Category: Authentic Leadership

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Authentic Business Relationships Authentic Deal-Making Authentic Leadership Authentic Negotiating Deal-Driven Growth

Access to Awareness

Awareness

Sophie McLean is a woman of many specialties. In her latest endeavor, she is speaking, consulting, writing and teaching courses and online seminars within the framework of Access to Awareness.

Sophie is using philosophical and spiritual concepts to help leaders effectively make a difference in the world. She does this by helping them develop a clear understanding of what it means to be human. In the latest episode of the Fueling Deals podcast, Sophie joins us to talk about the work she is doing now. She also explains how the concepts of awareness and self-discovery tie into everything in our lives—including deals.

A New Culture for Human Kind: Access to Awareness

For the last eight years, Sophie has withdrawn herself from the world and embarked on a spiritual quest. It reignited her passion for teaching and drove her to pursue the ultimate goal of developing a new culture for humankind. That notion is the driving force behind her company, Access to Awareness. Sophie works to educate people on what is possible with awareness and what it means to shift from surviving, to being alive. So many people are going through the motions in their lives. But with the right guidance, we can begin to see the extent of the possibilities and do something about it. And it all starts with awareness.

The Purpose of Money

In dealmaking, survival is a scarcity mindset. You operate from a place of fear because survival is about reacting to danger. But when you go into a negotiation with that mentality, you can’t work within the fundamental framework of dealmaking. This means you end up negotiating from a position of weakness.

Being alive is synonymous with an abundance mindset, and awareness is the key to getting there. We need to understand our relationship to money, because if we can align the purpose of money with the purpose of our lives, we will access a state of abundance naturally.

Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author and professional speaker who is passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.

If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal- Ready Assessment today!

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Authentic Business Relationships Authentic Deal-Making Authentic Leadership Authentic Negotiating

How to Handle Inauthentic Negotiating Techniques

Inauthentic-Negotiating

In the last few solocast episodes of Fueling Deals, we have taken a look at some of the major talking points from my book, Authentic Negotiating. So far, we have covered the Clarity, Detachment, and Equilibrium framework, the top six reasons negotiations fail, and the five steps to becoming a great negotiator. So, if you didn’t get a chance to read the book or listen to those episodes, I highly encourage you to go back and cue them up; there are a lot of great negotiating tips that you don’t want to miss.

In the latest episode of Fueling Deals, we dive into another topic from my book that covers inauthentic negotiating techniques and how to handle them.

The Empty Promise: Somebody makes a promise that they know they’re not going to fulfill in the end. You may choose to challenge their promise upfront to test its validity, then use CDE to keep a level head while you decide how to move forward.

The Big Fish: There may be a difference in scope or size with one negotiating party vs. the other. This can be approached with the notion that even a small fish has leverage because there are alternative plays, otherwise, the negotiation wouldn’t be taking place.

Nibbling: There is always another ask as you get closer to finalizing a deal. Sometimes a candid response is the best approach and it is okay to call them out for adding new terms. Figure out what needs to happen for the deal to move forward, and clarify whether or not there will be additional terms down the line.

Quivering Quill: Similar to Nibbling but it is carried out at the closing table to apply more pressure on the other negotiating party. Don’t get triggered or thrown off your game; instead, step back and evaluate whether the last minute concession works for you and whether this is someone with whom you want to do business.

Limited Authority: The other negotiating party abdicates the decision-making responsibility because of their position in the company hierarchy. While this may be authentic in theory, it is often used as an excuse. Stay calm, don’t let it affect you and decide whether or not they are the right partner for this deal in the first place.

Even ‘good’ negotiating tactics are supplementary to our core dealmaking framework, and no tactics or techniques can be substituted for fundamental skills. But you will frequently encounter authentic and inauthentic negotiating techniques regardless. The bad techniques reek of shady business practices and low credibility. And while you might never use them yourself, you need to know how to spot and deal with inauthentic negotiators on the other side of the table.

You can listen to the full episode here.

Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author and professional speaker who is passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.

If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal- Ready Assessment today!

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Authentic Deal-Making Authentic Leadership

The Echelon Partners Deal and Dealmaker Summit

Dealmaker-Summit

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the Echelon Partners Deal & Deal Makers Summit, which was an invaluable experience as both a speaker and an audience member. Echelon’s summit focuses on doing deals in the RIA space, and it was kicked off by expert sessions with 30+ industry experts, enabling us to provide audience members with a half-hour to pick our brains, get to know us and explore any topic that piqued their interest.

Kickoff and Buyer/Seller Challenges

The expert sessions and the dinner that followed were great opportunities for the conference participants to get acquainted with the experts, speakers and each other and network. The next day opened with “Buyers of the Round Table,” featuring Rush Benton of CAPTRUST, Dave Welling of Mercer Advisors and Kurt Miscinski of Cerity Partners discussing the low cost of money and the growing volume of deals. The panelists talked about the challenges associated with evaluating cultural fit with a focus on getting a collective buy-in from leadership and the rest of the team. One of my favorite quotes from that panel is that “culture cannot be acquired or mandated, it must be embraced,” which highlights the problems many executives face with integration. Check out the podcast episode to find out who said it.

Other areas of focus included buyer and seller challenges. On the seller-side, the panel explored why people sell and how selling to a bigger firm can solve problems with time management, talent acquisition, and growth. On the buyer-side, they talked about whether or not it is a seller’s market, why sellers are leaving money on the table, and the impact of funded buyers with impatient capital who are overpaying for deals. The discussion of whether or not we are in a deal bubble in the RIA market and what is contributing to that capped off a well-rounded discussion.

Keynote Debate

The next session was the keynote debate between Pershing’s Mark Tibergien and Echelon Partners’ Dan Seivert which has been a staple of the conference since its inception. Regardless of whether or not Mark and Dan actually believed the stances they were taking, they conducted a formal debate of seven different topics such as “the ideal way to grow with recruiting vs. acquiring” and “sharing synergy value and how it is split.” After each debate topic, they opened it up for questions and discussed their real views on the same topics which provided a lot of insight into the way they see deals.

Additional Panels and Final Thoughts

Following a short break, the conference transitioned to a panel format with the first discussion being centered on working with private equity investors and included Jeff Dekko of Wealth Enhancement Group, Jim Gold of Steward Partners, and Larry Roth of RLR Strategic Partners. The next panel focused on recruiting and breakaway deals, and it featured Bill Willis of Willis Consulting, Jeff Bischoff of Old Greenwich Consultants, and Robb Baldwin of TradePMR. Last up was an interview format of Manny Roman of Pimco on the people’s side of dealmaking.

Next, Dan Seivert took over with a solo session on deal structures, valuation, and transaction trends. Dan discussed the net reduction of advisors each year, the stage where there are peak margins, and what private equity firms are looking for before they invest. We moved back to the panel format in which I was one of the speakers. The topic was the “Battle of the Outside Council,” where Ted Cohen, Chris Frieden, and Dave Mrazik and I conducted a negotiation of a purchase agreement live for the audience. It was a phenomenal experience in which we addressed topics including purchase price adjustment, non-competes, reps and warranties, and employee agreements. Each of us took one buyer-side and one seller-side issue and got into an actual negotiation with real-world scenarios. It was lively, fun, engaging for the audience, and we received great feedback and were told that it was a very highly rated session.

Finally, the last section was on financing options for fueling deals. The panel included Aaron Hasler of SkyView Partners, Ed Swenson of Dynasty Financial Partners, Dustin Mangone of PPC Loans, and Rick Dennen of Oak Street Funding, who talked about capital availability in the market, types of deals they fund and who they focus on.

The event was a tremendous success with great networking opportunities and quality speaker from whom the participants learned a lot. I would highly recommend checking it out next year, and if you haven’t already, tune into the latest episode of my Fueling Deals podcast for a detailed breakdown of valuable takeaways from the conference.

Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author and professional speaker who is passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.

If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal- Ready Assessment today!

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Authentic Deal-Making Authentic Leadership Deal-Driven Growth

Entrepreneurial Freedom

Entrepreneurial-Freedom-2

As the CSO of Popdog, Niles Heron embodies an entrepreneurial spirit driven by freedom and the ability to control his own destiny. He has witnessed successful careers built under the restraint of golden shackles, but when the going is tough and failure is imminent, Heron finds comfort in the fact that his decisions yield the final outcome. Wealthy and untethered is the name of the game, and Heron has lived by that notion since he started his first internet radio business at fifteen years old.

Popdog is fundamentally focused on content creation and consumption in the world of live streaming, and they provide services and technology to some of the top content creators in the esports and video-on-demand spaces. This includes analytics tools that better portray their value to brands for sponsorship and monetization, and management services for nearly the top 40 content creators in the gaming industry.

Organic and Inorganic Growth in the Startup Space

Heron’s experience with accelerator programs in Michigan gave him a lot of access to early-stage startups where he found inspiration in nurturing the next generation of entrepreneurs, but a lot of businesses try to raise money to solve problems without finding a proper product-market fit. This led Heron to realize that his true passion was not in raising capital, but in helping people make their products work. As a result, Heron shifted his focus to consulting and built a powerful resume that paved the way for his future endeavors.

“If all you need is money, you can go to the bank, but what you need is proof that your business works.”

There are many types of deals out there and organic growth has to be the foundation, but once you’ve found the actual customers for your actual product, you can start augmenting. From this position, you have the ability to force growth in any number of directions, but if you go in all directions you will grow much slower. If you’re trying to scale, you need to pick one direction and understand that this is where investment really matters.

The reason you need to have one customer is so you can comprehend why you don’t have two customers, and if you can’t answer that you might as well have zero. The whole point of the partnership is to expand your customer base by deepening the relationship with existing customers or finding new ones. Demand limit is important to consider but if you can’t figure out why you’re not acquiring more customers, the partnership grows frail.

Doing Deals vs. Adding Value

People don’t go and seek deals because they often don’t understand the problem they’re trying to solve when they get the deal. The reality is that you can’t do deals if you’re not willing to be extremely self-critical. On the other hand, if there is no natural limitation set, deals become arbitrary since your focus should always be getting more customers. Unfortunately, that is not the way most businesses work since the markets have become over-saturated.

Before this episode, Niles Heron never saw himself as someone who does deals, but he always identified as somebody who seeks to add more value by any means necessary. Whether he is helping someone generate organic growth or finding a partner that can provide the means, he stresses that anyone trying to “do deals” should really be focusing on how they can add value. This requires time, but if you strive to accomplish something a “deal” is just the facilitator.

Click here to listen to his Fueling Deals podcast episode.

Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author and professional speaker who is passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.

If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal- Ready Assessment today!

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Authentic Deal-Making Authentic Leadership

Dealmaker DNA: Identifying Your Internal Body Work

Internal-Body-Work

n every Fueling Deals episode, I talk about different types of deals to cover a full spectrum of large scale mergers and acquisitions and smaller deals you can do without significant capital. You know by now that there are a lot of myths surrounding your ability to do deals from a company point of view, but there is also a lot of misconceptions surrounding your ability to do deals on a personal level. Who is a dealmaker and who isn’t? What defines a dealmaker?

At its core, I believe that a dealmaker is someone who is willing to learn – and it really is that simple. This antiquated idea of the door-to-door salesman type who is always greasing palms and lubing deals is no longer effective (if it ever really was). In this day and age, authenticity, transparency, and coming from a positive place where you can make an impact is the new gold standard, but risk-taking is still an extremely important trait.

The Decision to Start Doing Deals

The difference is that if you are an entrepreneur, you’ve likely already taken a risk and embraced this trait to the fullest extent. There is risk in every deal and likewise, there is risk for every company that opens its doors. Business owners are already risk-takers and they constantly take ownership of the consequences of their decisions, so the only entrepreneurs not doing deals are the ones who haven’t decided to do so.

All of your decisions are just decisions. There are processes you have to learn if you haven’t done something before, there are resources you need to put in place, mistakes you’re going to make—it’s the same thing with deals because there is just another learning curve and something you haven’t done before. Every skill that you need to do deals are the same skills you need to run a business, so if you learn the landscape, the industry, the available opportunities, and make a decision, you’re going through the same steps you use on a frequent basis.

Identifying Your Internal Body of Work

Like anything else, you can start small, build your skill level and increase the size of your deals as you get better, but to accomplish this you have to disconnect from your limiting beliefs by addressing an internal body of work. At whatever point in your career that takes place, you must look at what is coming up internally and preventing you from doing deals do accelerate inorganic growth.

The first thing to do is to identify the internal gap to see exactly what steps must be taken to get where you want to be. Whether it is fear, insecurity, lack of confidence, or anything else, identifying the internal work clarifies that gap and allows you to see the roadmap to move forward. In this solocast episode of Fueling Deals, I share a collection of insights that shed light on how you might be excluding yourself from the dealmaker’s table and how to break through and become a dealmaker.

Click here to listen to the episode, and visit www.fuelingdeals.com for more informative episodes on how to grow your business inorganically through deals.

Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author and professional speaker who is passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.

If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal- Ready Assessment today!

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Authentic Leadership News

3 Worst Salary Negotiating Techniques

Deal-Driven Business Management

My article 3 Worst Salary Negotiating Techniques For Negotiating a Salary is a good reminder on things to avoid during a negotiation. Compensation can be a stressful topic and if you approach it form a scarcity mindset, you will never achieve the number you are striving toward. Avoid these three techniques if you want your negotiation to succeed:

1.Talking too much.
2. Letting ego take over.
3. Being inflexible.
4. Negotiating your salary can be less stressful if you rely on clarity, detachment, and equilibrium and avoid talking too much, ego and rigidity.

Read the full article here.

Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author and professional speaker who is passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.

If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal- Ready Assessment today!

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Authentic Leadership

Six Main Reasons Why Negotiations Fail

The-Globe-And-Mail

In Harvey Schachter’s article on The Globe and Mail, I shared my experience with the main reasons negotiations fail. Don’t make these common mistakes:

1. Lack of preparation
It’s vital you prepare externally, learning about market conditions, history, and other factors that might influence the deal. But you also need to prepare internally, knowing what your objectives and bottom line are. What are you willing to pay for this purchase? What will be the title and actual work of the person you intend to hire? If ill-prepared, externally or internally, you will likely stumble.
2. Ego
“Your goal should never be to win the negotiation,” Mr. Kupfer says, referring to the desire to be able to brag afterward about how you crushed the other side. Often, he finds, such negotiators fare poorly, winning the one point they obsess about and not noticing other areas where they are unsuccessful in gaining their objectives. And if you talk too much, stroked by ego, you could be giving away information you shouldn’t and are not listening to understand the other side’s points.
3. Fear
Negotiators often fear the new, uncertain or different world ahead and, again, avoid a deal that would be worthwhile. Mr. Kupfer cites an entrepreneur who kept thinking up reasons a deal that would double his business could end up hurting rather than helping him. The solution was to write down his fears, which showed they were minor, easily addressed, or unlikely.
Read the rest of the 6 on the full article.

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Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author and professional speaker who is passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.

If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal- Ready Assessment today!

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Authentic Leadership

New $11B RIA Aggregator Tries Divide-and-Conquer M&A Approach

Edelman Financial Services

TORRANCE, Calif. — Wealth Partners Capital Group, a newly-formed RIA aggregator, is taking a triumvirate, divide-and-conquer, approach to mergers and acquisitions.

Founded earlier this year by John Copeland, Rich Gill and Sean Bresnan, the executive team that ran the highly successful wealth management division of Affiliated Managers Group, Wealth Partners will pursue small and mid-sized RIAs across the country via three regional firms it has already taken positions in.

“We want to be a national firm with regional strength,” says Patrick Goshtigian, president of Torrance, California-based EP Wealth Advisors, one of the three firms now owned by Wealth Partners. “We see an opportunity to fill that space with a lot of firms stuck in the middle who will need scale and resources to make that leap.”

EP, which has made three acquisitions in the last two years and has $2.5 billion in AUM, is targeting firms with between $300 million and $600 million in AUM, particularly those that are in Seattle, northern California and Denver, Goshtigian says.

Firms with less than $300 million who are looking for all cash succession deals will also be considered, he added. Otherwise, targeted firms will be offered a combination of cash and equity.

Read the full article here.

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Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author and professional speaker who is passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.

If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal- Ready Assessment today!

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Authentic Leadership

How to Get Yours In A Negotiation With 3 Simple Steps

How to Get Yours In A Negotiation

In my interview with Kevin Kruse, New York Times bestselling author, I break down the three keys to negotiating success. Clarity, Detachment and Equilibrium (CDE) are paramount to an authentic negotiating deal. It goes beyond CDE when you add the layer you need to strengthen yourself psychologically to prepare for an upcoming negotiation.

CDE works best when combined with CPR – Context, Purpose and Results. What I mean by context is that your state of being really counts in a negotiation.

I gave an example in the book about a big team in the service business that had gone to a place they were really unhappy at. They were going to go into a big negotiation to try to negotiate their way out of this deal. They had bad legal agreements, they had non-solicits meaning they couldn’t take their clients legally, so they were not in great shape legally, so they had to negotiate a deal. Everybody has a context. You may not realize what it is.

Basically they’re on the phone telling me how horrible these guys are and how they were misrepresented when they came in as to the terms, and how these guys were terrible people. I said to them, if you’re holding it out that these guys are jerks, they manipulated you, they lied to you, what’re the odds of getting a deal done?

We worked with them to shift their context on who they were being walking into the room. For them, just as an example, they realized, we need to be calm. The other thing they realized they needed to be was ‘patient’. They were very impatient, they wanted to get out of there. They didn’t have strong leverage to start with, so the more impatient they were the less chance they would have of being successful.

Then they realized that they also needed to be ‘firm’, because these guys were tough negotiators. Although they wanted to be ‘patient’ and ‘calm’, they also realized they needed something in their context where they wouldn’t get taken advantage of. They weren’t going to be pushovers. But they didn’t want it to be words like ‘aggressive’, ‘assertive.’ Those were more combative words, so they came up with ‘firm.’

That’s an example of shifting your context to a context that will put you in the best place and best way to be able to be successful in negotiating. That’s the context, I usually use words like that, three or four words that you can go back to if you feel yourself going off.

Read my full interview with Kevin Kruse at Huffington Post.

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Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author and professional speaker who is passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.

If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal- Ready Assessment today!

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Authentic Leadership

Authentic Negotiating: A Crucial Skill for HR Professionals

Recriter

My article at Recruiter explains why negotiating is vital for HR professionals. They use negotiation skills to work to resolve employee disputes, negotiating compensation and benefits, among other needed tasks.

HR professionals should apply the core framework for authentic negotiating: Clarity, Detachment and Equilibrium for their own negotiating needs, as well as train employees in better ways to achieve success. Try this:

  • Ask employees during training to think of what they do personally when they want to clear their heads and relax. It might be exercise, meditation, prayer, contemplation, deep breathing, taking a walk, listening to music, reading, getting a pep talk from a trusted colleague, or any number of other personal techniques. Encourage employees to use their techniques before starting a negotiation and between sessions of a negotiation. Let them know it is okay for them to even call a break in a session to engage in their preferred grounding practice, if necessary.
    Read the rest of my article and tips at Recruiter.

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Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author and professional speaker who is passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.

If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal- Ready Assessment today!

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