Episode #17 – Spanning Continents While Negotiating Locally With Mimi Daraa

 

Having an international business is always challenging. When you are a small business working with local tradespeople on different continents and creating products to sell in the United States, one of the biggest challenges comes in negotiating for things. Join Christine McKay and Mimi Darra, Co-founder of Maison Palo Santo®, as Mimi shares what she learned about dealing locally in Morocco and Ecuador and how it has changed her approach to business. 

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Spanning Continents While Negotiating Locally With Mimi Daraa

I am excited because we have with us Mimi Daraa. It’s interesting because she has this amazing background in doing product–based businesses globally. Many of you know I’ve had the honor of working in 53 countries, and I love all things related to international business, but when it comes to international business and products, as a small business owner, it’s a different experience. Mimi’s experience spans continents. She’s worked in Morocco. She’s got business now in Ecuador and United States. It’s fascinating the things that she’s had to learn to negotiate from a cultural perspective and how that has impacted her business. 

She’s founded Maison Palo Santo in New York City in 2017. She transitioned from being in the hospitality industry to have her own lifestyle brand. She’s also a registered yoga teacher. She is passionate about quality crafted products, travel, self-care and meditation so her signature line of candles was born. She enjoys living and loving life with her husband and her two Brussels Griffons, which are amazing dogs. Mimi, welcome. I’m glad to have you. Thank you for joining us here. How are you? 

I’m doing great. I’m so happy to be here as well. I’m super excited. You make the international business aspect of my life sound amazing. Thank you so much for that. It has been a big journey. 

Tell us, how did you get to this point? 

Right now, I’m in Austin, Texas. I call it moonlighting here in Texas, which has given me a different perspective on America, in general. Being from New York and also, my family is in France and me spending a large portion of my childhood there as well. I always had this international feeling, speaking multiple languages at home and meeting my husband in 2013, which he is from Casablanca, Morocco. We were both living in New York City, working. I was in the restaurant business, a Michelin Star, fine dining. As an Arabic teacher, tutor and all different gig opportunity jobs that you do in New York to live. 

We came up with an amazing idea because we always love design. We love to travel. We had come up with a couple of great designs for rugs. We had started to cultivate a relationship with the corporate chief of Berber Women close to the Atlas Mountains in the region of Morocco, which is a super remote place. It’s one of the only places where there was no internet and not everybody has a cell phone. It was a very interesting experience working with this particular cultural group from the beginning. It was great for us because we speak the language, although the Berber culture does not speak Arabic. They speak their own dialect. 

Most of the women there are a little bit isolated in their pocket because they don’t speak Arabic. They still speak a dialect. They’re limited as far as what they can do as far as a business on their own. They’re very reliant on a middleman. We tried to eliminate that by going to the actual corporate chief ourselves. That’s what we started. We were funded by a great organization called Kiva, which is a nonprofit that works with people in developing nations that are either have a mission for social good or some environmental aspect of their business. When we first went to Tazenakht, there was a school that was in bad shape. 

Invest in what you're interested in. Share on X

The first thing I wanted to do was rebuild the school. That was where the social good aspect came into our business as well. We didn’t have huge success with that first initial project and that was because of culture. We have learned a lot since then. That was our first smack at anything. It was very difficult. Me coming from America trying to set up a website and social media. I was ready to take pictures and to interview people but, I was not as received as openly for taking content videos of people making my rugs, as I thought that I would be. 

It wasn’t until the third trip there, that I was able to take a video of the lady who was weaving my carpets from behind and not showing her face and only showing her hands in the video. It was a little bit different for my husband Red, who went there alone on the second trip. I told him, “Whatever you do, do not come back here without a video because I need it.” He did this great where he interviewed the entire compound. He went around and found out the story from the beginning to the end. Within that video, we were able to get clips and things that we could set up at retail markets in New York because that’s how we started. I would do the design, we would negotiate with the cooperative. 

There was a head lady that we would work with and we would get the rugs and we would sell them in Manhattan. I had my own negotiating in Manhattan because I didn’t realize at the time opening up a rug business in Manhattan is like opening up a jewelry store in the Diamond District. There’s a lot of competition. I didn’t realize and I was trying to go around. In my first load of rugs, I had ten carpets. They were approximately 10 feet x 13 feet. That was the average size. It’s nothing huge for Moroccan rugs standards but especially for a New York apartment standards. It’s not that convenient to haul around especially when you’re carrying them by hand or in taxis. 

I created this little portfolio on my computer and I would go around. At the time, we were living on 39th Street, which is the rug district. I remember going to my first shop and the guy was nice and he sat down with me and he said, “Your rugs are so unique. They’re beautiful. Would you like to see mine?” I was like, “Sure.” He opened up a door. I didn’t even know it was a door. I swear to you, it was like a hangar that they kept airplanes and full of rugs. It’s 100 feet from the bottom to the top all around. I was like, “What you’re saying is you don’t need them right now.” He said, “Absolutely. We’ll keep you in mind if we’re ever looking for something like this.” I was like, “Thank you so much.” 

We ended up going to these beautiful retail markets. It’s mostly Artists & Fleas, Grand Bazaar, Renegade Fair in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg. I was negotiating with people In New York to buy these beautiful rugs on the market type level. I had already been through a ton of negotiations in Morocco. Negotiating with the shipping company and with the people to buy them. In the end, my biggest winning trait was if I can fit it in a bag, you can buy it. People would take me up on it and they say, “If you can fold this rug into a way that I can carry it home, I will buy it.” 

These are thousands of dollars items, which in Manhattan, people are financially capable to buy that. It was definitely a unique experience. We learned a lot about shipping with Morocco. We learned a lot about the different shipping zones and exactly how it works. We learned a lot about how people share shipping accounts in places like Morocco. We tried to make it work to ship it directly from the cooperative. They’re from Casablanca where we had a team member that lived at the time. We never could get it to the scale that we needed it to be cost-effective and continue with it at the moment. 

When you’re competing with somebody who has hangars full of custom, beautiful Moroccan rugs, then it becomes very difficult to do that. Before you continue, I want to unpack some of the things that you’ve touched on that I think that’s important for our listeners to think about. The first one is what happens in Morocco with the women who were making the rugs. There are a couple of things in there. There’s culture, gender and religion. There are things that come into that interaction. I get asked a lot because of my international experience. I was talking to somebody earlier and I learned how to negotiate in Asia. I learned how to negotiate in Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea. 

I negotiated in those countries long before I started negotiating in the United States, which is very different. There’s a very different mentality in negotiating in Northern Africa, Europe and the UK. In the United States, how you negotiate in Boston is not the same as you negotiate in New Orleans, which is very different than Austin, Texas or Los Angeles, California. Understanding the culture of the location where you’re at and we’re going to see this continue as you move from Morocco to Ecuador. Tell us more about some of the things that you didn’t understand when you went to Morocco that you were able to take those lessons and apply them as you moved into Ecuador, in terms of understanding the culture of where you were at. 

The biggest challenge for me, as a woman in general, in Morocco is I wasn’t doing the negotiating in Arabic. I speak fluent French, but as we got farther and farther outside of the city, those French gets thrown out of the door. You start going into more tribal dialect language into the Berber language. I was unable to do most of the negotiating on my own and I relied on my husband to do most of it, which was different for me. In Manhattan, I was always the one that was the face of any negotiation or the face of the shop or the face of the store. That was a different type of personal struggle. 

 

For us, it was very important that we went there in person and met the people that made the rugs because of how it works in Tazenakht, the middlemen, I don’t want to blame anybody or anything like that. This is a system that has developed over thousands of years. The women are contracted to do a job and they’re paid pennies on the dollar for what the middleman will get for the rug at the market. For us, it was very important. There’s a lot of these cooperative places, a lot of people that worked in the Peace Corps. They stuck around and they created these cooperatives that would pay the women a living wage for their pieces, which can take up to 30 days to 60 days to create. 

Sometimes even in a partnership a mother and sister or a mother and a daughter will work on the same piece and they’ll take turns and it becomes a very personal item. They use all–natural sheep’s wool to create the product. They have a very strong connection to the earth to do it. It’s very important for me to make sure that the money that we paid was going directly into the hands of these women rather than deal with the middleman from the market, which would have been fine. In Morocco, the hardest part of that was logistically getting to the places that were a little bit farther. If we had not been Moroccan, I would probably say that 100%, we wouldn’t have gotten there in person. 

We would have been much more limited. I think that we had a very different experience, especially since we had a team member which happens to have the same name as my husband Red. I call them the red twins and our team member in Morocco, his family was originally from that area. We had a very insider experience that allowed us to create a relationship very quickly, to be trusted and accepted even though I was a foreigner and we had never been there before. We were there to do business and talking about money. We had a limited amount of time. I didn’t have five days to sit around and get to know everybody, which is what it took a couple of trips for us. 

On that last trip that we took, I was able to get some pictures and things. It was because they were making something unique for me, it wasn’t their design, it was my design. It was like we were collaborating, which was something very unique. I still think of that concept of creating your own Moroccan rug design and having them hand-woven in the traditional style, I don’t think that exists anywhere. I’m still a pioneer on thoughts on that front. I still have a line of rugs that are going to come. We’re going to Morocco the first week of March. We’re going to pick them up and bring them back because I want to incorporate them back into my present business now that I’ve learned so much about international negotiation. 

My main challenges were from a woman’s perspective, it was very important for us to pay them directly, which made it take longer and logistically be a little bit more complicated as far as transportation goes. Other than that, when we were there and the doors had been open, Morocco, in general, was the number one most hospitable country in Africa. When you go to Africa, everybody knows that Moroccan people are the most hospitable. They have the reputation of the Arab world, including in the Middle East. For some people who think that Morocco is in the Middle East, it is not. Although it’s an Arab nation. 

Geography is challenging for a lot of people. 

It’s hard to think and I don’t blame anybody because it’s like you think about the culture and movies and the clothes and everything. It was interesting. It was a great experience and I’m so thankful for the ability to use our story about Morocco in order to start our business because we were crowdfunded through Kiva. It was how we started. It was relying on that story in the beginning. 

You said a lot of things that are hugely important and early in my career, I had a similar experience in South Korea. This was in the early ‘90s. Women did not have a seat at the table at all. I remember my CFO asking me if I was willing to go to South Korea. He positioned it in a not very favorable light. Although I was young at the time, I still had the wherewithal because we had a woman who had been a country manager who effectively had been kicked out of the country by our partners. He’s like, “Are you willing to go?” I said, “I will go if you give me an attaché.” A man who is from South Korea, who is known in South Korea who will elevate me and my level of importance in this relationship. 

My company agreed to do that and I got to work with a gentleman who was part of the Korean national baseball team. It was a huge baseball country. People would stop him and ask him for his autograph when we walk around. He was so incredible. I had so much success there, but I could never have achieved that success if he had not been there telling me where to sit in a car, what to do at the table. He was deferring to me when our Korean counterparts would ask him questions. He’d say, “You need to ask Christine.” When you have a desire to work internationally, you need to know what these cultural norms are in the country that you’re working in. You need to be creative and figure out how the heck you’re going to work within them. There are boundaries and guard rails but that does not necessarily mean that you are 100% closed off from being able to do business in that country. 

You’ve got to figure out how do I operate creatively within these boundaries and still respect that culture. At the end of the day, for me and it sounds like it was similar for you too. It wasn’t about being a woman and not being able to do business in that. It was about figuring out how to do it in a way that respected their cultural traditions. That’s a very different problem that you’re trying to solve versus I’m a woman and I can’t be something. You have to be creative. I want to fast forward. I don’t want to spend all our time talking about the rug business because what you’re doing right now in Ecuador is fascinating. I avoid the word pivot because that’s overused right now. You’ve made this transition and there were some definite differences. You lived in Ecuador for a period of time. How did you decide to make that transition and what took you to Ecuador to start your candle business? 

It was like the stars all aligned. During our course of creating these rugs and selling them in markets, we also used to do some Moroccan ceramics. Smaller items that were easier to sell. We started making candles out of these ceramics. We would make these beautiful beeswax candles in Moroccan ceramics. My whole concept behind it was to burn the candle and you have the ceramic. You clean it out and you have these two amazing products in one. We started creating these candles. We used the only beeswax from hives, from his company called Andrew’s Honey. I met them at the Farmer’s Market on 14th Street in New York. They are from hives that are on the rooftops of apartment buildings in Manhattan. It was cool because, for me, it was like, “We’re going to take oils from faraway lands.” We’re going to use the beeswax from New York and it’s going to be the best of both worlds. 

Anybody who has a voice has to help others. Share on X

They’re going to be super unique. They’re going to be in the ceramic. We had a lot of success with them. As we started progressing into the candles and making more of them, we started experimenting with different oils. Now, throughout that process, about a year before I had met my husband in 2012, I had gone to Ecuador by chance with my best friend in New York, Elvira. She lives in LA now. She took me by chance. Her husband at the time couldn’t make it. Something happened. I changed the ticket. I showed up and we ended up traveling the country for about three weeks with her parents. We went all over the mountains, to Riobamba, all about where they’re from. Ecuador is split into three places. The El Oriente, which is the jungle, La Sierra, which is the mountain, and La Costa, which is the coast. Ecuador is one of the most biodiverse countries on the planet. I think it’s the only country that lists Mother Nature in their constitution as a being that has actual rights. 

Just by chance, I went to Ecuador. We traveled. It was the last couple of days. As much as I love her parents, in the last couple of days, I was like, “Mimi wants to go out. I want to go out with my friends and party.” We went to this little coastal town called Montanita which is known for its surf culture. They used to do the World Surf Championships there. It has even served 365 days a year, nothing too big, nothing too small. It’s an amazing town for surfing 7 days a week, 365 days a year. She knew a couple of people there and one of her friends, here we go with the insider tip because she grew up there. 

Her friend from high school was a tour guide and he hooked us up with this. He took us to this little hotel called Balsa Surf Camp. I know the owner now. She’s a friend of mine. Her name is Julie and she’s from France. We automatically connected. We were sitting at this little tiny hotel and everybody around me was international. Everybody was from other countries in South America, Peru, Colombia, Uruguay, Chile, lots of Argentinians and a lot of Europeans, German, Swiss, Spanish, French and a ton of Israelis. Everybody was in this little town. Everywhere you look, there were different kinds of people partying and surfing. It was cool. It’s a big backpacker destination. 

We ended up staying there for a couple of days. I went home. I was like, “I love Ecuador.” It’s so cool. It was so different than my life at the time. I was managing high-end restaurants and it was a different world. Rustic and barefoot were not in my repertoire. I was wearing black and stilettos every day of my life. I was in a different world. I kept thinking about it. I then met my husband and we did the Moroccan rugs thing and we went to Ecuador. I went to Ecuador with my mom and my brother at different times because I wanted to show them. My mom was impressed because she loved the fact that the coast of Ecuador was like Central Bay in the ’50s when there was nothing. It was rustic and everything was cute and small. 

Now, it’s different. There’s whole different tourism where people go to watch rich people. As I started traveling back and forth to Ecuador, we decided as a family with my husband, that we would all invest in a small property and that we were going to build a hotel. That was my dream. I wanted to build a hotel with a restaurant, more like a B&B, not a huge hotel but something small. As we started learning more about the zone and how things work, particularly with water and the availability of water in general, it steered away from the restaurant and also my husband telling me, “You want to go from working 18 hours a day in the restaurant to working 24 hours a day in the restaurant. That’s what you’re saying.” I was like, “No, I don’t want to do that.” I want to continue my product development in these tangible goods working with different communities. Those were the path that I was going on. 

In 2016, we were there for about 6 weeks. Up until that point, we had gone to the house. We designed our own home. We had it built in the end and it was finished in 2015. Until that point, we had gone for 1 month at a time to 2 months maximum. This particular time, we were there for six weeks. We discovered the product which is called Palo Santo which has the name and our company. Maison Palo Santo literally translates to the house of holy wood. It represents my two cultures now, French and Ecuadorian. I’m part of Ecuadorian now because I spend a lot of time there. I have a lot of friends there and my house is there. 

I worked in the restaurant business with many Ecuadorian people over the years. I feel like I have a little community within New York of Ecuadorian people, which is cool. We started using Palo Santo at the house and for anybody who doesn’t know what it is, it is a wood that is traditionally used for energy cleansing. When I say energy cleansing, what that means is when you move into a new house, we light it up. You do a smudge. You can use it for yoga and meditation. That’s the woo–woo side of it. We discovered Palo Santo because we were desperate for some relief from the mosquitoes on our balcony. 

There are some seasons that the mosquitoes there are worse than others. This particular January 2021 because the hemisphere is flipped, January, February, March, April, that summer, even though they still call it winter, but it’s summer. It was hot. It was humid. I love the weather there, but this particular season, for some reason, I was getting attacked. I have pictures of this. I remember sitting in the house, I couldn’t even go outside. I was wrapped from head to toe in banana leaves because that’s the holistic treatment. I was like, “I have to get out of here. I got to change the beach.” You get that in your head and you’re like, “I got to change the energy. I have to get out. I want to go up to the beach. Let’s go somewhere.” 

We took the bus to Puerto Lopez, which is the biggest fishing village. They’re all fishing villages, but this is the larger port. This is 45 minutes to the North of our house. You take a nice winding road with all of the lush vegetation. You ride the bus and you pray the entire time that you’ll arrive in one piece, which you always do. You get on and off the bus and at the end, you start getting so into it that you’re running on the side of it. My husband is like, “Do you know that you’re not from here?” “Yeah, but I’m in it. I’m running. I’m going to jump on and jump off.” You get into the spirit of things. We ended up walking down the street in Puerto Lopez in this new little fishing village. I have this information on my website too because this is the story. We were walking and we started smelling this amazing scent. I have known this from so many yoga studios but I couldn’t remember what it was. It’s not a sage. It’s something like that though. I know this. 

We saw this little light. It was a little shop and a little man. Everything was little and small. We ended up talking to him for two hours about his product, about Palo Santo and his story. He’s Italian, yet close with Ecuador. He’s been there for many years now. He was a research scientist in Germany for the olfactory sense. It had a very deep connection to your sense of smell. He did a lot of research on the psychological connection between your olfactory senses, sense of smell, into your memory and to life in general and how important it is to us. 

 

He found it just by chance like us. We had this very similar experience. We bought a couple of bags of Palo Santo. He had me misted with the Palo Santo water. It’s an all–natural mosquito repellent. We started burning it at the house and we had this Palo Santo baptism at my house. It’s not religious, but it was very spiritual. We started burning this magical ingredient constantly from the morning to the night for almost a month. When we went home, we were so bummed to go home. We brought Palo Santo with us. I brought it to my restaurant and I was giving it away to everybody. 

Everybody was like, “Mimi, you need to sell this. This is amazing. We love it.” I started looking at how much people were selling it for. I was like, “This could be cool.” I wanted to pay for my travel back and forth. I was like, “I’ll set up at some store to sell the Palo Santo.” Our original company was called Magic Carpets. We can sell it with the rugs and the Palo Santo. We called it the North and the South collection, the North collection for Morocco and the South collection from Ecuador but first, we had combined them. As time went on, I kept thinking about Palo Santo. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I was like, “I want to go back to Ecuador so bad. I don’t want to wait six months.” 

We went back to Ecuador. We stayed for another month. This is probably the point in time where my job was like, “Do you want a job anymore are you going to sell Palo Santo and make candles?” That’s when my brain was like, “I want to be free.” It took me three more years before I could have the courage to make that decision. We started spending more time in Ecuador and learn more about Palo Santo. We started developing a relationship with the people of Puerto Lopez and with our supplier. That is when we started bringing back the oil. We started bringing it in our suitcase to begin and then we started developing enough relationship with them to do a bank transfer for them to send it to us. 

Since social good has always been at the forefront of my mind when it comes to doing business especially when I work in a foreign country or if I’m not from there or even here in Austin, when I moved here, the first thing that I did was to go volunteer for someplace. You get to know people. You get to understand their needs and the struggles of the zone. What the strengths of the people that live there and how we could help because anybody was a voice have a duty to help others that don’t. I have that voice. It’s my duty to help when I can. That’s for myself. I don’t expect that from anybody, but for myself. That’s who I am. 

Palo Santo is from the dry tropical forest, which is an endangered ecosystem. The tree itself is not endangered. It grows easily once you can get it planted. The seeds are a little bit more difficult to germinate, but our supplier was able to figure that out with some funding from some companies in America. Some people started doing some research with him in 2007, 2008. Since then, he has come up with a reforestation project with another larger company in Ecuador. When I say large, maybe ten people worked there. It was nothing huge. I’ve developed enough of a relationship with them that this past year in 2019, I was able to be a part of this project. I can now say that I plant one tree with each purchase from my website. That was the most important part for me because I said, “Everybody does Palo Santo. My candles are unique.” I started making the candles with the oil. 

The reason why my candles are different is because I have the one and only pure Palo Santo candle that exists. I’ve tried them all. None of them use what they say they’re using because I know how much it costs. It’s not possible. I don’t need to put anybody on blast. That’s never been my technique, but that is what it is. They’re very specifically formulated for meditation, yoga transformation and motivation. That way, we can use those tools as a way to transform our lives. For me, it was Palo Santo, which motivated me to make a big change in my professional life. It motivated me to focus on the things that were important to me. That was the motive behind expanding particularly into this niche line of products and building everything around Palo Santo. With this, I was able to develop a relationship in Ecuador. Ecuador has a totally different culture than Morocco. It took me a couple of years in order to be not taken seriously. We’ve talked about this before but coming from America, the first thing that we want to do is we want to flash dollar bills around. Money doesn’t always work in every single place, especially when it’s a zone where there isn’t that much money. 

Money doesn’t get them a lot. 

It’s completely different. In America, we automatically think, “If we had this, this and this,” and there, it was about showing my dedication to the rest of Palo Santo and to Mother Nature. 

It was probably a difference in terms of selling in the US. It’s about the acquisition, forward movement and progression. In many cultures around the world, it’s about tradition, preservation and being content in the life that you’re living. Whereas in the United States, everyone’s like, “If you are content about the problem, you should be striving to be more,” where in as much of the rest of the world rejects that as a notion. It’s like, “I have everything I need and want.” This is why money is not a motivator for everyone across the globe. That’s true in the US and from a negotiation perspective, it goes to understanding and having clarity on what it is you want. You said that when you realized that you were able to create something that allowed you to plant a tree for every product that was sold, that it was what it was all about for you. That ability to give back. Money isn’t a motivator for you either. 

This is something my husband tells me all the time about my own goal-setting. Money is not a motivator for me, but helping as many people as I possibly can. Elevating people, putting, giving people permission to ask for more of what they want and teaching them how to get that, motivates me. That excites me. I want to build a school in Guatemala for Mayan children. They’re so much in it, but if I focus on the money aspect, that’s a de-motivator. In some cultures, money is a de-motivator. When you’re negotiating, understand what motivates you in the deal, but also spend some time understanding what motivates your counterpart. Because if you start positioning it as something that’s important to you, but has no relevance to your counterpart, you’ve lost the opportunity to find goodwill and build on that relationship. 

When I used to go to Ecuador in the beginning, I used to dress in a different and certain way with my New York style. The longest I’ve ever spent there was six months at a time because I couldn’t stay there for up to six months with no visa. As I spent more time and many months living there, 3, 4, and then 6 months, I started dumbing it down in going to places because you don’t think about these things. You go and you walk into a place and people automatically are going to judge you. They’re going to think you have a certain amount of money. Things are on a different scale. 

I stick to flip-flops, tank tops and bathing suits no matter where I go. No jewelry and not that I wear diamonds or anything, but I keep it very simple and rustic because I want people to pay attention to me and the words that I’m saying rather than look at myself. I’m not going to take out my iPhone and started doing deals on it because products like that are extremely expensive in Ecuador. We don’t think about it when you come in from America. 

Little things like that I think can help when you’ve already gotten to that point where you’ve developed this relationship and you’ve learned a lot about it. You have maybe learned the names of the people’s family members. The first thing that you ask is, “How is your family? How has your sister or brother? How are you doing? How is your grandmother?” When you ask these questions first and then you go into the conversation. Sometimes it’s not as straight. What I like about negotiating, even if it’s on a small level, for pricing or something like that, is that in negotiations in most countries, it’s a sign of respect. 

That’s a huge thing. It’s a sign of respect everywhere. I’ve said this before on the show, but our philosophy on negotiation and the philosophy that I’ve developed over my many years of negotiating is, “Negotiation is a conversation about a relationship and you cannot win in a relationship.” It is about a mutual respect. If you don’t have respect for your counterpart, you cannot negotiate effectively. 

You probably shouldn’t be working with them in the beginning. It might work the first time around, but in my case, when you’re spending years or months or thousands of dollars on travel try to create these relationships and that comes from being a business owner with big dreams and knowing that you have to take those steps in order to get there. You have to have a very clear understanding of like, “I do want to work with these people so I’m going to give and take.” Maybe not every time you’re going to walk away 100% satisfied, but you’re going to think about it. In the end, it’s going to be like stepping stones. You give a little bit and take a little bit. 

I think that’s something to highlight too, in terms of the American difference. 60% to 65% of negotiators in the United States are very positional in their negotiation. What that means is that they say, “This is what I’m negotiating for. It’s right here in front of me.” That’s not how much of the rest of the world thinks. Much of the rest of the world thinks about, “There’s this thing right here but there’s the thing way out here too.” They looked for ways to bring those things together in harmony. As Americans, we’re very focused on the here and the now. We see it in of the things that happen in so many aspects of American culture, but the stock market is the biggest highlight. 

Any person who’s an expert in investing will tell you that there are short-term gains to have but we look at what’s the stock doing now. What are the earnings this quarter? What are the earnings this year? It creates this short-term mentality. Good investors will tell you that the stock market is a long play. It’s about how long you keep your money in it and not necessarily what’s in the here and now. The here and now affects that but globally, when you think about negotiating, especially outside of the United States, it’s about figuring out how to bring the future and the present into closer alignment or to think about the present with an eye on the future. That’s important because if you aren’t doing that, you lose opportunities, especially when you’re negotiating outside the United States. It’s true within the US too, based on different geographic cultures. I’m from Montana and if you try to negotiate, you’re a New Yorker in Montana, they’ll sit and laugh at you. 

They’ll immediately be turned off and be like, “Get out of here.” 

One of the biggest reasons why I wanted to have you on is because you have this breadth of experience in different continents and different cultures. How you’ve had to transform both yourself and your business and your negotiation approach. The things that you’re talking about with respect to Ecuador and it’s true in the United States, too. It’s important. Do you want to ask me about my weekend before we start talking about business? Do you want to ask me that at all? Do you want to wait until the end? 

If you’re just meeting me, I’ll tell you right now. Hold that stuff to the end for me. I like getting business done and over with, and then I kick back and enjoy and build a relationship then. If you spend a lot of time trying to build the relationship upfront, that frustrates me. If you’re somebody who likes to build a relationship upfront, I’m going to try to adapt to that. I’m going to ask you for more information about your family, what happened over the weekend and what’s going on in your life. We’ll spend time figuring that out because that’s what an effective negotiator does. They adapt to the environment that they’re in without sacrificing the clarity of what they want out of the relationship. You still need to be clear on what you want out of that relationship, but you have to be able to adapt to match the environment that you are in. 

My technique for Ecuador, which is the reason our reforestation project is happening. With the support of our loyal customers, we were able to contribute to the planting of 4,000 trees. There are 50 hectares that are dedicated to the reforestation of Palo Santo by the Minister of Environment and other plants. You can’t plant this one tree, but all plants and things like that. My technique for Ecuador now is I need to get a week in advance to do any deal so I can chill out. What happens to me is like you said, I go there and I’m like, “Go.” I’m used to being an entrepreneur and working from 4:00 in the morning until a certain amount at night. Going from this place to another place and setting up meetings. 

If somebody is two minutes late, I’m off the door. The first time I tried to do a meeting in Ecuador and it was for another side project that I was doing there for a little doggy shelter. It’s at 5:00 PM. I was in the driveway with a clipboard at 4:59, ready to sign people in. People started rolling in at 7:00 and I was so upset. We were like, “You’re going to have to let that go.” Those are just little things. Those are the fun sides of it that you learn and that’s why I think it’s so interesting.  

Anybody who’s trying to do something like that, the little piece of advice that I can give to anybody is to go there first. See if it’s a place that you have an interest in working with because at the end of the day, depending on what business you’re in, especially if you’re in a business like me where you’re trying to sell goods or trying to create goods from raw material that come from a place that you have to prove authenticity about, you need to create these relationships. I started negotiating. One last thing is I got a new supplier and they’re in Greece. It’s amazing because we’re going to start using his sage essential oil. We use this in Croatia now which works with small farmers, but this guy makes distillers and gives them to small farmers so that they can create an income from their plants. 

They can distill all different kinds of oils. I’m starting the negotiation. I said it right off the bat of what my intention was to work with you, which was to promote your social goods. That way I can support you with these purchases. I was willing to pay a little bit extra for that. I was willing to do that because I want to make sure that they know that I’m serious, that I’m not here to try to cut the best because I’m trying to move forward into a long-term relationship and that could go to a variety of places. 

The way that you described that the word that came to my mind was transparency. I find that when you’re negotiating in multicultural environments, and to be honest, one of my favorite books to teach multicultural negotiation is Stephen Ambrose’s, Undaunted Courage. It’s a uniquely American story of Lewis and Clark crossing the United States, the Lewis and Clark Trail. They negotiated with 24 indigenous tribes, as they crossed the US. 

Some of those negotiations went much better than others, just like you had somebody from Morocco who was there and I had somebody in South Korea. They had Sacagawea and Sacagawea was the one who guided them. Being transparent, knowing who you are, what you do and how you behave. When I’m negotiating and this is especially important in Asia. Nodding in Asia is an agreement, but I am a head–nodder as a negotiator. For me it means, I hear the words coming out of your mouth. It does not mean I’m agreeing with you. 

We’re just acknowledging. That is what we do. 

It’s important to be transparent with my counterparts, especially those not from my background and my culture to say, “This is how I behave. Just so you know, when I’m nodding my head, it means that I’m hearing you, but I will go offline and process that information. I’ll let you know if I agree. Trust me, when I agree with you, you will know. When I disagree, you will know.” I hold the thumbs up and down on Zoom. That’s important in multicultural negotiation to be transparent because you will move the conversation so much further forward by being transparent and letting your counterparts know who you are and what you are about and how you behave. 

It’s because it strengthens your relationship. It lets your counterpart have a window into who you are. We so often try to protect ourselves from that. Especially as Americans, we try to shut that transparency off. We tell ourselves or we have been told for many years that it means you’re going to get taken advantage of. When you see distrust in the relationship, that’s when you’re going to get taken advantage of. When you are transparent and you trust but verify. You create opportunities for open dialogue and curiosity. 

Respect the culture. Share on X

When you’re working in a new culture, you better be curious about the culture you’re working in. You need to ask lots of questions. You are that four-year-old again asking questions that may sound stupid, but they demonstrate the level of respect and the depth of respect you have for your counterpart‘s environment, their culture, their history, their world experience and the way that they exist in the universe. 

You will move so much further faster by taking time to do and walking in and trying to be a Manhattan, trying to be a Montanan and trying to be a Bostonian or Angeleno or take your pick of cities or locations in the United States. At the end of the day, business is global, and it’s going to get more and more global. We will be interacting and Zoom has flattened. The earth is flat again. Mimi, we are about out of time, but how can people find you? I know that you were being so generous and thank you for being generous and offering something to our readers. 

You can see more about our reforestation efforts on our social media @MaisonPaloSanto. You can also check out the website at MaisonPaloSanto.com. If you would be so generous to make a purchase so you can plant a tree in your name in the dry tropical forest. Put a little note. Write the word Negotiate in your order notes and I will make sure that you get an awesome bonus gift. We are not only a candle company, we’re an aromatherapy company, but we’re a company that is set apart from the rest because we promote transformation and motivation so you could improve the dedication to whatever it is that you’re working on. We do believe that international business, domestic business or whatever, although we’re a family–run business that is on the smaller side that we have really big values. We know that businesses run by thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Those thoughts, feelings and emotions are different from place to place, from state to state, and from day–to–day. We would love for you to visit the website, check it out and read a little bit more about our story. Again, go ahead and get yourself a Palo Santo candle. Try it. 

Mimi, it’s been an honor having you. Thank you so much. I love your energy and your passion for the work that you’re doing. Thank you for putting effort into leveling the playing field in your own way across the globe, making things more accessible and elevating people who might not be otherwise be elevated in the environments that you’ve been working in. I appreciate that. I want to thank all of you for joining us for another episode. Thank you so much. We will see you next time on our next episode. I look forward to seeing you there and have a great day. Cheers. 

Important Links: 

• Kiva 
• Undaunted Courage 
• https://www.MaisonPalosanto.com 
• http://www.Facebook.com/maisonpalosanto 
• http://www.Instagram.com/maisonpalosanto 
• http://www.Amazon.com/maisonpalosanto 
• https://www.Etsy.com/shop/MaisonPaloSanto 

About Mimi Daraa