We’ve been thinking a lot about the risks involved with getting what you think you want, and, for whatever reason, not asking for more. It’s been said that the only constant in life is change. Whether or not you take action in life or in business, you can be sure that things aren’t going to stay the same. Risk taking is not for everyone. For us at WatzThis?, in order to have a positive impact on how change happens, we need to take risks and stretch beyond what we’re comfortable with and push the limits of what we think is possible.
Last week we made the biggest deal of our young start-up’s life. We decided to rent a considerably larger office space than we have now, and to make a big change to how we do business. The details are exciting, but we’ll leave them out for now. Don’t worry, we’ll tell you about them in future emails.
Unlike most of the other deals we make, where we have our awesome literary agent or another broker on our side, representing us, we decided to handle the negotiations of this deal ourselves.
The day before our meeting to discuss the potential of us renting the space, we watched a course on negotiation from Coursera.org at 2x speed, and our strategy changed completely. We decided to ask for what we really wanted, rather than what we thought the other party would agree to.
The payoff was huge. Not only for our deal, but for us personally as well. We didn’t get everything we asked for, but we got considerably more than we had previously expected. If it wasn’t for that last-minute cramming on negotiation, (something neither of us have historically been very good at), we would have never asked for exactly what we wanted.
Another great and unexpected benefit from all of this is that we tried, and succeeded, at what we are always encouraging others to do. We saw a place where our knowledge could be improved, we did the work to improve it, and we took the risk of applying that new knowledge.
This experience opened our eyes to new possibilities and to a greater potential we didn’t even know we possessed. We encourage you to go forth, push yourself, and ask for more.