Colin Sprake spent eight months negotiating a deal that he killed 24 hours before signing when due diligence revealed the other side lacked integrity. He chose to walk away rather than harm his employees and company, even with everything on the line. The lesson: trust your gut and don't compromise your values, no matter the cost.
A deal I'd worked on for 8 months suddenly collapsed 24 hours before signing the papers. And I want to tell you a little bit more about what happened the next morning. I can tell you one thing. One of the things in business is about living your values. And you know what? I looked at that deal. I'd spent 8 solid months doing due diligence, going through every piece of that deal. And then the day before, I realized these people don't share our values. They don't have integrity. They're people that say one thing and do something else. And you know what? My gut just told me this was not the right deal. So immediately I aborted, and the next morning I went in to tell our team. They were horrified. But one thing they said to me, Colin, one thing you do is you live your values. And when people don't live them, you abort. Because like I say to many of you all the time when you listen to these videos, is that life is difficult at the beginning, it only gets worse. It took 8 months to realize that this deal had no integrity, that this deal was going to be a lot more challenging, number one, but also potentially a lot more harmful to the people that were part of the deal in terms of employees in the company that we were buying. And I said, you know what, I can't do this deal. You got to do the right thing at the right time, all the time, because that's integrity. And I highly recommend that you never compromise on your values. When you compromise on your values, you're really saying, I will compromise on anything and do what it takes, whether I feel right or not. And I'm about sleep good at night, put your head in the pillow knowing you did good for people today.
