Be more confident in every negotiation by learning from insiders that will empower you to get more of what you want while building long-lasting relationships. Welcome to In the Venn Zone with Christine McKay. Tune-in as prominent business leaders, founders, and celebrities share their behind-the-scenes stories of real-life negotiation failures and successes. Discover insightful negotiation concepts you can apply in every area of your life right now. Listen to In the Venn Zone every week to unleash the powerful negotiator in you.
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In the Venn Zone: Empowering the Negotiator in You
My name is Christine McKay. I would like to welcome you to In the Venn Zone, the show that’s geared towards helping you the small and mid-size business owner, elevate your negotiation. I am your host. I am excited to be coming here to you every week. I’ve been doing negotiation for over 25 years. I started out doing international mergers and acquisitions work in Eastern and Western Europe, and Southeast Asia. From there after getting my MBA, I started doing work in large procurement organizations, ultimately transitioning to working in sales departments. Over the course of my long career, a lot of it in M&A and divestiture environments, I started to see how small businesses are at a definite disadvantage in terms of their ability to negotiate effectively.
I find that to be true for a lot of reasons. The biggest one is that we’re taught how to negotiate pretty much never. We learn how to negotiate when we’re kids, and we never really change out of that. We never moved into different negotiation style. We might, some of us have tried things and then realized that it wasn’t working and we adopted. A lot of us tried things and we keep doing what we’ve always done and hoping that we’ll hit at least a certain percentage of people. What if we could change that? What if you could change the nature of your negotiation, elevate your conversations become more effective as a negotiator, stop treating negotiation like a wind situation and start treating it like a relationship? That’s what we’re here to do. We’re here to help you do that.
We’re here to help you move from thinking about negotiation as something that you have to win, or when your partner or counterpart wins, then you’re losing. Stop thinking about it that way, instead think about negotiation as a conversation about a relationship. Remember, you cannot win a relationship. How do we do that? We’ll bring you some amazing guests. We have people like Scott O’Neil, who is the CEO of Harris Blitzer Sports Entertainment. They own the New Jersey Devils, the Philadelphia 76ers and a number of other amazing sports brands. He talks about how they looked across their supplier base and realized that it didn’t reflect the diversity of their community. He talks about what they’re doing about that and what that means for their negotiations.
Negotiation is a conversation about a relationship. Click To TweetWe have a great interview with Jillian Michaels, who is a fitness guru and has more of a small empire of fitness products, apps, etc. We talk about negotiation with her and what that’s meant to her as a result of her career, starting on television and migrating to a business owner. We have an amazing interview with Andre Champagne. Let me tell you, he is fascinating. He started a company a number of years ago called Hollywood Trucks. He revolutionized the industry in terms of making it green, all those trailers that sit on lots and all those things. He invented this thing to turn them green and to reduce power consumption. Now, he’s taking that technology and he’s applying it to the eBike and eScooter industry. We talked about what negotiations has meant for him and how it shaped the things that he has done.
We talked to Mark McShurley. He owns a roofing business in the western part of Virginia. He talks candidly about how he grew fast. In that process, he was overextended by a lot of money and had to negotiate with his large roofing supply company, so that he could stay afloat and stay in business. He gets really candid and honest with us about what happened, what he did, how he managed it and how he actually had to renegotiate after that. We talked to people who are experts in our minds, helping us with our own thinking, because the hardest part of any negotiation is the negotiation we have between our ears. Blair Dunkley talks about his expert and amazing work that he has done in the field of mind models. He taught us some interesting and effective tools for training ourselves to think differently and behave differently.
We’ve got somebody to talk about lying, somebody to talk about self-confidence. We’ve got someone from the sports entertainment industry, to somebody who has a nonprofit or organization. She has a ranch outside of Atlanta and does tourism things and writing lessons and all that. We talked to her about negotiation and what that means in her world. We talked to Meghan Gardner, who has a company called Guard Up, that does live action role playing in pre-COVID, and did afterschool programs and camps. They’ve also done programs for Boston Celtics, Carnival Cruises and a bunch of other companies.
We have this incredibly diverse set of guests and they keep coming. I’m excited about it because one of the things that I believe is that as small and mid-sized business owners, we don’t have access to the education, to the resources that big companies have. That automatically puts us at a disadvantage in our negotiation. The reason why this show exists and why I launched my company, Venn Negotiation, is to help you, the small and mid-size business owners, people in those industries and those businesses, because this is a way for us to get real with you. They talk about it in the Ivy Leagues and what you hear about from hostage negotiators and trade experts, but it doesn’t necessarily boil it down to what’s happening on main street or industrial street, or wherever you’re located.
We try to take these amazing concepts, which are applicable in those situations and make them pragmatic and practical, so you can use them after we’re done with every show. I am excited that you’ve tuned in. Thank you for being here. Click Subscribe, stay in touch with when we are releasing new episodes. Our first episodes are going to be launching very soon. We’ll be on all the podcast channels as well as broadcasting to our YouTube channel called Venn Negotiation. Thank you very much, everyone. I look forward to seeing you again soon. Please be sure to leave reviews and send me your thoughts and ideas. If you have an idea for great guests or a great show topic, make sure you let me know. Thank you. Have a great day and happy negotiating. Cheers.