, right? One simple negotiation. But most of you would be scared to ask, right? And again, that's another conversation for another day is why you're scared.

Because you care what people think about you too much. I think I said that on another podcast with a friend the other day. But it can create so much greatness. These partnerships and negotiating a partnership is how it sounds. It's a discussion, a backwards and forwards on a business deal that could be a win-win. Negotiating prices. A funny one is Salesforce, the big billion, billion, multi-billion dollar CRM, right? It's like ActiveCampaign or Keep, Infusionsoft, all those things, but it's more for corporate, right?

We moved to that because we were way over, you know, 10 million in revenue. We were going to 100 million in revenue and we wanted an infrastructure to get us to 100 million in revenue. So we, all the other ones that most people use in my industry, we were starting to outgrow. So we moved to that and I stayed out of the initial conversation because again, I try and empower my team. They went in, you know, as a several month like process of reviewing that versus HubSpot, getting tutorials, demos, going backwards and forwards, if we can do everything we need. They start to negotiate. They give me the deal. I push back.

And even I'm making them negotiate on my behalf. And we get chipping away, chipping away, chipping away. And, you know, just when they think the deal's closed, I throw another clause out of them. I'm like, actually, I need this. They approve that. And then I didn't move forward because I wasn't confident it was the right time in my business and the right people to implement it. So I pause it. They freak out. My tech guy at the time that was managing it freaks out. And they're like, if you don't do this deal now, we've been negotiating for a month. It's never going to be around again. At the end of the quarter, I rang management, executive team to get a deal like this. This is the best we can ever do. And even my tech guy that doesn't understand negotiating

and business was freaking out like oh my god we've done all this negotiating you're gonna lose this deal we're never gonna get it i'm like whatever and i go i'm not doing it so and then four or five months later we circle back because we are in a better position and ready to do it and i send one email or i go back some and i go hey we're ready to do you sign up now. And, you know, obviously there was this massive thing about, oh, we can never do that. And and then they come back and go, oh, yeah, we can honor it. And I go, actually, I need half and I go, actually, I need half the time, you know, the period of time, the contract length halved.

And I'd already negotiated a bunch to get it down. It was like three years I finally got it down to one year no way they could go below one year and then in the end when I come back five months later I go hey I'm not doing more than six months and they go okay so I literally have two months of negotiating not with me with my team with my me helping kind of throwing up throwing negotiation into an email thread. And then this big freakout is never going to happen. Five months later, it not only happens,

but we literally halved the length of the contract, which for me was a big clause because with CRMs and software, I never know if you're going to use it or not, right? And I don't want to be stuck in this super expensive, you know, over 100 grand software if I didn't use it. So for me, that was a big deal break. So that was enough for me to go, okay, great, appreciate it, guys. And, you know, be polite around like, sorry, it took so long, just, you know, internal,

was it's a big jump for us, blah, blah, blah, but appreciate you still honoring it. And we move forward, right? But that's the difference between me, the boss, the CEO, that's why I'm successful and people that, you know, in the company that aren't at my level is that ability to negotiate, to understand business. And for us, that's a massive step for our business and could save us literally nearly $100,000 if it doesn't work out for us because of that last negotiation piece. But you've got to realize you've got to be okay to keep pushing, right? If you really want to be good in business, you've got to be okay to keep pushing. And again, like I'm not saying this to be unethical to like, you know, someone that's like a tiny business, I don't believe you should hammer them down and not pay anything or not pay people what they're worth. but especially with big corporations, especially with payment terms, stuff like that, negotiate. Another thing you learn over time in business, which I never could fathom, is you can negotiate with attorneys, right? When I started

business, the whole idea of an attorney and hiring it was scary. Then I would do a couple of hours a month and it was scary paying an attorney 500 an hour. You know, now we spend 10, 20, 25 grand a month on it. And we actually negotiate costs and hours billed with our attorneys. We're like, no, I'm not paying for those hours I didn't get. It took too long. Right. So you literally negotiate everything. You can literally negotiate with the government. If you have debt with the government, you can negotiate it down. You can negotiate payment terms. You can negotiate all the time with banks, with credit cards, right?

We did one initiative, spent a bunch of money on a credit card for it. It didn't work out. And we had this big debt from it, which I really didn't want to pay off because it sucked because we kind of backfired on us. So I was like, I'm not wiring 100k. So I negotiated to pay it off over a year and it cost me a little bit more, but they let me do it. And for me, that was like from an energy like business where we were at. I wanted to use more money that I had for better initiatives for initiatives working well. And I negotiated that with a bank, right? A massive company. So you've got to learn negotiation is possible everywhere.

Negotiation is going to get you a better life. It's going to get you a happier life. It's going to get you a more lucrative business. It's going to get you a better structure in your business. If you're an employee, it's going to get you into better opportunities, better promotions, better pay. It's going to help you negotiate a better work-life balance maybe. There's so, which I'm inks BS by the way, but still, is going to get you a better situation in life with your landlord, with your spouse, with your children, negotiating to get them in bed on time. It's going to give you this whole structure in your life by simply unlocking this one skill. So I hope you enjoyed today and I hope it's going to motivate you and inspire you to go out there and indoctrinate this belief of

negotiation no matter what, because it's a skill you've got to sharpen. I didn't want to come on today and teach, you know, 20 minutes of how to negotiate. I really wanted you to just like understand it, grasp it, appreciate it, tell you some stories and how you can use it in business. And then I recommend, look, if you want to take a course, there's bunches of courses out there. There's some amazing books out there that I would go, you know, you can literally just Google it and get a list. Chris Voss is, you know, someone I know and a big fan. His stuff's good. There's some great communication and persuasion books out there. So go read some books. Books is probably the best ways. And just start practicing, right? Get out there, practice, get out there in

the trenches, negotiate with your staff. Negotiate, because it's good for you to do it with your staff too. Negotiate with all your vendors. One easy thing to save you guys all money now is literally go email everyone you're paying and say you need to pay less. Like, it's that easy.

We've literally saved tens of thousands of dollars by emailing big companies like Zoom and we're negotiating our rates with them. So you can negotiate with everyone. I did this as a kid with cell phones, right? A monthly cell phone service. I got into this and I would negotiate every year and get a better deal and I looked forward to it to get a better deal. So indoctrinate it, train your kids to start negotiating, push it to your employees, get comfortable with it because it will help change your life, make your life better,

make your business way better, and just dive straight in. But until next time, keep living the red life, guys. I appreciate you guys today listening in, and I'll see you on the next episode very soon take care