Growth and Endpoints
Managing Your Company
Build your negotiating, selling, and decision-making skills; manage your finances; correct your course (you’ll have to, at least once!); manage the transition to a healthy, growing business.
Negotiating: Everything is negotiable!
- Like everything in life, in your entrepreneurial company you need to negotiate effectively for virtually everything they seek, and because people on the other side are going to be relentlessly negotiating with you whether you know it or not. Negotiating can be fun, but fun or not, you have to negotiate all kinds of things every day. So prepare yourself to do it well.
- Can you make a list of the major things you should negotiate during your launch?
- Can you take that list and annotate who will be responsible to prepare thoroughly, define with the team what is a must-have and what is nice-to-have, and manage the negotiations?
- How well-prepared are these people (or you) to negotiate effectively? How do you know? Who can you call on to help you learn or actually participate in the negotiation with you?
- How much time and resource can you allocate to shoring up your negotiating skills and doing the homework needed for the important negotiations? Can you quantify a cost-benefit?
- How will you measure your success in your negotiations?
For training and learning:
- Dawson,Roger Dawson.“The Secrets of Power Negotiating,”(audioseries available at http://www.rdawson.com/.
- Ertel,Danny.“Turning Negotiation into a Corporate Capability,”Harvard BusinessReview,May–June1999):55. A summary of education and training practices to build negotiating skills in an organization.
Print resources:
Startup Toolkit 