Client Case Study: Leveraging Negotiation Training for Business Success with Bryan Heid [Real Examples, Results]

Hello, my friend, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. Thanks for joining us today. With over 10 million downloads and listeners from more than 180 different countries, it's dedicated listeners just like you who have made Negotiate Anything the number one negotiation podcast in the world. I'm your host, Kwame Christian. I'm a business lawyer, mediator, author, and the proud CEO of the American Negotiation Institute. Now, before we get into today's insightful conversation, I have a golden opportunity for those of you who recognize the power of negotiation in your professional lives. Have you ever found yourself wishing that you could navigate those high stakes conversations with more confidence? Or perhaps you're looking to empower your team with the art of persuasion and conflict resolution? At the American Negotiation Institute, we've crafted specialized keynotes and workshops tailored for those very needs. We've transformed the negotiation skills of professionals worldwide, and we're eager to do the same for you. We believe the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And our goal is to help you improve your lives and the lives of those around you, one difficult conversation at a time. Don't let another challenging conversation leave you second guessing. Click the link in the description to discover how we can help you find confidence in conflict, negotiate better deals, and have stronger relationships. Because in the world of business, every conversation counts. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview. Brian, thanks for joining us today.

Yeah. Hey, Kwame, glad to be here.

Glad to have you. And I feel like this is a long time coming.

We've known each other for a few years. I followed you and you've been a big part of my negotiation. I'll say training and growth and Turing. So it's awesome to actually be invited in and be a part of this. So thanks.

Yeah, man. And how about we do this? So let's start off and you can tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what you do, and then afterwards we can talk about how we got connected. And I think that'll just be a perfect segue into our topic.

Yeah, it will. So my name is Brian Hyde. I am in strategic procurement. I've been working in this field for approximately about 15 years. Have a background, really started with US military. So I'm a former military officer and left the military, went on to the business world, worked in purchasing, operations, logistics, and then really found my niche here in strategic procurement a few years ago. So been working in that field and really have grown quite a bit to understand and be able to deliver results for my employer but also along the path, I had to realize that as I looked at myself as a negotiator and then looked at my team members, who were often even younger than me quite a bit, that we needed negotiation training and back. I think it was like 2018, when Trump, at the time the President, was pushing for tariffs. And all of a sudden, it kind of hit me like, holy crap. Basically all of our contracts are going to have to be renegotiated at once from suppliers that are going to be demanding more money to pay for tariffs because they don't want it coming out of their bottom line. And I was like, we're not ready for this. And that was probably like, fall of that 2017. And then I think 2018, he said, this is it. We're going forward with tariffs on China and then Europe and our North American neighbors. So it was just kind of crazy. So I was like, how do I get ready for this? And we'd had some minor negotiation training along the way at the company I was working for and really just started searching the web and found Ani. And I'm like, I've never really been in the podcast, but let me check this out. I got on there, and I think one of the very first podcasts I listened to, you had Chris Voss on for the first time. Like, he had just come out with his book, and I was, like, blown away by it, and I was like. So I went out, bought his book right away. Then I bought the book for my entire team, and I even sent a copy of the book down to my team member in Mexico. Like, you got to read this. This is some really good techniques and tactics and things that we don't understand, we really haven't ever tried to employ. Maybe the silent tactic is about it, but even that we really hadn't used it and didn't know, you know, maybe how best to use it on a regular basis. I'm sure there was plenty of times I should have kept my mouth shut. You know, I just kept talking in negotiations, not realizing, you know, the power of that. So, yeah, it's kind of how we came to this point, you know, here this past couple years, where you've done some training for us both that my previous employer at JLG Industries and Oshkosh Corporation. And then, you know, I've continued to follow your podcast and still am learning from your many hosts or your guests, many guests that you have on podcast.

Thanks, man. Yeah, that's a perfect synopsis because it has been a really long journey just in General with the podcast and with a and I, but also with us, too, because we connected through the podcast. You reached out, filled out a workshop request, and then we did that event, and we've just been in touch ever since. And so in years, even in times when we weren't doing trainings or any, like, official business, listeners, I need you to know that Brian and I text all the time, mostly in the fall and winter with increasing hostility and then eventually concessions of our college football fandom.

I think I probably owe you a beer or two from a couple Penn State losses along the way, but sure thing.

Yeah, man, this is funny, this is great. But see, this is an example. Win, win, right? We have a Penn State Nittany lion and Ohio State Buckeye. We're together, we're working together. This is great.

That's right. That's right.

So, listeners, today, what we're going to talk about is negotiation training. But Brian has a really interesting perspective on negotiation training. And one of the many respect and admire about you, Brian, is that you took that element of what you do very, very seriously. And as a leader in the procurement space, you were always making sure that not only you kept up on what was new and evolving in the space of negotiation, but you also made sure that your team was always keeping up on the forefront of negotiation. So can you just tell us a little bit about your mindset around practice and training in general?

Yeah. So again, it grew, I'll say, organically out of need. Right. And awareness. And so, you know, I've always looked at that as, hey, this is an opportunity to continuously learn, which I think is a Jeffersonian principle that for any UVA fans out there, that life is just a continuous learning journey and you need to stay on it. So, you know, that's part of it. But then also, you know, really looking at what's the core skills that are needed for myself and my team's roles. And they're negotiating every day. We were negotiating, still are negotiating every day on, you know, everything from deliveries and things that might seem small to, you know, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts. And, you know, making sure that that adds value back to the organization. So, you know, seeing that that really should have been a core, is a core skill required for strategic procurement and strategic sourcing, supply chain. However you want to categorize that, then you really have to dig into it. So as I looked at it and I started to learn, there's different learning techniques, listening, reading, et cetera. So everybody learns a little Bit different, but I learned quite a bit from listening to the podcast and then forcing myself to read books, which sometimes that's a challenge for me to stay engaged in a book from COVID to cover. But getting into that and then really trying to see, well, how do we apply this on a regular basis. And that really became the challenge because you can bring in outside people to come do 8 hours, 16 hours multi day trainings, but then how do you take that and actually apply it? And I really struggled to see how that was successful over, I'll say time, because the training could be good and you may take a couple nuggets away and be able to apply it. But then, you know, my teams and I were always so engaged in the fight. So it's like you really never pulled away from the fight to focus on it. And so really it was about then trying to figure out how to continue to push this. And one was actually just being in front of leadership and saying, hey, we need this training so that people could see it was a priority and then making it a priority on my team and actually practicing that, you know, those different skills that we were trying to learn or that we had learned in our seminars and trying to make sure that they were practiced over time. So that became more of a natural activity. As you know, when you go into negotiation, you're already stressed, your mind's not necessarily thinking clearly. And if you're going to try to use some tool or tactic or technique that you don't really know and haven't practiced, it's often it's going to not happen. Yeah. So that's kind of how I've, I've worked through this. And it really comes down to approaching each negotiation, you know, with a foundation of training, thorough planning action, and then reviewing that negotiation afterwards and sharing lessons learned. Hey, we won here. We could have done things better, you know, in a different area. Maybe team members, there was a team negotiation. You know, team members didn't work in sync through certain portions of it. Maybe other places they did great. So trying to capture that and share it with a team and make sure that we're learning through that, it's still a journey. I don't have it all figured out. We'll learning, you know, and each team I join or lead is going to be different, you know, to some degree. So, you know, what works for that team and how do we do that, you know, is critical. I mean, I. A gentleman by the name of Mark, he's a director of strategic procurement. I think for Target. He turned me on to the do you know Mark?

I do.

Mark.

We're going to have to give him a shout out in this episode.

Yeah, he'll appreciate that. But he turned me on to the negotiation cards from the negotiation club. I think found that as a great little tool to continually challenge my team with and use that in just weekly end of the week session is what we tried to do every week. So on a Friday before people have completely unplugged, but when they kind of really want to wrap wind down for the day is I just have the team together, we do a little negotiation session with his cards and practice a tactic or technique. You know, really was a nice addition to that. But you know, it's through sharing, it's through learning. Whether it's your podcast or from Mark, Procurement Foundry is another organization. Those all have been good places for me to learn.

Hello my friends. I've got a really exciting announcement for you. On August 30, 2023, we're hosting a negotiate anything masterclass in an amazing 28 million dollar range residence in New York City. This is a once in a lifetime type of experience. It took a long time for me to negotiate the deal to get this location and I'm not sure if or when I'll be able to do it again. Seats are limited. So if you want to make this happen and you want to hang out with me in nyc, check out the link in the description to learn more. Oh Brian, this response just kept on getting better and better as you kept going. So the funny story about Mark, so we're buddies, we text all the time to Vietnamese. He's in Minnesota.

I think he's a gopher. Right?

He's a gopher. So I love texting him. But yeah, I remember when I was looking at my podcast statistics, I live in Columbus, Ohio, so the majority of my downloads came from Columbus, Ohio for a long time. But for some reason in Minnesota, in Minneapolis, that was number two. I didn't understand why Mark is why because he was listening to the show and sending it to his team. This is really funny. But Brian, what I love about this response is that you're showing the importance of leadership in this process of continuous improvement when it comes to negotiation. Because in your organizations the training didn't happen without you pushing it both ways. So you were pushing it to your leaders, helping them to recognize it was a priority. But you were also leading by example with your team. By investing in your own continuous improvement, sharing free resources and sharing books and things like that. You're Showing them that negotiation is important and we can and should do better. And I think the thing is we're all busy and a lot of times we can get so caught up in constantly negotiating at work or whatever it is that we're doing that we don't take the time to slow down to get better at that skill. And you need to allocate specific time in order to do that. It takes a commitment. And I think that's just really important to point out.

Yeah, done this a couple times with my teams. And you know, really, if you say, okay, if we want to dedicate 2% of our 40 hour work week to train, can you like set aside 2% of your 40 hour workweek for training? It's 2%, like, okay, well how much is that? You know, it's doable, you could do it. Or 5%, whatever you want to say, right. And you really break it down to numbers and it's like, all right, well, let's invest in ourselves, let's invest in the team. Let's show each other that one. We, we care about the team members and care about their skills and developing them. And it's just a way to also make sure that people are putting in some time, like at least a small amount of time to develop themselves and we develop each other as a team, you know, when we're doing it as a group. I read a book a number of years ago by Liz Wiseman. It's called Multipliers and it's a leadership book. And it's really about turning your habits and your approach to working with your team to where it's about them. It's about multiplying their efforts. I don't want a team of Brian Hyde if that's the case. It's a team that's going to be really limited. Right. But if I could get team of five really smart people, plus myself too, then, and we're all working together, investing in each other and investing in the success of the team, then we're multiplying the output of the team by significant factors. It's not addition, right. It's multiplication. And that's the goal is to get that multiplication. So yeah, so investing in the team is critical. And I really look at a couple things that I think is, is important as I'll say an overall lesson. And this applies 100% to negotiation as I found it, to relationships with suppliers, internal stakeholders, et cetera. Be a difference maker in that you need to have a positive impact on people. This has been shown to me. So Much, really, in the last, I'll even say last couple months, where people. People were coming back to me and saying, hey, you really impacted me at some point in my career, and I want to do something positive for you in your career. And it just blew me away. So, you know, how'd that happen? It's about being kind to people. It's about working on relationships, having the empathy. Right. The compassionate curiosity. I think you say, Kwame. Right? You know, using compassionate curiosity to make people feel comfortable and feel welcome to be around you, and then working to try to solve problems together. That joint problem solving. I'm sure I haven't always done a good job at it, certainly not a great job at it, but at least I've been able to impact people somehow along the way in a positive manner. And that karma, call it whatever you want, it's come back to be a positive influence and really reinforce me that, hey, every day I have the ability to impact positively somebody other than me. And that's powerful. So that's one. Preparation is the second. You know, we talked about self preparation, building yourself up, but also, you know, as I always told my team, you know, approach your. Your business, particularly big events like negotiations, like, you're an Olympic athlete. And I saw this on, I think it was LinkedIn a number of years ago, probably when the Olympics were going on, and somebody had a note in there like, prepare yourself. Yeah, you're not physically going out, performing like an athlete. You're mentally doing it. So sleep, eating, right, exercise, just the basics, but it helps your mind be able to think more clearly and be open to creative ideas, which is the idea of solving these challenges and problems that we face with our suppliers or internally by coming up and developing good creative ideas, either ourselves or just through our input to the other party that, you know, maybe they came up with the idea or together we develop it. Right? But having that creativity and embracing creativity is critical.

I love this. This is so much here. So being a difference maker, taking the time to prepare and taking preparation very seriously, and then creativity, I think the of all of those things, I mean, they're all very important. The preparation is, for me, the foundation for all of those things, because we can be a lot more creative when we've taken the time to prepare. We can make a difference in the lives of somebody else if we've taken the time to prepare. And we can do that with a lot more precision. And one of the things that I thought was fascinating about our call last week was that when you were talking about Training. You mentioned that you consider training as part of the preparation process. That was fascinating. So can you tell the listeners about that too?

Yeah. Okay, so training is part of the preparation. You know, you're developing, you're learning one. Right. So you're. That also ties into the creativity aspect of our minds. Like the more we learn, we're connecting different ideas together. Right. Different concepts. So that outside bringing, particularly if you're bringing somebody in from the outside, getting that outside input allows us to start thinking differently. Right. It's just our mind will connect those dots and we'll start to realize even probably said this a hundred times, or at least thought it a hundred times. I'm sitting in training and all of a sudden I find myself starting to take notes about things that are going on in my real world, like real time today because I'm connecting the ideas of training. So I got this little list of notes I'm taking just for Brian Hyde and I got a whole nother list of notes that I'm taking on the training. And the notes for Brian Hyde are pulling out these ideas that I just connected in my mind Training. So having that formal training and learning, developing new ideas. Right. And then being able to test them, you know, out is important. But you know, how do you, this would be as much of a question for you as a trainer or as a leader. You know, how do you take, make sure that you're getting what you learned in the classroom setting. Right. And apply it in real world situation or how do you make it not just, you know, one time event but you know, it becomes part of your fabric of how you in this case negotiate or lead problem solve. That's all kind of tied to together here.

Yeah, I think really in order to do it well, you have to have a, a good collaboration between the trainer and the leader. And so for example, for you and me, we, we chatted all the time leading up to the training and we talked afterwards too. And so we were talking about not just how to make the training more impactful, but then also what type of materials and things like that after the fact you could utilize to continue the, the conversation. And so I think with the way that I present, you know, it's almost like a crowd work, improv almost. We talk about the topics and then I'll, I'll say that I want to talk about, but then I'll open it up to the audience to talk and share experiences and ask questions and everything because I want to in the moment give everybody an opportunity to actually play around with the concept themselves. Oh, this is a new tactic that I've learned. Anchoring. How do I utilize this in this situation? How do I utilize it in non monetary ways? Those type of things. I think that's how you make it really practical during the training. And then afterwards it's up to the leader to make sure you keep on encouraging that those thought processes and encouraging people to take those risks in actual negotiations. Because it's like, hey, we practice these techniques. I want to see you all actually utilizing these techniques going forward. Let's report back, let's talk about it. And just continue to sharpen the sword every month.

Yeah, I actually think when we talked last week too, I think the training, like an in person training is important. Right. But the ideal training almost has as much of a takeaway the team can utilize after the training and or follow ups to that training. You can really start to embed those ideas into real world practice and become comfortable with them and start to again, weave that into the fabric of your negotiation style or your negotiations that you lead as opposed to. Okay, it was a nice seminar. Learn some things. But then how do you make sure you take something away from it and apply it? It's difficult, like I said, particularly when you take folks that are in the fight and maybe this is the same, the sales team feel the same way when they go through negotiation training. I don't know. But you're always in the fight and you got to pull out. You do the training and then you're right back in. But you haven't figured out how to integrate what you just learned potentially into how you're going to apply that. That's really the critical piece. How do I apply it? How do I take the important pieces that I want to stay with my team and make sure that happens over time. You know, that's critical piece, particularly as a leader. If I'm going to invest in the training and the time to train, it's not about that day you kind of focus on. It's about that training day. And no, it's. It's about everything after that day.

Oh, you're so right. And again, I think that can be almost lost sometimes because sometimes people are trying to check boxes. I did my training for the decade and I'll be good. And so we have to make sure that we're constantly implementing things.

So I want to be able to take, give some examples here to maybe make it relevant. So 2018, I talked about this earlier, tariffs. We realized, hey, we're going to have to start Negotiating on a lot, a lot of different contracts. All the suppliers are going to want price increases and our company is not going to want it. And we certainly don't want to pass it on to our customers. We can avoid it so we can stay competitive or have a competitive advantage if our competition is out there passing on price increases. So at that point, gone through, read Chris Voss's book. Nobody split the difference or about splitting the difference. Never split the difference. And then I'd gotten some good things off of your podcast. And so as a team, we started to try some of these tactics like the compassionate curiosity, empathy, I think he called it, I'm trying to remember how he phrased it, but tactical empathy, you know, and silence, late night DJ voice, these types of things. Right. We started using it in our negotiations and we actually started seeing some immediate results of hey, we're, we're making, you know, we can see these, they do work. Like they're not just some gimmick. I'm not saying they work all the time, but you know, I would say out of everything, you know, those coming up and working to develop good open ended questions and just keep asking those open ended questions really proved to be quite successful. Yeah, we didn't win all the negotiations, but often we were able to significantly delay price increases, work with suppliers to come up with creative ways so that we weren't buying product maybe from China, we were buying it from Eastern Europe and not having to pay tariffs. So really great results that really helped us focus on let's stay in this. At least it did for me. And I know some of my team members still are. They love learning about negotiation and applying it their job. So that was one example.

Yeah, I mean that's a great example because that really puts a bow on it. Brian, because what we're seeing here is the fact that, all right, we've been talking about training as an investment throughout this conversation and now we're saying, and this is the result and key word that you said, immediate results. As soon as you started to do these things, you started to get immediate results, which is great. And that's the thing. A good training should be practical, of course, should offer strategies and tactics, but it should be delivered in a way that is simple and easy to apply because that's what we're seeing there. If somebody can go through a training and then immediately put into action and immediately get results, then that means that it's, they've learned it in a way that has the requisite level of simplicity for it to actually Be practical and utilized in the tough situation.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, and I'll say we've used, I've seen either applied it myself or through my team use different tactics and techniques through our negotiations. Sometimes they work. Sometimes I'll say that that may not have made a difference, but it does add some level of confidence to the negotiator when they're actually employing something opening or asking open ended questions. You just can't go wrong with that being empathetic. It works. I don't want to say it works, but again, you can't go wrong with being empathetic and trying to consider the other people's point of view. Yeah, I've done that all the time. I'm sure I haven't. I'm sure I've failed at different points. I know we had a negotiation with a major supplier that it was over, I'll say a couple million dollars of air freight and who was responsible for it. And the supplier claimed, hey, I can't take it. If I take it, I'm going out of business, I'm going bankrupt. And it was an overseas supplier. Were we being empathetic? Yeah. Were we trying to understand the situation? We were, but it was very difficult to try to work through what was fact and what was fiction. When you're talking about another company's financial position overseas. There's a lot of cultural issues, really difficult negotiation. And the outcome was not good for my company. And I learned something from that. I learned a lot of things. One, I was familiar with the term batna and setting a batna. I had been very diligent about it in the past, but really considering how critical that negotiation was to our company, the impact if the supplier went out of business or just refused to ship product to us would have been hundreds of millions of dollars of product sold, wouldn't have been able to be built and sold versus $2 million air freight. So how could we have resolved it? We probably could have been more creative in understanding what exactly is both sides batna and developing, I'll say creative solutions to potentially help out that supplier financially in ways that we ultimately ended up doing, which was cutting them a check. We got goods shipping to us, which is a win for us. It didn't shut down our production. But there was just a lot of really hard feelings over that and decisions were made that were significant and impacted both companies in the long term. You want to talk about a win win that ended up as probably more of a lose lose. That was one of those negotiations. And I Was like, okay, what could we have done different besides that? We needed to understand Batna. My leadership executives needed to understand that and make sure we were making decisions based on that. And then one of the big things I took away from it was outside help in negotiating in a crisis, because that was a crisis and we were like days away from shutting down production, things like that. Right. So we were being one party was holding the other party hostage, I'll put it that way. Having a third party come in and we've talked about you and I've talked about this, Kwame, but having an outside expert counsel, et cetera, come in and help work through that, you know, I think really would have been a big win for us because it's so. In that situation, things were so tense, so stressful, it was hard to sort through what was the financial realities that we were trying to understand with the other company and then also solve. Solve a difficult problem. I think that's where a third party assistance really could have helped. And I have yet to see executive teams do that. I know they do, but not where I worked. So I think that was definitely another lesson learned from that example. And I think, as you've said in your podcast, there's not necessarily losses. You don't lose, you learn. That was a big learning opportunity. So, okay, yeah. So having that counsel to help alleviate some of the workload and stress and provide, I'll say, guidance and creativity, being able to explore ideas that maybe you get into a really difficult situation, stressful crisis mode, you tend to become more tunneled vision, and it's difficult to think creatively in that scenario. The other part is splitting work. So we had one team doing all the financial evaluation, the coordination with executive team and the negotiation. And if I had to do it again, I would split the work, have one team focus just on financial, one team on the negotiation, and a separate individual leading the coordination with the executive team, or some combination of that. I think that was also a hindrance in coming up with creative ideas.

Yeah, this is great because I think there are a couple of aspects to identify here. So first, one of the things you mentioned was it's not just at that time, understanding Batna and those types of negotiation terms would have been helpful for you and your team who were actually at the negotiation table. It also would have been helpful for your internal clients, the leaders within your company, because they are decision makers. And sometimes you have to understand how to negotiate effectively to judge and evaluate your negotiation team. Right. And so if they were better versed in that then you all could have been in alignment with utilizing some of those principles in the negotiation. So when we're thinking about training, I think procurement teams should think a little bit more broadly about who they invite. Not just the negotiators and deal makers, but also the internal clients, the decision makers, cfo, CEO, those type of things, when appropriate, can be beneficial. And there's a saying in law that the attorney who represents himself has a fool. As an attorney.

Yeah. Wow.

The worst thing you could do is represent at yourself because of the reason that you described. You don't have the perspective. And it might not even be a situation in the legal context that the person is a better lawyer than you. They just have a better perspective upon which to make decisions. And so sometimes it having somebody come in and see things from a different perspective can help you at the negotiation table. So bringing in that third party is helpful. And then also sometimes that third party consultant can be the bad guy. Because maybe the people that you need to convince internally, maybe there's a relationship issue or you don't want to ruffle feathers. It's like, like, can you go tell them that they are being dumb, Kwame? Can you tell them that? Okay, I'll be the messenger. But again, there's just a lot of really unique strategic roles for a third party negotiation expert that I think a lot of times people don't consider, but it usually doesn't hurt. Just kind of like what you said before.

Yeah. If I look at the cost from that negotiation to the company, like what the end result was, we're talking millions of dollars. The relationship ended up over time. The decision was made, leave that supplier. So it had to be a huge investment in time and additional money to leave that supplier. It was just tremendous. If we would have gone and paid a fee to get expert advice, I think it would have been well worth it. And that would be certainly one of my key items that I'd bring to any future crisis negotiation. And I think that's why they often bring in crisis mediators or not mediators, crisis experts, management experts, to help executive leadership teams get through those types of events. Because of that, in my experience, and I may be limited in my knowledge, but I don't believe many of the executives, including in the procurement side, have either significant or maybe any formal negotiation training. They may know how to communicate and have great soft skills. They may not, but most of them, I found, do. But then again, how to structure a formal negotiation and setting bat in a zone of possible agreements and trying to work through to creative solutions. That really is critical. And if they don't know that going in, particularly prior to a crisis, they may struggle to want to engage on learning that in the middle of the crisis.

Yes, it is so true. I mean, when you think about people in crisis and their natural responses, we have flight freeze. Educate yourself is not responses. So the resistance is can be anticipated. But again, it goes back to that whole creation of a learning culture, the spirit of continuous improvement for everybody, every part. Because again, I think that's one of the things we can't overlook. Look, it's not just our department in particular in the procurement or supply chain world that needs to be educated on this because everybody will work together cohesively in some type of way. And so the better you all are at understanding the negotiation strategies, the more unified you'll be as you go forward. And then also, one of the things that I see with essentially every single procurement team that I train is that they need help with the difficult conversations internally with their business clients. Can you talk a little bit more about that too?

Yeah, well, I've failed there on a number of occasions as well. So for sure, I was thinking about this the other day. There was a situation where we wanted in strategic procurement, we were sole source and we wanted to develop a competitive landscape and we wanted to bring in another supplier, which meant that on a very technical part, requiring a lot of testing and proving out the part, not just in a test environment, but real world on our equipment. So significant investment in. We got to go ahead, do this both internally from what we thought, from the stakeholders from engineering and certainly from the leadership team. So we did that. We found another supplier at a trade show. We went out, we developed significant relationship with them, went to Japan, visited them there, et cetera, worked to build it up, came back, got the competitive price we needed to justify the testing. We're ready to move forward with testing. In fact, I think we'd already started an engineering, came back, said, oh no, the current supplier wants to give you another price, which happened to be just below the price that we had just negotiated with the new supplier. They're like, well, we don't need to do testing now. We got savings and we can save the money from the testing. It was very disheartening, but I didn't have that full buy in from the internal stakeholders. I thought we did, but it wasn't there. It was shallow. So it was probably more of yes, but I heard yes, but I didn't, you know, they didn't. There was no I didn't pick up on the fact that there was probably a but there somewhere and I needed to flush out that and get that full commitment because it was really about a strategy. I mean, cost savings were important, but it really was about a strategy of having multi sources of supply. And I'll say it helped us maybe on a cost standpoint initially, but then we're still stuck with one source of supply and it came back to bite us again because of the lack of alignment on a clear strategy. I think companies, I'll say this, the company I worked for at the time, I believe they've learned a lot since that was like 2016. So the challenges that we faced from 2018 in tariffs through Covid ramp up the disruption of supply chains, capacity constraints and where we are today. So many, I think leaders now realize that there is a need to have risk mitigation built into the cost of the product because at the end of the day, you can't get the product you need. You can't build, you can't sell, you can't make revenue. That certainly is a lesson that, that I've heard numerous times, but I think a lot more people in the business world now see that definitely.

Oh, Brian, this is so good. I really appreciate this and I'm excited to get this into the hands of different leaders in the business world, around the world, not just in the procurement space, because I think there are a lot of corollaries where everybody can benefit from this. So thank you for that. Before you go, I'm connected with you on LinkedIn. I want you to give a shout out for your LinkedIn profile so people can connect with you if they want to continue the conversation.

All right, well, yeah, if you, even after listening to this, if you still want to connect with me on LinkedIn, it's Brian Hyde, H E I D. And I certainly am always up for connecting and having discussions, benchmarking, talking about training programs, best practices, you know, when it comes to negotiation and leadership. So I really appreciate that. You know, I continue to listen to your podcast. I've learned so much. Some of your most recent ones that just really resonated was one with Seth Freeman. I think I immediately went out and bought his book on Amazon. So Seth, he got at least one book sale out of the interview with Kwame Kendall. The Swedish. There's not Swedish. He was Scottish, I think. Hostage negotiator. Actually, I was going to start out this podcast by saying I was a hostage negotiator, but I learned so much from him. I mean, Matthias Schreiner, one of his podcasts. This is maybe four years ago, I don't know, a number of years ago you had him on and he engaging him in the podcast. And I'm like, holy cow. He's describing the negotiation tactics that were used against us by a German company. Maybe it was they had gone to his training, maybe they hadn't. Maybe it was coincidence. But I'm like, that's exactly what just happened to me two months ago. And I was like, like blown away by it. And I was like, I've learned so much from that. So, yeah, I appreciate the podcast. I hope this goes on for as long time and I hope more people get to listen and really learn. Like, I've learned as much as I have from you and the guests that you've brought on Kwame. So thanks for sharing that.

Oh, man, that's great. I appreciate that. It really means a lot to me. And yeah, that's the goal. Just get this out to as many people as we can. And I'm excited to get this episode out to as many folks as we can and other leaders in the business world. And I'll definitely shout out those folks, let them know. So, yeah, those episodes were great. And I do remember that call when you said Kwame. I knew after I heard him say it, I knew that we were doing.

Yeah, maybe I'll get to his training sometime. Was it Shriner Institute or something like that? But there's so many trainings I'd like to attend that I haven't. But maybe I'll get to some of those. Maybe I won't. But yeah, really appreciate it, Kwame. Thanks for having me on.

My pleasure. Congratulations. You've just joined an elite club by listening to to a full episode. You're now officially on the Negotiate Anything team. So welcome aboard. What most team members do is they subscribe to the podcast because that allows them to automatically get the latest episodes of the show. The best things in life lie on the other side of difficult conversations. Keep learning, keep practicing, and keep getting better. Your relationships will improve, your career will soar, and you'll have the confidence you need to get the most out of these crucial conversations. Again, thank you for joining the team. We're excited to have you, and I will see you in the next episode. I'll catch you later.