Page 175 - James Caan - The Real Deal

16 · Life in the Office

someone was making on a contract. ‘So you say the materials are
£15,000 and it will take a team of fifteen people twenty days?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And what’s the day rate for each worker?’
‘£150.’
‘So, let me see, that’s £15k for materials, plus fifteen people,
times twenty days, times £150, that’s . . . £60k for the job. But you
quoted me £75k, what’s the extra £15k for?’
And if they couldn’t justify the extra, I would negotiate hard:
they’d already told me what their costs were, I’d worked out their
margin so I knew how hard I could bargain.
I still believed wholeheartedly in my dad’s strategy of win-win – I
still do, of course – but my negotiating position changed depending
on whether I was negotiating for a commodity or a service. If I was
simply bargaining with a stationery supplier, I would be looking
for the best price, but if I was buying the services of something like
a PR agency then price wasn’t my only consideration.
If, let’s say, an agency had quoted me £2k a month to handle
my PR, what would be the point of bargaining them down to
£1500? They would have been demoralised, angry even, and they
wouldn’t work as hard for me. I might as well have thrown that
£1500 away.
The other thing I learned to do in negotiations was always to
ask one final question when we shook hands: Are you happy with
that deal? Mostly, people said they were.
‘Good, because what I don’t want is for you to go back home
and feel bad. I want us both to feel that we’re going to get what
we want out of this deal. So if you’re not happy tell me now, don’t
call me tomorrow saying you’ve changed your mind.’
Probably about 20 per cent of the time, people said: ‘Actually,
James, I’m not very happy with it.’
‘Great. You’ve done me a huge favour. Let’s sort it out now. If
you could change one of the pieces of this deal, what would it be?’

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