Mastery Monday - Be Willing to Walk Away

In negotiation, you need to prepare in advance for your negotiation situation. Basically you are having a discussion about the situation and looking for an outcome that you are happy with.

In any negotiation, before you go into it, you have to decide what your walk away point will be. You must do this in advance so when you are in the midst of the discussion, and it’s not even close to being resolved the way you want it to, you may need to walk away.

What is the walk away point? That is subjective to each person. The reason you want to decide that in advance is so you don’t get caught up in the emotion during the discussion and agree to something that isn’t good for you. It’s basically making an agreement with yourself in advance given all the facts of the situation.

A friend of mine recently closed her business. She didn’t want to close it but circumstances were not in her favor to remain open. When she went about working to save the business, she made a decision in advance what she would do to make it work so she could remain open.

She had a small retail space in a row of stores off a main road. There were a couple other stores in the building that were also retail type spaces. There was limited parking but it worked fine for many months. People would come and shop and then leave afterwards. 

Then a coffee shop moved in and the customers would talk up all the parking and sit in the coffee shop for hours. This negatively affected the other businesses there. One had already decided to close. The owner of the coffee shop would not cooperate or do anything to work with the other businesses about the parking situation. 

My friend called and wrote to the property management company and the building owner. Neither were willing to do anything to support her. She went to City Hall to research code about the parking and see if there was anything she could do. She also reached out to the local Chamber of Commerce. She exhausted everything she could to resolve the situation but no one was willing to work with her on it to resolve it in her favor. The business had lost money for 3 months and it was directly related to the coffee shop and the parking situation. 

She decided it was time to close and walk away. It was a tough decision but in the end she was happy with the fact that she made a plan, executed it and walked away when the plan didn’t work out in her favor. She had planned her walk away point beforehand. 

When you are considering your position in any situation, determine what your walk away point is before you go into it. That way you will have a clear plan going in and a clear exit strategy when it’s time to walk away.