Sam Imperati, The Attorney That Fights For Your Business! | Biz To Biz Podcast

Welcome to the Biz to Biz Podcast, your number one source for all business news. Hey everybody, welcome to B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast, sponsored by Nationwide Payment System and our new product NPS One and Click Biller, where we show you how to do smart invoicing. Go to our website nationwidepaymentsystems.com and book a demo. But today we're here to talk about some really cool stuff. Maybe, maybe not. And we have an attorney on the podcast today. We're going to talk about when you have a problem in your business and you need some resolutions, business resolutions. We're going to be talking with Sam Imperati from ICMResolutions.com. That's his website. And we're going to dive in and talk about business. You know, from time to time when you have a business, you run into problems and then you call Sam. So what happens when somebody has a problem, Sam?

Well, usually they panic. They start spinning in the intersection of logic and emotion. They catastrophize. Fear sets in. They're in that fight or flight kind of mode, and they regress back to the conflict resolution skills they used in high school. And that makes matters worse. So I come in and help them stop the spinning in that intersection of logic and emotion, establish their true north. What are their true needs? What are the true needs of their loyal opposition? And together, the three of us sit at a table and work out a deal that's sustainable and durable. We call that a resolution versus a mere settlement where people walk away equally unhappy.

Okay, so how long— I mean, how long have you been an attorney?

I started practicing, uh, in September of 1979.

Wow.

Yeah, back in the day. I mean, I was telling my associate that when the fax machine came out, we just thought the world of technology had exploded, and we were turning stuff around at the speed of light. Little did we know then that here you and I are thousands of miles apart, but yet communicating in real time with, uh, with and over that thing they call the interweb or some such thing, right?

The interwebs. Oh yeah, I mean, listen, we're according to when I was a kid, and by the year 2000 we should have had flying cars, but that didn't happen.

No, no, not yet, but I, I don't think it'll happen in my lifetime, but I've got some 4 great-granddaughters, uh, granddaughters who are great, and I suspect it will happen, um, in their lifetimes.

Okay, so you know what happens when, let's say you have 2 people, we'll make up a situation, you have 2 people, they're in business together, and whatever, one is not happy, maybe they're both not happy. What happens?

Well, usually they go into denial. They stop talking to each other. The communication becomes terser and more curt, and they They spin, and little things become big things. I like to say that misdemeanors become felonies and felonies become capital crimes. And if they are speaking, we know that the other team is lying. And as a result, no progress is made.

So how do you resolve something like that?

Well, usually I talk to them individually. And have a candid conversation about what's going on from their perspective. And then I suggest to them, usually in a joint email, perhaps a joint conference call, that here's a resolution plan. Here are what I believe are the necessary steps to get them to yes. And we sit down in a room. It could be a Zoom room. It could be in person.. And we go through ICM's 4-step process where we unpack the deal. We go from what are their positions and what are their arguments to below the waterline of adversarial banter, which is where their underlying interests and needs and desires live. We start listing options. Options is an acronym. It's only proposals. That include others' needs succeed. Because if Party A's proposal doesn't include anything for Party B, it's really not an option, it's a position. And that's what happens, that's how we start off, and it then flows from there.

Okay, so that's the 4-step process?

Yeah, yeah, and you can find that, it'll be on the website, it's a free download if people are interested in seeing what that works at the micro level.

So what's like a real-world strategy that, that, or a tool that listeners could start using tomorrow to help them with finding resolutions to issues they have?

Well, I'll give you two quick ones. Um, you can tell when your loyal opposition, um, isn't happy because they tend to be speaking in the past tense. They lead with, "Allen, you promised me this. You said you were going to do that. How come you didn't fulfill your promises to me?" One way is to simply change your verb tense. So I coach people to speak in the present tense. "Allen, here we are. Where do we go from here? What's our next steps?" And segue into the future tense. 'What, how do you see us functioning next month once we've resolved this problem?' So use, using the right verb tense is key. Second is a technique I call the umbrella question, and it's really a fill-in-the-blank sentence. 'How can we address your needs, Allen, while at the same time my needs?' And you list them out. Thereby parentheses, and then focus on what we have in common.

Right.

And that sets the stage because if you answer that question with intellectual integrity, it's going to be that resolution versus a settlement. And when you, you know, it's so interesting when you go to judge school, you learn that a good settlement is when everyone walks away equally unhappy. When you go to mediator school, you learn that a settlement is not enough. You need something richer and more durable. We call that a resolution. And when a matter is resolved, the parties walk away with their business and personal needs reasonably satisfied. That leads to a more sustainable, fair, durable solution.

Okay. That's interesting. And what do you say to somebody— what if they're in a situation where they have a problem with a business partner or whatever, other or multiple partners in their business? What do you say? How do they— what's the— how do they stay resilient in a time like that? And how do you convince people to sit down at the table They say, no, I don't want to talk about it. Like, so how do you convince them to sit down at the table?

So there are 12 common objections to conflict resolution. One of them is, I just don't want to be in the room with that yahoo. They're a piece of work of near biblical proportions, and I can't stand them. And I guffaw and normalize it by saying, what do you think they're saying about you? And they usually politely laugh and smile and say, okay, I get it. And then I make it clear to them that they don't have to settle. We're simply exploring the options versus debating our positions. And, you know, having been a trial lawyer, sat on the bench, I was Nike's trial attorney in private practice. There's no such thing as a good lawsuit. Even the winners come away unhappy. Happy. My trade union lawyers are— we punish them with our bills. The process takes too long. It impacts their opportunity cost. They can be doing many other things to grow the business than sitting in depositions or in the courtroom. And I basically make the business case that You got to get this thing resolved because it's going to metastasize further. And then we're talking corporate bankruptcy in the interpersonal sense and maybe even in the literal sense, because these disputes can blow up a company.

Yeah, I can see that. I bet there's some interesting stories happen with, with Nike. They have— I'm sure their business, they probably dealt with a lot of people and contracts and things like that. And You know, sometimes people go into business with the best intentions, and then, you know, 5 or 10 years later, all of a sudden, you know, one person is not participating and the other person is participating in the business. And, you know, how does that work out?

Uh, it's all about, uh, uh, the elements of a successful team. And what are they? Mutually agreeable goals. Common values, clearly defined expectations, and trust and respect. And what happens frequently is they come in with these generalized goals and objectives that are like mom and apple pie. No one can disagree. Let's become multimillionaires and make the world a better place. Yabba dabba doo. Everyone can jump on board with that. But when they don't nail the clearly defined expectations as to to who's doing what, when, where, why, and how, the strain of those undefined objective indices of contribution start to take hold. And then the you-know-whats starts hitting the fan. And again, misdemeanors turn into felonies, felonies into capital offenses, et cetera.

So you mentioned about the Ten Commandments. And so do you have Ten Commandments of business? Like, what's your— you have— what are your Ten Commandments?

Well, um, first of all, unlike the Ten Commandments, they're not written in stone. I mean, context is everything, duh. So if the dispute is internal, the focus needs to be first on that relationship. A poor relationship is going to sour or make almost impossible to resolve the more mechanical issues or the flybys. Do we expand to a new market? Do we contract and stay where we're at? Do we do a new product line or not? Etc., etc., etc. So first is attitudinally getting in a place where they agree to explore it. The lesser the stakes and the less emotionality, there's a lot of do-it-yourself, DIY tools and techniques that again are all free on the website. You can take a gander. For those stakes that are higher and there's deep emotionality, oftentimes bringing in a conflict coach if just one side wants assistance and the other is bringing in a mediator where we sit down and get these issues resolved. So it's all about exploration versus debate. Is that attitude? Because, you know, in life and in business, especially in family businesses where life and business are synonymous, you have a choice and it's binary. You can build a relationship and fix the problem, or You can build the case and fix blame. And when we're on autopilot, we tend to want to build the case and fix blame. And if you do that, that's your true north. The most you're going to get out of that is a settlement where everyone walks away unhappy. If your goal is to build a relationship and fix the problem, you'll not only get a settlement, but you'll have that sustainable, durable, fair resolution. That resets the dynamics personally, which then allows the synergy that brought those 2 or 3 or 4 individuals together in the first place to start building something beyond what they thought was possible before the conflict resolution intervention.

Oh yeah, that's definitely true. You know, it's definitely— so what kind of information do you have, like, on your website as resources? Tell me about that.

Sure. Well, one, there is a one-page negotiation and decision-making cheat sheet, and it lays out some core tools. This is the DIY function because, you know, I've had a long successful career, and I'm at the stage in life where it's about giving back and making the world ever so slightly a better place. So there's that tool. There's a tool called a private situational assessment. And let's say 2 or 3 partners or members of a board of directors of a nonprofit or the executive team of governmental agency are not on each other's holiday gift list. I'll have each of them take this situational assessment, and it asks a series of questions. Most of them are using a Likert scale where I lay out a statement, and they check a box from 1 to 7, from not groovy to groovy, to use— to date myself terribly in my linguistics. And I gather up all that information along with their response to some narrative questions. I pull it all together and issue a report that says, here's what I think is working, here's what I think is not. 'If you choose to want to resolve this independently, here are some suggestions. If you want to engage an outsider, here's how you do it.' And they go on and make the decision that works best for their particular fuss, right?

Okay. Oh, so is that another, like, thing you can download from your website?

Yeah, it's actually that one. You take it online. Oh, you take it Folks, folks go online, the results come only to me, and then I get back to folks with some diagnostics and some— excuse me— suggested game plan for intervention, and they decide what works for them.

So do you charge for that or that's free?

The initial assessment that they take is free. But wait, there's more. There's $29.95. You get free Tupperware and Ginsu knives. Operators are standing by, Allen.

And you told me you don't like jokes. Okay.

I love jokes. I actually won a stand-up comedy competition, but under the category intellectual integrity, it was only between lawyers. So all the participants were lawyers. So, you know, in fact, I will buy you and anyone that's listening, Allen, a drink of their choice, alcoholic or not, if you could tell me a lawyer joke. I haven't already heard.

A lawyer joke. I don't know if I, I don't know if I know any lawyer jokes. I, I wasn't prepared to answer that.

No problem. I grade on the curve, so don't worry.

Okay, great on the curve. I say one thing, whenever they're, you know, one of my, when I first got into business a long time ago, in my first business, one of my attorneys told me, goes, whenever you have a dispute, he goes, you want to stay as far away from getting into lawsuits as possible because the only— the only— you'll spend money, the other person will spend money, and only person winning is the attorneys. And it's very rough. So you want to try to, uh, resolve situations in a, in, in a way where you can resolve them with the, the least amount of friction and money. And not get involved into crazy lawsuits. Although I would say I've taken a couple of people to small claims court and I won all. I did 3 and I won all 3 times. So maybe I should have been an attorney.

Yeah, good for you. Now I feel professionally threatened by your competence.

Yeah.

You know, I think, I think that's sage advice, and I will tell you that all things considered, the legal system in the United States works. Sure, there are outliers that happen from time to time. But the bottom line is there are some cases with some people who are so assholean in their behavior that they will not sit down and work out a reasonable compromise. Right. And then you got to go to court. Right. And Believe me, I will oftentimes— not oftentimes, that's incorrect. From time to time, we'll tell parties, I don't think divine intervention is going to get the two of you together. Go forth and litigate and let me know what happens. And oftentimes I'll check in with them a year later after they go to trial and spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and ask, Hey, now that you know what happened, would you do it over? And many times they'll say, yeah, no, man, I wish I had known when we were mediating what I know now. And that's why good mediators have a church chat with the parties that are at odds. And we discuss three things: their BATNA, WATNA, and MILANTA, which is what I take under stress. Let me explain those. Acronym. So BATNA is, if you don't settle, what's your best alternative to a negotiated agreement? So if you don't settle and you go to court, you go to your board of directors, you go to the public, you go to the governmental agency, what's the best likely outcome? Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa come early. And everyone seems to focus on their BATNA. They think that's going to happen the overwhelming majority of the time. But the shadow side of your BATNA is called your WATNA, W-A-T-N-A, the worst alternative to a negotiated agreement. So you don't settle it, you go to court and you get your butt handed to you in a hat.

I'm going to have to get some of these acronyms from you. You have to email those because we're going to use them probably. That's got some good, that's some good material right there.

Yeah. And then, and I didn't come up with those words. There's two dudes, Fisher and Ury, out of Harvard that wrote a book called Getting to Yes, and their sequel was Getting Past No. I'm thinking about writing the third in the series, which I think is the more difficult problem. It's getting around maybe. Where people are crazy. Getting around maybe is going to be sort of my book. But the bottom line is, what's your my latina, most likely alternative to a negotiated agreement? That's if you try the case 100 times, what percentage of time you're going to win. When you do win, what's the range of verdicts? What are the transitional and transactional costs? What are the lost opportunity costs? You put it into a spreadsheet, you multiply times pi and divide by your shoe size, and you get a number that makes sense to settle at. And so good mediators are reality therapists.

Do you have like a case of Pepto-Bismol?

Yes, exactly. That comes extra. It comes with the Ginsu knives and the Tupperware if you call now, because operators are standing by.

Yeah, I think you got a hand. I mean, this all sounds like my stomach hurt when, you know, when you were saying my— all those things, and I'm like, mylanta, you're gonna need some mylanta.

Yeah, exactly.

So, so what's the, um, what's the— what if you had to give somebody 3 pieces? What would you get, like, 3 pieces of advice? You're having a problem, what's the 3 pieces of advice that you would give somebody?

One would be stop spinning and step back and look at the problem as though it was presented to you by a close, wise confidant. And think about what questions and advice you would give your friend in the same situation.

Okay.

And that's, that's designed to look realistically at the options available to you. To be aware of your cognitive biases. We all have them. We all suffer from these psychological economics or social economics. Principles, like confirmation bias. We only look for information that supports our case.

Right.

Availability bias. The information that comes to us first and easiest also tends to support what we want to hear. So we rely on that. So it's stepping outside and looking across the field and looking at the entire forest not between, not just behind the particular tree that you are relying upon. 3 would be explore, not debate. Once you start exploring, you're going to be above that waterline of adversarial banter, only exchanging positions and arguments. If you are exploring it, you're diving below that waterline, finding out really goes— what's really going on.

So would that be like downloading that first paper you told me about?

Yeah, that would help. That would help a lot, especially the assessment. You know, um, when I sat on the bench as a part-time judge and I listened to my colleagues argue, all of a sudden I realized, looking at it from that neutral perspective, Allen Kopelman, MD: that when we're in conflict, we present our arguments in increasing order of absurdity. We start with our very best argument, go to our second best argument. They see our first argument and raise our second argument, you know, and it's like a game of poker. And never once did I, after a trial, turn to the jury and say, ladies and gentlemen, it's your time to deliberate and determine who prevails. The only issue for you to consider is who had the last argument. That's not how it works. You know, that's not how it works. But somehow when we're in that fight-or-flight mode, we seem to think that's the case. And then we're going to end up in a disastrous situation.

Yeah, it's like, you know, that you don't want to be on a jury trial. I don't know about that. Sounds risky.

Yeah, well, yeah, they're 12 human beings too trying to do the best job they can and unraveling the facts. But, you know, the system overall works. Again, yes, of course there's always exceptions, but I think they, they prove the rule. And community juries are wise and good judges and good lawyers can set up the matter so they're looking at it from all the various lenses and apply the law to the facts and come up with the right answer.

No, I get it. So if you wanted to sum up everything and give, and give us a, uh, some parting words, what would they be?

I really think it, it is this: when conflict rears its ugly head The first question you need to ask yourself is, timeout, is my goal to build a relationship with this person and fix the problem, or is it to build the case and fix blame? Once you choose one of those two routes and you stick to them, The end process results are clear. Building that relationship, you are going to get a resolution. If you decide to build the case, the most you can hope for is a settlement where everyone walks away equally unhappy. And so really focusing in on and not detouring from your core mission Building a case or building a relationship is really where it starts, plays out in the middle, and where it ends.

I think you gave some really good advice to people on the podcast today. I hope everybody listened to this. I'm gonna— in fact, I'm gonna go back and listen to some of this myself because it's a really interesting subject matter, and there's probably not enough people out there doing what Sam does. Because you don't see it that often. I mean, mediation is probably a little bit different than what you're offering to do, right?

I do both. I do both conflict coaching, um, facilitation, and mediation. Facilitation is just like mediation, but it's not confidential, whereas mediation in most states, uh, is a confidential process. Oh, okay. Parties are free to be candid, uh, with me and not have the worry it's going to come back to haunt them.

And you can help anybody in any state, right?

Yeah. I mean, nowadays most of this stuff is done by Zoom. It's more efficient. The more emotional it is and the more protracted it is, the more likely it should be in person.

Oh, okay.

To have that, that direct communication. But the overwhelming majority of these matters can be worked out with Zoom. And, you know, Good mediators meet with everyone at the same time. They do Kissinger-esque shuttle diplomacy, going from room to room, be it Zoom or physical, and help people to carve out something that makes sense.

All right, well, thank you for joining us on the podcast today. Today again, Sam Imperante, he's from icmresolutions.com. I tell you, check out his website. It looks like, you know, he's a great subject matter expert on conflict resolution with businesses, and I think it's super important, you know, for, you know, when you're in business to deal with things and, uh, in a calm— as in, as in the calmest way that you can, right? That's probably the best thing, and try and avoid lawyers. That's why you can go to somebody like Sam and get your problems worked out. So I appreciate you coming on the show today.

Hey, no problem. I do have a closing seasonal lawyer joke for you.

Okay, let's hear the lawyer joke.

You know, as it's getting colder and colder out, this becomes more and more sage advice. It's: How do you tell when it's really, really cold out? Drum roll. Us lawyers have our hands in our own pockets— da-da-da-da-da! Hey Alan, it's a pleasure; thanks for doing the good work you're doing and getting out resources to information—I really respect you for that—and best wishes hope never see you in professional capacity paying me conflict resolution.

Okay, yeah, but it's, you know, it's important that people, you know, we try to educate people on B2B Vault and provide, you know, educational business information so people can, that are in different, you know, we talk about all sorts of subjects on here, fintech, AI, websites, marketing, everything, and sometimes legal issues because that's what happens. You have to deal with legal issues sometimes when you're a business owner. So this is a Great podcast for any business owner to listen to, and there was great advice in there on how to handle different situations. I think it's great. So I say, everybody, thanks for listening to B2B Vault. We're signing off. I always say, carpe diem, seize the day. Peace out. Again, B2B Vault is sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems. If you're listening, you know where to find us: YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook. Instagram. We're on every podcast network from Spotify, Apple, and every other podcast. So follow us, and when it comes out, we'll tag you on LinkedIn, Sam, and you'll get to share it with your followers and share it with your, you know, clients and future clients so they can find out more about your business. Everybody have a great day. Take care. Thank you.