hi I'm Paul ganore I'm an investment banker and I negotiate for a living today I'm here to answer viewer questions and I'm going to start with some questions here on buyers uh the first two questions are how do buyers know there are other buyers bidding and you're not bluffing and a similar question is you mentioned multiple times that dealing with one buyer negatively influences your leverage do you ever find yourself in a situation where you have one buyer you yet the buyer is unaware of this fact how do you cope and what would would your advice be to me as a junior dealmaker well let's talk a little bit about that you know when I think about a formal m&a process I think a lot about Texas Gold back in the late 9s David sklansky wrote a book called The Theory of Poker and in that book he posited his fundamental theory of Poker and and basically what he said was every time you play your hand differently from how you would have played it if you could see your opponent's cards they gain and every time your opponents play their hands differently than had they been able to see your hand you gain and so I think about poker as decision making with incomplete information and trying to force your opponents into making a mistake and I think about m&a as decision-making with incomplete information trying to force your opponents to make mistakes almost the same thing so if we start with a Texas Holo example for all of you who are not famili with Texas Holdem I apologize but when you think about Texas Holdem let's say that you're dealt big slip right you've got Ace King and I'm dealt a queen Jack for example now I can't see your cards you can't see my cards the Flop comes down King 103 off suit now you're arguably holding a better hand but I can't see your hand and you can't see my hand if I were to fold um acknowledging that you have a better hand I've played optimally and I've gained right I've chucked my cards um I played as if I could see what was in your hands now had I got all in right and you called I would not have been playing optimally because you were holding the better hand at the Flop and let's say that the turn and the river don't help me your expected value has increased and you just want a big pot that's what David gansky is referring to with playing hands as if we could see our opponent's hands and in the same way like when you think about a formal m&a process it it's almost in a lot of ways akin to Texas Holdem because you're setting up a formal process just just like the game of Texas holdom right you've got the Flop you've got the river you've got the turn information is being released at each stage of the process same thing in a formal process so the buyers know that they're other buyers well if you're running a sealed bid auction they don't know that obviously they can infer that from the standpoint that you're actually running a process now am I often dealt with dealing with one buyer uh not often but it happens time to time and it's very rare as a matter of fact I can't think of one particular instance where I began a formal process expecting to only deal with one buyer uh but sometimes that happens right you put together the materials you send them out to potential biders and then you get one indication of Interest you've got only one buyer you got some decisions to make um now that buyer is involved in a formal process now right so that buyer has tended their initial bid they may assume that there's a lot of other buyers they may assume that they're the only buyer I don't know um what they can't see is what's in my hand and what's in my hand is their bid the only bid um so they need to determine how they're going to play their hand and I've got to determine how I can play my hand now I'm going to use the term deception here because poker is a lot about deception and I don't mean it um in deceiving the other party per se but we're dealing with Bluffs we're dealing with conceal concealing information we're dealing with fiing out information if you're playing poker you're trying to determine what's in your opponent's hands and you can do that based on past performance how do they play tight loose what's their demeanor at the table what are their facial expressions do they have any tells so on and so forth uh in the same way the buyer in that process would be attempting to farad out information on my side of the table so I do often find myself um in a situation where there's one buyer you know in this question here went on to say let's go back down here um do you find yourself in a situation where you have one buyer yet that buyer is unaware of the fact um and you mentioned multiple times that dealing with one buyer can negatively influence your leverage yes I think the primary way having one buyer negatively influences Leverage is really psychological because if you have one buyer you on the cell side are going to run a little bit scared right so let's look at one buyer versus two let's say that I have two buyers that are both very very interested in buying the asset and they're aggressive and they're bidding I could afford to run an aggressive process I could afford to negotiate hard because I've got two buyers there and if one Falls out I've still got another bird in the hand if I'm dealing with one buyer I might be a little bit concerned I might play a little bit scared uh because I don't want to lose that buyer and end up with a busted auction it's in that particular case where you really have to run that process I think a lot of times the way that you would if you had multiple buyers because if the buyer sophisticated and the buyer's used to dealing with these sorts of processes they're going to figure it out by the way that you act so I guess in summary on that question there are are a lot of times that you will end up with one buyer and I think the general rule here is to run that process with one buyer just as you would if you had five or 10 different buyers you run through the inter of bit biding stages you acknowledge in your mind from an emotional perspective you get it out there and integrate it and what I mean by that is you say in your mind I have one buyer and I can't let my own emotions and psychology cause me to play my hand any different than I would have had I had multiple buyers that's the general rule I think over time with judgment you start to learn maybe sometimes there's a buyer that might not be so aggressive and you have the ability to scare them off so you have to use judgment there but I think as a general rule you would run that process in the exact same manner that you would with multiple buyers and I've run one I've run one buyer auctions before that have been extremely successful so don't get scared by the fact that you have just one buyer what techniques do you use to extract valuable information without revealing too much so information was in a very very important topic of the first episode in this series and I want to go back to that because when I think about information in an m&a process I think about two broad classifications of information on the one hand we have information that qualifies the asset so for example the fundamental the business the legal constructs and constraints the company so on and so forth right the information about the asset and then we have information regarding leverage factors and your job whether you're on the buy side or the sell side is to far it out as much information as you possibly can while concealing information on your side so if we think about again about those broad classifications we have the asset itself and we have leverage factors now let's think about how do we f it out information we can do direct questioning we can do indirect probing we can consult third party information sources public filings and individuals so on and so forth and then we can observe Behavior and the information qualifying the asset is typically garnered through direct questioning right you can sit down and have a conversation with a seller for examp example about the asset in question where it gets more tricky and in some ways just is as important as information qualifying the asset is information regarding leverage factors in the negotiations and while you can do some direct questioning there you're often better on an indirect basis as well as observing behaviors and so I want to talk a little bit about that because I don't think I I got so into it in segment one of this of the series let's say that you are selling your business and I'm your advisor and we sit down and we say okay we're going to start prepping this thing to go to market and you've got some key account Executives here that have appear to have deep relationships some big clients and if we lose them uh they might take business to the competition what have you done to lock them up and look and say well we've done a decent job but we don't have the best contracts in place and our main guy he's got another year on his contract um but we probably could do better locking them up now we don't know what buyers are going to do we haven't started the process yet but we've identified issues that might cause us some problems later on down the line like so for example key account rep decides to take off that could be particularly negative for our m&a deal so when we think about fa information let's say the key account exact's name is Jim right and Jim's got a year left on his contract now you could go and sit down with Jim and directly begin to question him you can say hey Jim you know we year out from your contract I'd like to up this you've done a great job um let's renegotiate a contract for you you could do that and then you could start asking him questions like for example how important is his relationship to account a b c but in the context of the negotiation itself when you start asking direct questions that's going to raise some questions in his mind like why the heck are you asking me that and it's going to put you in a position where he could potentially extort you so I think some things to to to keep in mind is direct questions are far better when they're materially separated in time and space from a negotiation itself so it's one thing that to sit down with Jim tomorrow and I have a beer with him and say hey Jim let's talk about accounts a b and c try to Garner information as to how important he really is to determine whether or not he's a Flight Risk and if he does fly will he take the accounts with him you're doing that outside of the construct of a negotiation so it's not going to raise a lot of red flags um if you want to take a more indirect approach instead of asking him Direct ly you might find yourself in a position where again you're just doing reviews of the accounts maybe you're going to a meeting here and there with him and starting to build the data yourself you're talking to other folks at the firm trying to understand how much leverage this guy might have in negotiations you know what if he catches on to what you're doing he might turn around and say hey why are we renegotiating my contract right now are you selling the business now for sake that puts you in a horrible position because now you're either forced to tell him the truth which is going to allow it's going to put him in a position of tremendous leverage um or you going to lie to him which would be a horrible thing to do because you know the one hand it's unethical on the other hand you know you might even be opening yourself up from a legal perspective if you lie to him and he relies on that it could potentially be fraile inducement so you want to stay out of direct questioning in the middle of an actual negotiation and so if we take this to a broader m&a context perspective when I start to think about leverage factors the types of things I'm trying to determine is necessity desire time pressure um Who's got what at stake for doing a deal and I find that a lot of the indirect probing at the very early onset of a deal is is is probably where you're going to make your money and what I mean by that is let's say you're running a cide process and you the seller want to understand as much as you can about the buyer and their motiva motivations and their capacity to pay you're going to want to do that over dinner and drinks um maybe the night before a formal meeting you're going to want to have a lot of indirect conversation and this is why I always advise clients do a lot of lising ask a lot of questions be very careful from what you review because the buyer is going to be trying to find out the same information the buyer is going to try to figure out if uh you've got an important trip coming up that you got to take so you need to get a deal done at a certain point in time that your wife just retired and wants to move to another country there's a lot of things that you can in invert andly reveal which will shift leverage from you on the cell side to the buy side so direct probing indirect questions third party you know another way to of course far down information one of the most important is basically by observation and that observation takes place within the construct of the formal deal process how people react to things how aggressive they are how non-aggressive they are you can kind of start to Garner how important the deal is based upon how people interact with you and the signals that they give you within the process so I always say to myself and for years every time I start a process um you know I've got a what's a mental checklist it used to be a written checklist but now it's a mental checklist for me for each and every different buyer that we deal with what is the pertinent information regarding the leverage factors that I'm trying to get and what sort of questions will I ask in order to get that information to help me decide what sort of Leverage and what is the disparity of Desire between my client the seller and each individual buyer so what's the most effective way to create a false sense of urgency in a negotiation without it backfire well I think the ideal way to do that is through the Strategic use of deadlines as I've disced discussed before there's power in time pressure people do not like to make decisions under time pressure in fact they tend to make poor decisions under time pressure if you're the seller you want to use this to your advantage and so you want all buyers under the exact same level of time pressure and you do that by setting deadlines and you know the saying is deadlines are made to be broken and to a certain extent that's true but you can put some teeth behind deadlines for example and if you've got a bid deadline right set for this Thursday at 5:00 p.m a buyer may say to you what happens if I don't get my bid in by Thursday at 5:00 p.m. now you need to use some judgment here um Thursday at 5:00 p.m. might mean like hey the investment committee won't be able to meet until Monday morning so the earliest I'll get my bid in is Friday or Monday afternoon it would be appropriate to allow that individual to attend her a bid on Monday afternoon um but using deadlines and putting everyone under the same deadline puts buyers in a position to potentially lose so another answer might be you know if you don't get it in on time we're moving on to the next round without you and again judgment comes into play here I don't know that I've ever really seen at least on the sou side I'm trying to think if I've seen a deadline backfire I think deadlines can backfire if you use them in such a way that it tends to have a negative impact on your own credibility meaning if you use an aggressive deadline schedule and all the buyers are just running late which can happen but that happens consistently I think the other side of the table kind of starts to disregard your your deadlines in general right and they're going to kind of do whatever they want so to a certain degree it um it behooves you when you set a deadline and not a tremendous amount of leeway surrounding the use of that deadline have you ever seen a negotiation completely unravel because of sell's emotional decision absolutely as a matter of fact I think in midmarket m&a probably the biggest deal color out there is the emotions of the sellers and within the next few weeks I think I'm going to do an entire episode on emotions within the context of m&a because it is a big one and you know one of the most important jobs of an investment banker an advisor is really absorbing a lot of those emotions because again I won't talk about it extensively today but I will talk a little bit about it um in Investment Banking a lot of the guys that I work with and have historically are probably social paths like individuals void of emotion and I I think that sometimes makes it difficult look on the one hand and I think it's a to be able to go out and kill people mercilessly without any sort of conscious whatsoever there's probably a benefit in that right but I also think that understanding emotions understanding the emotion and the psychology of the seller and how they're going to deal with things I think is really really important and you know one of the things that often happens in m&a is you get a you have a man or a woman who owns a $100 million visit for example negotiate for living right out there doing contracts left and right very successful in building a business but now it's time to sell it that person is emotionally attached to that business that is their baby and their ego and identity is tied to it and any affront to that business and any way shape or form tends to irritate them and they take it very personally and so you'll have situations where um a buyer might put one offer on the table and then 2 weeks later materially change some terms as they gather more information um and of course the seller takes that personally and now all of a sudden can't trust that buyer and thinks that buyer's toying with them and gets angry and emotions tend to Cloud judgment right emotions tend to like for example if you have a let's let's use a typical example right like fear and anxiety tend to be pretty similar on the emotional spectrum and let's say it's 2:00 in the morning you walk out and a very dark parking lot and you hear a loud noise well at 2:00 in the morning because you've got a little bit of anxiety you're walking alone and a potentially dangerous area you hear a loud noise you're going to jump and you're going to quickly turn around and your heart might start to beat faster your palms might sweat uh if you were walking in that same Garage in bright sunlight at High Noon and you heard that same you that same noise you might not even have paid attention to it so the emotional state and the core state that you're in can definitely change the decisions that you make um and without understanding that you know one of my key jobs is actually making under making sellers understand how emotions do influence their decision making and we use a variety of different techniques I'm going to go into the in a in a future episode but you know one of those techniques is you know emotional reappraisal if a buyer changes a deal ter if a buyer negotiates very hard if a buyer does something that appears to be a front to the seller the seller shouldn't take it personally the seller should reframe that and look at it as the buyer actually acting on the best behalf of its client its firm whatever making the best best decision it can for its client acting appropriately within the context of what that buyer is supposed to be doing and it's not a personal attack on the seller it's the buyer action doing its job and so the seller can understand that that yes this buyer is doing his job now I'm not going to get offended but I'm going to do my job then I think you can break down some of the emotional violence and focus more on some better decision-making again I'm going to get into this extensively because and this is a great question I mean the seller's emotional state um and emotional unraveling can certainly blow up a deal and it's probably in my opinion and at least in my personal experience uh more deals blow up because of the Motions on the self side as well as the buy side than they do for fundamentals of a business where you know something is in DD is found that blows the deal up now it's usually negotiations and emotions causing things to Runner ey What's the best way to make a buyer bid against themselves without realizing it well there's a lot of ways to get a buyer to bid against themselves I mean one very simple term and I don't know if they'll realize it or not is somebody makes you an offer you say hey make me a serious offer and then we'll have a serious discussion right and so you're not even willing to have a discussion unless another offer comes in that's one way to do it I don't know if the buyer would realize necessarily what's going on or not um another way is you can find yourself in a as we talked about earlier a a controlled auction process with one buyer the entire time he's spit against himself and doesn't know it so um I can't think of anything above and beyond that one next question if a seller has only one serious buyer at the table how do you still create perceived competition now there's a ton of these one buyer questions coming in um I'm I'm hoping you'll never have to deal with that but uh for those that you do we talked a little bit about it before but again it's about molding perceptions on the onset right if there's only one buyer at the onset often times you won't know it until you start a process and you start that process anyway you give them bid instructions as you would if you were running a process with 20 buyers you deal with that buyer in the exact same way that you would deal with that buyer in the context of a broader process with dozens of buyers and if you do that nine times out of 10 you'll be okay 10% of the time you're going to totally things up what's one piece of conventional m&a wisdom that you believe is flat out wrong now conventional in terms of what myself and practitioners believe and conventional versus what sellers believe might be two very different things the latter is easier for me to come up with though um I think a lot of sellers out there believe that price is objective they believe that there's a quote unquote going rate for a business they believe that all buyers will effectively pay the same amount for a particular asset which we know is very very incorrect right the combination of business a and business B creates value so business B being the buyer business a being the seller every buyer is going to have a different capacity to pay they're going to have a different ability to create value they're going to have a different strategic intent for doing that deal and therefore they're going to be able to pay different amount for that business your only job on the cell side is to extract as much of that value creation out of that transaction as you can for the client next question this one came in through Linkedin as well I appreci I get hundreds of these um messages on LinkedIn I get a lot of great questions I can't respond to all of them but I I'm making an attempt so I'm going through them here this one's great what's the most aggressive move you've seen a biyo make in an attempt to kill competition in an auction process you know I'm going to do a whole episode on opening moves and shutdown moves and you know we talked in the last session about the Dutch auction we talked about the preemptive offer um you know probably the the most standard is the preemptive offer right if buyers really understand um the context in terms of valuation as well as what the competitive scenario looks like sometimes they can slide in early in a process with a preemptive offer and basically lock out competition I'm going to change this question a little bit from most aggressive to I guess let me say most sophisticated right so sometimes these sorts of moves don't have to be aggressive they just have to be insightful and sophisticated um and sometimes on the onset they don't even seem aggressive but the results and the consequences are that of aggression um you know I once saw a process where there were a small handful of bers on a transaction and let's say the price was 50 million at this point in time a buyer was starting to get a little bit deal fatigued and he was a little bit concerned that the seller was going to shop his offer so he decided he was going to use effectively an opening maneuver and change process rules and here's what he said he wrote a letter that said enclosed is a sealed bid this is my best and final and we're prepared to close immediately um you can open this bid on the following terms and his terms were this was the final round of bidding um the seller would take the best offer from this round and close that deal no further shopping all of the other bids had to be opened s simultaneously with this bid and all of the other bids needed to be um exact dollar amounts and what I mean by that it couldn't be highest bidder plus a dollar right it could be highest bid plus a dollar it had to be actual dollar amounts and I thought that was a pretty sophisticated way for a buyer to come in change process rules move a deal into final round get all biders to put their best and final on the table and have the seller open them all up simultaneously uh and thereby shutting out any additional compens ition uh and as well as any add any additional Shenanigans uh from the seller so um when I think about process rules as we talked about in the last couple of sessions I mean there's a million different ways to run a process and I think buyers who are sophisticated and experienced um can think of very subtle ways to attempt to change process rules that sometimes sellers will just do because sellers get deal fatigue as well and want to be done with the process um so I think it's important for you if you're on the buy side to think about what are the subtle ways that you could influence a seller to change process rules that might work in your favor some interesting questions came through here uh one was in an m&a deal who really has the power the buyer the seller the banker and I think that's obviously extremely fat specific um and what I mean by that is power is based upon leverage factors so every deal is going to be different right like so if you've got a business that has 50 buyers that literally can't live without buying your business right um you're going to have a lot of Leverage uh if you've got no one that wants to buy your business you the seller are not going to have any leverage or power the buyer is going to have a lot of power you know the banker should not necessarily have any power at all the banker is an agent of a buyer or an agent of a seller and effectively is almost an offshoot of the seller so I think of myself personally as the seller so when I am running a process I am the seller I am an agent of the seller an extension of the seller um and the way that I give my client additional power or leverage in the process is number one educate that client right make sure that the client understands about fting out information revealing information concealing information all the different points of Leverage how to run the process so and so forth that's how we can manufacture power on our side I it's an interesting question I appreciate it um what's the most effective way to psychologically dominate an m&a negotiation without seeming adversarial if you run a process you pretty much don't have to do anything the process does the work for you right and so you could and that's why I I love to run formal processes for the most part because it is a baked in way to actually negotiate without having to be adversary I we've talked about this extensively if I've got a bunch of buyers competing doing this whole same side of the table negotiation I'm I don't need to be adversarial right I don't need to negotiate with anyone they're doing the work for me so I think the most effective psychological way to dominate is run that formal process and do it the right way another question here is about the Dutch auction um it was the first time I had used it on the no more transaction why don't I use it more often you know the Dutch auction is great for Speed and I often don't need more speed in an m&a transaction um as I discussed the Dutch auction introduces risk for buyers but it also introduces risk for me as well because you know I've got a price that's falling and if no one hits that bid and people stand back I might ultimately end up in a worse position than I was before I began that Dutch auction um I think from a fundamentals perspective the Dutch auction was great where we were running an English auction and we were driving the price up and then we kind of came out obliquely with the Dutch auction I don't know that a Dutch auction would work and I've never attempted this nor do I know anyone that has um selling a business entirely by a Dutch auction I I suspect maybe it's been done somewhere I haven't done it and I I don't know how great that would be because I do talk about um extensively that sunk cost fallacy right the investment principle where buyers are less likely to walk away and you will often times get escalation from them the more they the more resources they've expended the more time money and effort they put into a deal and as you're walking through kind of a ascending price English auction they're spending more money on DD they're spending more time there there's a lot more effort there's more thought they become emotionally attached in some ways to the principles in the transaction to the deal their names on it um and I don't think you would get that if you had a descending price auction right so you wouldn't have those iterative steps right you've got a price that starts high and these guys are just trying to hit the bid versus taking them up slowly and incrementally uh it's an interesting question it it's something that um will I likely do it again I'm sure I will uh have I done it again since no more yes it's just not something that um I think that I would hang my hat on um and I would only use it in very specific cases it worked well in the no more transaction um and it worked well in the subsequent times I've used it but uh I don't think it's an allpurpose tool like a close bid ascending English auction would be how do you determine when a buyer is bluffing um I think on the buy side bluffing tends to be um a very risky maneuver and here's why um on the one hand somebody can call your bluff but sometimes if you're a buyer if you think about it it's almost worse for for you to be bluffing and for a seller to actually believe you and here's what I mean by that let's say that you're a buyer and you say here's my offer $50 million best and final I'm not paying a penny more for this business and the seller looks at you and takes you out your word says okay 50 million best you can do I completely understand you goes back has dinner goes and has a meeting the next morning uh next morning the business sells for $51 million and you were willing to pay 60 um now that seller didn't call your bluff that seller actually believed what you said and that's a very very bad position for a buyer to be in to be bluffing and actually be believed um because then there's there's no more interaction like that seller didn't even call you back up that seller believed you thought you were sincere so you know I don't I don't really concern myself so much if um a buyer is bluffing you know sometimes buyers will come in with best and finals hey Paul our this is our best and final offer at 50 million bucks now if I have other buyers at better prices then I'm not really particularly concerned whether they're bluffing or not I might go back to them and give them an opportunity to increase their offer um so I I would say that the risk more you know when we actually get through buy side m&a I'm doing a lot of sell-side stuff now but I'm going to do a buy side series and when we talk about buy side m&a I'm going to go into the bluffing because bluffing for me is a pretty Dangerous Ground I think a lot of times for buyers more so than Sellers and we'll get into that all right I think the last question we'll get to today is what's the one skill that separates Elite deakers from average ones and you know I don't know if that there is one skill I think it's kind of you know holistic I guess fundamentally instead of talking about one skill I could talk about kind of attributes of elite deal makers um I think Elite dealmakers have the ability to size up the context of the battlefield pretty quickly remember like when you're doing deals all the time you're recognizing you know it's a lot of pattern recognition you see a lot of the same things over and over um so you you have to be able to recognize what the context of the board looks like in terms of the buyers out there I think you have to be able to really emotionally detach yourself from the negotiations and I don't mean suppress emotions per se I don't mean don't feel I just mean that you have to find yourself in a position where you are not needy right like um I think it's important everyone out there that's going to engage an investment banker needs to make sure that their deal while important to the investment banker is not extremely important to the investment banker because they're going to the same emotional needs that you the seller will have and that's not a good position to be in so you've got to be able to emotionally detach yourself as a dealmaker and say you know my job is to get my client a great deal it's not to get a deal done it's to get a great deal and I need to be able to step back emotionally from the transaction I think great deal makers uh have the ability to help their clients manage their own emotions um I think that you know and this was something that was very difficult for me actually and I've had to learn this over the years great deal makers do substantially far more listening than talking right um it really is about extracting as much information as you possibly can from each situation that you're dealing with and not doing a ton of talking I mean I I get it gets to the point right now I actually get ridiculed sometime in my own office that I'll sit there for 45 minutes and not say anything and I'm the guy who you know my VP of m&a execution always makes fun of me from the stpoint he's like sometimes it's really awkward to be on the phone with you when we're on some of these negotiations because I can literally sit there for 10 minutes and not say anything at all while the other side figures out what they're going to say like I I appreciate long periods of Silence I don't have the need to fill the air um and I think that's a skill that very very elite dealmakers pick up over time and um you've got to be comfortable with being in very awkward situations and and awkward silenes because at the end of the day that's really what helps you kind of gauge neediness on the other side of the table um I think Elite deal makers um learn learn to not react emotionally and I talked about emotional Detachment but it's also like you have to be okay kind of sitting with yourself and really thinking about things you know in any m&a deal you've got just an ungodly amount of data points coming at you right let's let's say you're negotiating with eight buyers trying to sell one business so you're following eight different conversations eight different buyers who have different goals and objectives who want to do different things who have different abilities actually to close the deal so you've got to be able and willing to sit down and really think through things on behalf of your clients I would say the other thing about Elite dealmakers I mean m&a is a craft right you can't go to I mean there's m&a courses obviously but it's not like you go to it's not like being a doctor where you go to Medical school right it's it's a craft it's more of an apprentice so when people learn how to do this how I learned how to do it is I worked with a guy named Frank quatron and he was one of the best contemporary de he's still alive I shouldn't talk to him about him in past tense but Frank um was a phenomenal investment banker and to be able to sit in and watch what he did and learn um so I just had a lot of great mentors over the years and so again it's a craft you pick it up over time you watch what folks do um you develop the skills I think just like any craft so you're not doing the exact same thing day over day you're really pushing yourself to the limits um and I think for me you know one of the things that really helped me you know if I'm talking to Junior dealmakers out there you know when I graduated from school you know it was all about finance and accountant you get an investment banking you're in sell jocky right you spend 15 hours a day um punching number into Excel it was miserable it sucked but you learned about financial modeling and so on and so forth when you start really getting into actual m&a I think really Understanding Psychology is important you know and you can start with basic books like you know thinking fast and slow I think that you know that book came out in 2012 I've probably read that 15 times no doubt and it's a four or 500 page book and so if you look at my library it's full of psychological references from psychodynamic therapy and so on and so forth so understanding these sort of things and you know Chris Foss was down here a couple of months ago for breakfast he wrote Never split the difference great guy and I when I first read his book I discounted a lot of the things that he said uh because it's not really particularly gerain of the type of negotiating I do but there are some things that he's mentioned in that book and as I've gone back and thought about and had discussions with him that I think um are very helpful in the type of negotiations that I do on a day-to-day basis specifically validations of Fe feelings so on and so forth he and I do have some disagreements about the use of deadlines um but I do think there are a lot of things on the topic of emotions and the topic of psychology I think is very helpful not only dealing with Buyers but if you're a sside adviser it's dealing with your own client and helping your clients reappraise and reframe their emotional state in order to make logical and reasonable decisions because you know at the end of the day decisions are emotionally made right and it's important I think to be able to work through uh that with your your clients so well I appreciate everyone who has sent in questions the best way to do this going forward is just drop a comment or question into YouTube and we'll definitely take a look at all those and attempt to respond here in future episodes you can also join me on LinkedIn my link is in the description below and finally we love to kill it for our clients here at pomac if you're thinking about an m&a transaction anywhere in the world I'd be happy to chat with you you can reach out to us here at ponic by clicking on the contact us Link in the description below again thank you for joining me today and I'll see you on the next one [Music] [Music] [Music]