How to Keep Your Partners From Taking a Mile Each Time You Give an Inch
Issue #2107
- WEALTHY: 3 reasons you should add some penny-pinchers to your portfolio (Andrew Gordon)
- HEALTHY: Dropping a few pounds could save your life (Craig Ballantyne)
- WISE: Iris Murdoch on partnerships
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- 8 ways to thwart "more-for-me" people (Michael Masterson)
- 7 ways to get Google users to check you out (Bob Bly)
- It’s Good to Know… about American pets (Lori Allen)
- Add "abjure" to your vocabulary
Imagine if There Were Only 6 Numbers to Choose from When Buying a Lottery Ticket!
Wouldn’t that be great?! Of course, the fewer the choices, the more likely your chance of success, right?
How many choices are there when buying and selling shares? Errmm… a LOT! Hundreds… One of the reasons I enjoy such consistent success from trading is because I only have 6 options to choose from! Except this is even better in a way, because the lottery is pure luck…
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Make Room for Cheapskate Companies
You won’t find a "cheapskate companies" category in financial websites or analyst reports. That’s a shame, because they make great investments.
Cheapskate companies - which you can find by doing some digging - are simply companies that have the ability to keep costs down. While skimping on employee pay and benefits is not a key piece of the equation, the following are:
- Keeping down energy costs. Not letting rising fuel costs eat away at profits is easier said than done. Sometimes, a company has to spend money now - for example, in energy efficiency - to save money later.
- Keeping down costs for basic materials and/or feedstocks. Inventory management is one way to do this, but it may not be enough. Sometimes, drastic measures are necessary. For example, in a recent survey, manufacturers said they will move 25 percent of their production overseas if the chemicals they buy continue to rise.
- Paying less for their assets. From the buildings they occupy to the equipment they use, some companies have a knack for buying their assets when the market is soft and full of bargains.
Keeping down costs takes as much ingenuity as increasing sales. And it’s just as important. Some companies don’t know this or don’t care. You should only invest in those that do.
[Ed. Note: Andrew Gordon, ETR’s Investment Director, has authored several books on energy markets, global countertrade practices, and the hot growth sectors of China and Russia. A former professor of marketing and finance, he is the editor of INCOME, a monthly financial advisory service that uncovers income-generating stocks that promise safety (first and foremost), along with much-higher-than-average profit potential.]
"In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way."
Iris Murdoch
How to Stop Your Partners from Taking a Mile Each Time You Give an Inch
Being successful in business is often a result of the deals you make. As I said in ETR #2033, if you bend over backward to make every deal good for your partners - and not just for you - you’ll find that people will want to do even more deals with you. And when everyone wants to work with you, it is much easier to grow a profitable business.
But what happens if the person on the other side of the negotiating table doesn’t understand that concept as well as you do?
When you create relationships and strike deals, there is rarely an exact point of fairness, a precise set of conditions that make all responsibilities and benefits balanced. Most business deals involve an input of capital, expertise, and other resources, the value of which can be difficult to measure.
I never try to make a deal exactly fair, because I don’t believe in exactness. I think of fairness as a range. Imagine a measurement device (such as an applause meter or a thermometer) with a colored bar that covers a portion of it. That colored bar is how I think of fairness. It is a range, not a point.
When I do deals, I imagine that bar before I negotiate. At one end is what I think is fairest to me. At the other end is what I think is fairest to my negotiating partner. I mentally prepare myself to settle on anything in between. By doing so, I benefit in four ways:
- I save time.
- I save money.
- I show myself as fair-minded.
- I avoid having second thoughts later.
This process has been enormously helpful to me in my career. It has allowed me to have productive partnerships - enjoyable and profitable joint ventures - with people who had reputations of being "difficult."
And there has been an unexpected, ironic compensation as well. Several times, after settling on the "other end" of the range of fairness, I found that, after a few years, my partner’s contribution turned out to be much more substantial than I thought it would be. Consequently, the deal that I initially thought may have been a bit more in his favor turned out to be much more advantageous to me.
This strategy will make it easier for you to negotiate deals and easier to keep them. But, there will be times when you will not be able to make a deal. No matter how far you extend the range of fairness, the guy on the other side of the table will want more. I call this type of person a "more-for-me" negotiator.
It would be easy for me to say "Just avoid such people." But the truth is that they are usually very seductive - especially to people with big hearts. (Could that be you?) They are also very skilled at making their "more-for-me" deals look pretty good to you.
One clue to watch out for: You feel that the deal isn’t very good for you, but you want to do it anyway because you really want to make the other person happy.
As someone who falls into this hole constantly, I can tell you from experience that doing something against your gut instincts purely because it will please someone else is not a good idea.
Don’t get me wrong. You want your colleagues, associates, and partners to be happy with the deals you make. In fact, wanting the deal to be good for them is necessary for its long-term success. But when the deal is off-balance - and you are fundamentally unhappy because you know that the other person has pushed you into an "it’s-better-for-him" arrangement that you don’t think is fair - you must sit back and wonder whether the entire relationship is worthwhile.
More-for-me behavior is easy enough to detect. But how do you protect yourself against it? This is what I try to do:
- The moment you realize what’s going on, try to take a break from the discussion to "think a few things over."
- Figure out, in the peace of your own head, what you would be willing to accept as "fair" and what would be an unquestionable "deal breaker."
- Determine how you could live without the deal. (There is always a way.)
- Admit to yourself: "This person is trying to take advantage of me by trying to make me want to please him. If I attempt to please him, he will continue this negative approach of his. I will be enabling bad behavior. That will not only make things worse in the future but also cause him to disrespect me."
- Gird yourself emotionally to be as ruthless with him as he is planning to be with you.
- Call him to reconvene the meeting - but make some sort of arbitrary demand. Something like starting the meeting 15 minutes later than the time he suggested or meeting in another room. It should be something so small that he can’t reasonably refuse you. If he does, cancel the deal.
- Having established your new tough-guy persona, lead the conversation with a prepared statement. It should be something like this: "John, I’ve thought about this deal and I believe that the fair way to do it is for me to have…" (Give him some version of what you think is fair, but not your last-ditch position.)
- Negotiate to your last-ditch position and settle there… or walk out.
[Ed Note: Teaching you how to make good deals is only one way Michael Masterson can help you grow your business. Join him this fall at ETR’s Info Marketing Bootcamp and learn how to take your business to new levels of success.]
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How to Control a Silent Killer
If you’re unhealthily overweight, you probably know it. You also know if you have unhealthy habits, like smoking or excessive drinking. And if you’re not as fit as you should be, you probably recognize that too. But high blood pressure - the silent killer that can lead directly to heart attacks and death - goes unnoticed every day.
Australian researchers have found an easy way to control this silent killer.
The researchers had three groups of men complete a mental stress test before and after a 12-week diet program. One group of men changed nothing in their diets, another group ate a diet high in fruits and vegetables and low in dairy products, and a third group ate a low-fat diet. By the end of 12 weeks, both groups that had changed their diets lost an average of nine pounds, while the control group remained at about the same weight.
The subjects who lost weight also reduced their resting systolic blood pressure (the higher number in the normal 120 over 80 blood pressure reading). Furthermore, in the groups that had changed their diets, blood pressure returned to normal six minutes faster after the stress tests than in the control group.
The scientists concluded that weight loss helps men control their blood pressure better during times of stress, which is likely to lower the risk of cardiovascular disease in the long term. So if you have high blood pressure, add more fruits and vegetables to your diet and lose weight. And if you don’t know what your blood pressure is, get it checked immediately.
[Ed. Note: Craig Ballantyne is an expert consultant for Men’s Health magazine. If you’re looking to burn fat, build muscle, and quickly step into the body you have always wanted with just three workouts each week, check out Craig’s fat-loss system, Turbulence Training for Fat Loss.]
Quick Internet Marketing Tip: What’s Working in Google AdWords?
By Bob Bly
At a recent weekend Google AdWords seminar, sales and marketing specialist Perry Marshall presented a list of tactics he said are worth testing in your pay-per-click ad copy:
- Celebrities (e.g., "As seen on Oprah")
- Famous phrases (i.e., cliches)
- Words and phrases that evoke sounds (e.g., "Blam!")
- Question marks, dashes, and hyphens
- Claims to fame (e.g., "Voted best product")
- Controversial claims (i.e., bold-faced statements)
- Suggestions for specific procedures or immediate actions
[Ed. Note: Master copywriter and best-selling author Bob Bly is the editor of ETR’s ETR’s Direct Marketing Masters Edition, a program to help you start your own successful direct-mail business. Sign up for Bob’s free monthly e-zine, The Direct Response Letter, and get more than $100 in free bonuses.]
It’s Good to Know: About American Pets
By Lori Allen
Americans are likely to spend over $40 billion this year on their pets - an amount that has nearly doubled over the last decade. They will spend nearly $3 billion on grooming products and boarding services alone.
According to a survey by the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association, 63 percent of American households have a pet. That’s nearly two out of every three households, and that number has gone up 13 percent in the last nine years.
[Ed. Note: You can earn six-figures each year by snapping photos of household pets as a pet photographer. Learn how at AWAI’s pet photography workshop this September.]
Do You Need To Start Out Small?
If you don’t have an Internet business yet, or if your company is smaller than $1 million then you need something different… something that lets you start off small.
One man I know turned $10 into over $500,000. How’s that for starting small!
Let me show you how to get a similar Internet income stream running for almost nothing.
- Patrick Coffey
To "abjure" (ab-JUR) - from the Latin for "to deny under oath" - is to abstain from or shun. (The word is related to "jury.")
Example (as used by A.B. Yehoshua in A Journey to the End of the Millennium: "He closed his eyes as he raised the goblet to his lips and took a small sip of the cool liquid, and then his face paled as he understood how sublime the taste of the forbidden drink was, and how easily one might become enslaved to it. There and then he resolved to abjure it totally."
[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker … build your self-confidence and intellect … increase your attractiveness to others … just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR’s new Words to the Wise CD Library]
Michael Masterson
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2007