Now this number, as you might expect, is slightly higher for men. 46%, so about half of them. And so, most of us don't ask at all. What a convenient and lovely thing for our employers who have now got budgets that are well under control because we've never asked them for any money.

And I get why this happens. This is really scary, you know? Folks hire me to help them negotiate all the time, and so I get that front row seat to the fears that people have, and the concerns that people have as they go do the scary thing of asking somebody for money and hoping that they're going to say yes.

There's a lot that comes into play, whether it's feeling like you might be labeled as greedy, feeling like your boss won't like you if you ask, feeling like they might say no to something that you really want and really need, especially these days with, you know, groceries costing what they do and mortgage rates being what they are.

Quite a lot of us are really looking at the bank accounts going, "I wish there was a way to add a few more dollars in here.”

So there's a lot emotionally, riding on these negotiations, and there's a lot of skill that it takes to do this job well. A lot of us find this totally intimidating, and that makes a ton of sense to me.

And, friends, 70% of people who do ask actually get the raises they ask for. Pretty amazing. I never thought this number was as high as it was until I saw this stat.

This is data from PayScale. And this breaks out into, of 100% of people, 70% of people who ask, get some money, 39% percent get what they ask for, and then 31% percent don't get exactly what they ask for, but get something.

That's pretty good odds. Now like all data, nobody's surprised to see this coming, this is 70% of all people, this number is totally different if you are a woman of colour. For women of colour, this number is 51% percent.

So quite a bit lower, but still better than half. Both of these odds, for most of us in the room, we're sort of somewhere between that 51% and 70%. White women actually do almost as well as men overall, in these conversations, but somewhere between 50%, or 51% percent and 70% is our odds of getting some amount of money when we go and ask.

Not bad. Not bad. Better than we thought.

How Much Money Could Be on the Table

To give you a picture of kind of what the stakes are, how much money can be on the table, I'm going to sit here and subtly humble brag about my last three negotiation clients, so you can see what kind of money we can be talking about here.

Now, this is not my best three, this just happens to be the last three that I've worked with. So, client number one got $60,000. Whoa! A terrifyingly high number.

Now, part of the reason why she got $60,000 is that she was coming from a job where she was really, really underpaid. She'd been working for years as a back-end software developer. She worked really, really hard, but at a company that didn't pay her very much money, and negotiating wasn't something that she'd ever done before.

She really wanted to do it, that's part of why she decided to work with me. But she came from a family background where negotiating was not the done thing.

Her family were immigrants, their attitude was, "If you've got a job, you're doing great. Don't knock it. Don't get in the way of it."

So she never really learned those skills. She didn't learn them at home, nobody modeled them for her, and going and making that scary ask was counter to everything she ever learned about, "Be grateful for what you've got."

But she managed to get a $60,000 raise. Very, very cool. It's a huge like, life-changing amount of money actually, when you get $60,000 a year more than you were making before. So very, very proud of her.

Client number two, is somebody who asked her boss for money and then her boss said no. But in the end, she still managed to get $25,000. Amazing.

We're going to hear a little bit more about this person's story later, but when she was making her ask of her boss, got so worked up emotionally, because it's a really scary thing to do, and also her boss had already said no to her the first time she asked.

When she made this ask that got her the $25,000, she almost started crying. While she was making the ask, she was welling up with tears and her voice was cracking, and she's going, "I can't believe this. I want to leave this room. This is my worst nightmare coming true."

And even though that happened, she persevered, she stuck through it, and she managed to get $25,000. Amazing. And a promotion in the process, by the way. $25,000 and a promotion. Great work.

Person number three is a long-term executive coaching client of mine who got a new job and then reluctantly went, "Well, I better text Holly, because negotiation's scary and I'm not going to do it on my own, but I know she'll kick my ass and make me do it."

So, she texted me and said, "Holly, we need to talk. I've got a negotiation." She and I spent half an hour on the phone, she got on the call with the people who were offering her a job, spent 15 minutes.

15 minutes later, she had 42,000 bucks.

Not bad. Pretty good. Part of the reason I'm showing you this $127,000 extravaganza that's sitting here on the screen is to show you most of us aren't asking.

The ones of us who do, actually have relatively good odds of getting a yes. These folks have all gotten yeses. And the amount of money that they're getting, it's not $20, it's not $500, it's usually measured in fives or tens of thousands of dollars. These are large sums of money.

Negotiation is The Best Hourly Rate You’ll Ever Make!

I want to say to you what I say to all of my clients at the end of the day, which is that this is the best hourly rate you are ever going to make, these conversations.

When I have conversations with clients, especially that first one, who are going, "Oh, I'm really nervous. I'm not sure how I can have this conversation or if I can have this conversation, maybe it's not worth it, I feel too stressed out."

I'll say to them, "Listen, this conversation at most, is going to take you an hour". It might be multiple conversations, but you're not going to spend six hours back and forth around this.

Let's imagine that I just called you up out of the blue and I said, 'Hey, I've got a deal for you. You're going to spend let's say 15 minutes on the worst phone call of your life. It's going to be so awkward; you're going to want to crawl out of your skin. You're going to despise it.

At every instant, you are going to want to leave. And at the end of it, I'll give you $40,000. Would you take that deal?" I mean, the answer is yes.

15 minutes of awkwardness for $40,000? Of course. Of course, I'm in. And nothing really bad ever happens. It just feels icky.

It's a great deal. This is some of the best hourly rate on your discomfort you will ever get in your life. I highly, highly recommend that as long as you feel safe enough to do it, go ahead, make the ask.

Lesson #1: Make the Ask

Lesson number one here in our 10 lesson plan is ask, make sure you're one of the one-third who asks, and not one of the two-third who doesn't.

Okay, so we're going to negotiate. You all probably already decided that before you got here anyway. But even if you had any doubts, now we're really convinced, "We're going to do it, Holly. We're going to negotiate."

The Ask + The Rationale

Amazing. Okay, so we're going to use two main ingredients. First, the ask that we have, whatever it is that we're asking for. In this case, we're going to talk about salary, but asks can be all kinds of things.

Maybe it's more vacation, maybe it's more resources for your team, maybe you're negotiating about being put on a certain project or getting a certain title. In this case, we'll talk about salary.

You've got your ask and then you've got the rationale. Most of us don't just get to come in and say, "I'd like $200,000 please," drop the mic and then wait for the yes. We usually add a little more detail about why we think that's the right number, so we'll need a rationale as well.

Just like we did before, this is how most of us do it. When I talk with my clients who've hired me for a negotiation, they universally say, "I just want what's fair."

I say, "How much money do you want to make?" And they say, "Well, I just want to make what's fair." Who here has said that? I know I've said it. It's incredibly, incredibly common to just say, "Yeah, I just want what's fair, Holly."

Or they say, "Well, my current salary is..." and then they name whatever their current salary is. What do you notice about these two statements, "I just want what's fair?" and "My current salary is..."?

We're avoiding naming a number. There's no numbers in any of this. These are both neat little ways to kind of not have to actually confess to the number that we want.

The problem with this is that it reduces our credibility and it gives away all of the power in the negotiation. If you get into a negotiation and you can't name a number, you just say, "I want what's fair," they don't really take you very seriously because you haven't been able to just ask for it in a straightforward way.

But also, that allows them entirely to set up whatever they want the number to be, to be the number that it is, because you've never actually challenged them on it. You give away all the power you have, to create the outcome that you want, and cede it to them when you don't name a number. So, not ideal.

I understand why we do these things because it allows us to feel a little less demanding, but it has some negative side effects.

Lesson #2: Name a Number

Lesson number two is you have to name a number, a real one with a dollar sign in front of it, and a specific one. And by the way, not your current salary. Even though that's a number, it doesn't count.

On that note, friends, part of the reason why I don't want you naming what your current salary is, one, your current salary is not particularly relevant to what you'll be making next. I know it feels like that to you, but all it really does is serve to benchmark you down at what you're making now.

It's so effective at doing that, that there's actually a number of jurisdictions now, where this has become illegal. It's not actually allowed for companies to ask you what your current salary is, because it's so effective at suppressing pay.

So it's okay for you to think about your current salary, but please, don't say it out loud in a negotiation. The only number that's important is the one that they're going to pay you, not what you're making now.

All right, so lesson number two, name a number, not your current salary.

We've been talking about this for a minute, but still don't have a number. Let's try to do that.

From here, most people will say, "Well, okay, if I have to name a number, then I guess I'm looking for..." whatever their current salary is and then a small incremental raise. It might be $5,000, it might be 10, maybe 20. But universally, my clients start small.

Or they say, "Well, I think they'll be able to give me this," or "I think I can get away with this," or "The most I'll be able to get is blah." Anyone here ever said one of these two statements? "I'm looking for just a tiny little raise," or "I'm pretty sure I can get blah, blah, blah." I've said these.

What we're doing here is we're keeping small to avoid a no. Because no's are scary. That's for most people, their worst nightmare going into a negotiation.

Other than maybe crying in the middle of the negotiation, the last thing that we want is to go make the big brave ask and then have somebody go, "Sorry, no $40,000 after this 15 minutes of awkwardness."

Instead, it's 15 minutes of awkwardness for $0. So, we tend to lower what we ask for in the hopes that we'll just get an automatic yes.

All we're doing is doing their job for them. It's their job to tell us no, it's their job to fight with us about what we should get. We shouldn't bring our ask down ahead of time. They're supposed to be the ones bringing our ask down.

Lesson #3: Never Negotiate for The Other Side

So, an important lesson here for you all, is to never negotiate for the other side.

It's fine for me if they don't want to pay you the number that you're asking, but I don't want you to do that work for them.

Because we never know how this can go, I've seen a number of negotiations where somebody's made the ask, it's clear that the other party doesn't really want to do it, but they're so overcome with awkwardness, or they don't know how to counter the argument that they just agree.

If that's true, that's great news for you. Don't get in the way of that. Don't make it so that their life is easier, don't do their job, don't negotiate for the other side.

Let them actually say no to your high achieving, adorable, wonderful face that doesn't like to be disappointed. Make them break your little heart. It's going to be hard for them and they might not do it, and then you'll win, okay? Never negotiate for the other side.

Do Your Salary Homework (with Examples!)

We're going to do some homework here. Because most of us don't just come out of thin air with a number. Showing up knowing exactly what we want. So, we're going to do a little bit of homework ahead of time.

Now, for most of you, I imagine that you're expecting that this list is going to say, "Go out in the world and find out what other people are getting paid."

But the first thing on this list, very, very intentionally is think about what you actually want. Not what you can get, not what you can get away with, we already talked about those, we're not going to negotiate for the other side, but what you want. I want you to really think about some questions. Questions like:

Most of us, when we answer this question, we actually come at it from that place of like, "This is what I could survive with. This is what I could barely get by with. I could tolerate a number like blah."

I want you to think beyond what you can tolerate, and into what you actually want. The number that you actually ask for is going to be the number that you want, plus a little extra because there's going to be room to play in the negotiation. You'll go back and forth.

You might not get exactly what you ask for at the beginning, you might get something lower. What we don't want to do is start with an initial ask that we can barely tolerate, and then go down from there.

We want to start at something we like, a little bit higher, and then come down from there. So, we're going to start with what you actually want. Dream as big as you can.

That's the first data point that matters. Because if we don't do that, we're just setting ourselves up for some resentment.

From here, we're going to start looking externally. External to us, internal to our company.

If you're working at a job right now, especially if you're doing a negotiation for a raise or within your role, but you've just been performing really well and you want your pay to be a little bit higher, I want you to start with the internal salary bands.

Not every company has these, but most companies, especially if they're, you know, relatively mature or a little bit larger, will have some kind of salary banding where they say, you know, "If you're a senior software engineer, we're going to pay you between this much money and this much money. And if you're a manager, we're going to pay you between this much money and this much money."

There's going to be a band that they say, "Anybody in this role should fit inside of this narrow little bit of payment that we've defined"

It's really important to know what those bands are for a couple of reasons. One, that's an important benchmark for you of what's going to be possible internally, but also companies put a lot of effort into determining what these are.

They go out and do research and they participate in salary surveys, so they're often really well informed by market data. It's a cheap way for you to get your hands on that, because salary surveys of that caliber are often not available to you.

Internal salary bands can be really useful for informing sort of where the boundaries of the negotiation might be on their side, but also in getting a sense for what's out there in the market.

One more thing I'll say about that is at some companies, these are incredibly transparent. There are some companies where this is just published on the company intranet or something like that, and available through HR.

And then there are other companies who guard this like the recipe for the 11 herbs and spices of KFC. You know, it's like the recipe for Coca-Cola. You'll never find out. It's the most important thing that they've ever had.

Know that sometimes this can be a sensitive question depending on your organizational culture, or not. I would advise you that even if this is something that's not readily available, go ask. All they're going to do is say no. Sometimes they'll say yes. You'd be shocked at what my clients figured out with nosy questions, that they shouldn't have known.

So go ahead and ask about the internal salary bands because if you can get that information, it's really, really valuable to you. Then once you've gone and taken that off your list, the next thing is to look at external salary surveys.

Now I know I mentioned that there's sort of these amazing, high-powered salary surveys that companies will participate in, and those are harder to get access to.

But there are lots of salary surveys usually done by recruiting firms or industry associations that you can find that kind of benchmark what salaries look like, sometimes in a fair amount of detail.

You can usually find them by Googling, salary survey and whatever industry or job you kind of work in. So, salary survey, tech, or for me, salary survey, mining, Canada, something like that.

Then, I actually want you to reach out to recruiters directly. One of the cool things about recruiters is that you can call them up and say, "Hey, here's my resume, here's who I am. What do you think somebody like me gets on the open market these days? You're out there every single day trying to connect people like me with jobs."

They've actually got their fingers on the pulse of pretty recent salary information. They won't know every single thing, they won't have as broad a base as like a salary survey would, for example.

But they're going to have pretty good and pretty up-to-date anecdata a lot of the time, and they'll often have a pretty good gut feel for, looking at your resume, what's somebody like you going to be worth.

It's worth a call to a couple of recruiters just to say, "Hey, what do you think?" They'll probably take that call because it's always interesting if you're a recruiter, to get a call from somebody who's maybe negotiating, and maybe not going to get a yes, and might soon be on the job market.

Give a call to recruiters, and while you're at it, try to generate some job offers. One of the best sources of how much would the world pay me is to just go find out. Go do some interviews. Even if you don't take the jobs, go do some interviews, see what people would actually offer.

Occasionally, you'll get some really compelling offers and you might switch jobs, but other times, you'll get some data or you'll get some really interesting leverage to go back to your employer with when you say, "Listen, I'd love to stay here, but so-and-so's offered me $20,000 a year. Would you like to keep me or not?"

Then finally, my favourite recommendation, the one that my clients end up spending the most time on by far is gossip. Gossip, gossip, gossip, like your life depends on it.

You're going to call up all your friends that you know in the industry and ask them either directly, "Hey, what are you making?" or "What were you making when you were at this kind of job?"

If that's a bit of a high flame ask, because I get how it can be, people don't always want to share directly their salary, you could ask things like, "Hey, I am about to negotiate my salary and it's for this kind of role. What is the salary that you think is reasonable for that type of role, given what you've seen in the industry?"

You could ask that way, or you can say, "I'm interviewing for this kind of role. My research says that the right kind of range for this is, you know, between X dollars and Y dollars. Does that match with what you've seen, or would you say it should be something else?"

Or you might even say, "What have you seen other people get paid for roles like this?"

So, there's a bunch of different ways that you can sort of ask people without asking people, what are you making or what do you know. Go out and ask everybody you know, all your friends, everybody that you've worked with that you think you could ask, have this question with reasonably, go ask them.

If you're getting promoted into a new job and you know somebody who's done that, go ask them. Go ask them what they got paid, how hard it was to do with HR, what they know about the salary bands.

Get information you can, from any source that you can. Gossip, gossip, gossip. At companies that you work at, and companies that you don't work at. All of that is valuable information.

You didn't think you'd get homework coming out of this talk, but look at you, you're just overloaded with conversations you have to have.

When you're done all this, you're going to have a zillion data points. Your head's going to be spinning, you're going, "Why did I talk to Holly? This is a nightmare. I have all this information, how do I turn this into something that's going to be an ask?"

What To Do With All These Salary Data Points

Something that I think is really important to say at this point, is you're going to have this wide range of data. Some of it's going to be high, some of it's going to be low, but you only have to share what helps you.

Just because you've discovered information doesn't mean that you should share it with the other party that you're negotiating with. Remember what we said earlier. Don't do their job for them. Only share what helps you.

If I'm going into a negotiation and I've gone and I've grabbed some salary survey data that says I should be paid $130,000, and I've got some info from Glassdoor, which by the way, is always super low, that says 120.

And then I've got a recruiter that sort of says 130, a couple other sources, from friends and family that say sort of 130-135 range, and then I have one guy who made $150,000. You can bet that if I have to use this in my negotiation to substantiate my ask, I'm going to say, "Well, so-and-so at competitor Y is making $150,000 a year, so I think this is a reasonable ask."

I'm not going to mention the salary survey, I'm definitely not going to mention Glassdoor and their low-ass numbers, I'm going to share the numbers that help me.

Lesson #4: You Control the Spotlight

A lesson that I want you to really pay attention to as you're looking at all this data that you're going to gather, anecdata and survey data, is that you are in control of the spotlight in your negotiation. You can share the stuff that's advantageous to you, and not share the stuff that's not.

Make them do the work to tell you about how such and such salary survey says something totally different. That's okay. Place that spotlight where you want them to see it.

Lesson #5: Start With What YOU Want

And start with what you want.

All of this data is going to be helpful, but it doesn't replace the information of what you want, and it shouldn't come before what you want. The thing that I see over and over again with my clients, is that when they go out and do this research, they inevitably find that their ask is too low.

I actually don't think I've had a single client go, "I was asking for a number that was $20,000 too high." It's never happened, not one time in the many, many years I've been doing this. It probably does happen, but I've never seen it. So, it's probably pretty rare.

Most of the time, people are benchmarking themselves too low, and so their ask comes up as they do this work. Make sure you actually start with what you want, and then usually you'll end up bringing that number up.

One of my favourite moments from a negotiation several years ago was I remember I started working with this person, she was just about to get her P.Eng, and she was trying to get a good raise to go with that.

She was really nervous, I can't remember what the number was, I think $75,000 or something like that. And everybody at our company told her, "It's not possible. One, don't negotiate. They'll just hand you your raise automatically. You don't have to ask. They'll deem you worthy and then tell you what you're worth. That's thing number one. So don't be a weirdo and ask, because nobody does that. But also the raise is going to be teeny-tiny, it's not a big money thing, you get your P.Eng, but who cares? It's just going to be a little extra.”

That was the pervasive narrative, the gossip... She did a lot of gossiping, and the answers were all terrifying initially. And so, she was really nervous to ask for 75, and it wasn't a huge jump from where she was, but it already felt audacious.

She and I worked together over a long period of time. She did a lot more gossiping. We did a lot of looking at what value she generated for the company and how important the work she was doing was.

I remember as we were closing in on the day she was going to do the final negotiation, we were running some scenarios back and forth and we were practicing what she would say in different scenarios.

I said to her, "Well, what would you do if the offer was 83?" And she goes, "As a starting offer?" And she looked so offended, and I was so excited. I went, "Yes. Finally." This person who before, 75 had felt outlandish, was like, "83? What do you mean 83? As an initial bid, that's not going to be the final number."

I really want you to take home with you this idea that the number or the feeling that you come in with when you first start approaching a negotiation isn't always the feeling that you leave with, and in fact it changes almost all the time.

One of the main things that I love about negotiating with clients is you think you go into it for the money, but really what you come out of it with other than the money, is a massive dose of professional self-esteem, which I just see in that client in spades.

All right, so we've finally arrived at a number, we've got an ask. Whatever that number is, the number that we truly want, the number that we've looked around and gossiped about and found is, you know, somewhat reasonable and it's what we're going to lead with.

The Rationale: Justify Your Ask (with Examples!)

Now we’re going to justify it. Now we've got to give them some kind of reason why the heck we're asking for this giant number that previously was terrifying to us.

We're going to talk about my very good friend, Sabrina. Sabrina is somebody that I used to work with back in the ye olden days when I was a mining engineer.

Back in ye olden days, Sabrina was a more junior mining engineer, she was relatively new in her career, but she was excellent at her job. Super genius and mining engineer extraordinaire.

The job that she was doing at the time was called dispatch engineering. For those of you who aren't in mining, dispatch engineering is kind of like if you had a dystopian surveillance state over the entire mine site, and you track every single movement of every single piece of equipment at all times, and then obsessively monitor that data for improvement.

It allows them to kind of dynamically put, you know, trucks and shovels in combinations that help optimize production. Sabrina was in charge of all of that.

Sabrina's relatively early in her career. She's an EIT. Let's just assume that she's making what I was making when I first started as an EIT, which at that time was $60,000.

And Sabrina had a great year, she did lots of great stuff at work and she wants to go and get a 10% raise. So $6,000 is what Sabrina's looking for. Let's imagine that Sabrina goes into her boss and says,

If you were Sabrina's boss, how much would you give her, if that's what she came into your office and said? If I were Sabrina's boss, I don't know that I'd give her much of a raise here. I think this would be a cost of living raise situation.

And, you know, in my head, a little condescending pat on the head like, "Good job, that'll do pig". And then send her away. I don't think this would really warrant a very large increase. Unfortunately for Sabrina.

Let's imagine that we changed this around, have Sabrina come into the office with a slightly different justification behind her ask. Let's say she said,

So if you were Sabrina's boss, how much would you give her now, knowing that this is what she did? A lot more money! I mean, all of those things are good. The 15% thing really caught my eye.

What Sabrina has described here is effectively the mining trifecta. You know, mining really cares about three things, making a lot of money, selling a lot of gold. Not becoming Bre-X, the scandal that rocked the whole industry and made nobody trust us anymore.

So, you know, actual accurate reporting is really important. And then not killing anybody, because when we kill people, one, that makes us murderers and we don't like that. But two, it's also incredibly bad press and makes it very hard for us to operate in these communities when people are dying in our mines.

Sabrina really did everything that people in mining love for her to do. $6,000 is quite frankly, far too small of an ask at this point. She's done amazing work. This is excellent. But I want you to notice how this amazing work can be disguised by the way we talk about it.

How to Find Your Skills & The Businesses Needs to Get $$$

It's really important that we position this correctly. So, let's break down what we did between these two examples, so you can start to see why the second one works so much better than the first one.

Basically, what we're doing in this is we're creating a Venn diagram between the skills or the deliverables that Sabrina brought to the table, and then the things that the business actually needs. In that first example, we kind of talked about the things she did and about her skills, but they weren't really framed in terms of things that the business cared about.

They were way over on that yellow side of the column, and not really overlapping very much at all with the pink circle in the Venn diagram.

In the second example though, we moved closer to the middle, and we started talking about all the things that Sabrina did, but as they related to things that the business cared about, and that put us in that kind of orange dollar sign territory that obviously we'd like to be in, because there's a giant dollar sign in it.

So let me break this down for you, because if you're going to go into a negotiation and you're going to do this, you won't have Holly's magic PowerPoint to give you the second version automatically.

I'll walk you through a little bit through some of the questions that I ask my clients, and how I like to think about it to get here. This can be complex, there's lots of different things that go into it, but at least here's a starting point for you.

On the Your Skills side, we're going to take an inventory here, of what you've been up to and what your skills are.

Question number one is, what are you great at? What are you doing really well?

These could be things that people care about or not, but just like, what are you excellent at? Start there. Build yourself a long list.

Then I'd like you to look at what results did you create last year? So like Sabrina, we had that amazing 15% production increase. I want to make sure we don't miss that.

What are the results you've created?

And then, because sometimes we have the ability to create value even if our employers don't know, I want to know about any hidden skills or talents that you have that your employer isn't currently utilizing.

So one thing that's true about Sabrina is she was an engineer in training, an EIT, when she started, but Sabrina actually had more experience than most of the other EITs on the mine site, because she already had a couple of years of work experience under her belt.

She was EIT, but she was a more senior EIT almost. And she'd done short-range planning at a mine in the States for years. She actually knew a lot about how mines operated, and that helped her be really effective at her job, but it also meant that she could move out of doing dispatch later on and into higher- value mine planning roles really, really easily.

This is an example that she could make because she didn't already have her 15%, you know, and didn't kill anybody, and stop us from being Bre-X, so she didn't have that argument. There's a way that Sabrina could have talked about how those skills have value and increased her salary as well.

Sometimes these hidden skills, even if you're not using them, can actually be incredibly important.

Step one is to take an inventory about everything that sits over in that yellow circle of your skills.

Then we're going to switch attention to the other side and look at the business needs. Here we want to think about what really matters to the business.

We talked earlier about if you're a mine, don't do fraud, don't kill anybody, make a lot of money. If you are Facebook or Google though, the answer is sell as many ads as possible.

Every business has specific things that matter a lot to them. That are how they make their money, that are baked into the business model, that are essential.

Let me ask you to think about what really matters to the business that I'm in, for the company that I work for? And then I want you to look at that company specifically, "Well, what are the strategic priorities we have over the next little while?"

People will talk about them in town halls, you can find them in annual reports to shareholders, sometimes news releases will focus on these kinds of things. But look at what the strategic priorities are from the top, especially.

Then we're going to break it down a level and look at what our boss struggles with. Because we're not just making the case to the CEO of the company, about what our raise should be. We're actually talking to the real human being who manages us day-to-day above us.

Then I want you to think, okay, what does your boss struggle with? Both from a business perspective, if he's a software development manager, it's really hard to get good velocity on the team and get a lot of software out the door. Maybe that's a key area of struggle.

But it might also be that he is overworked and overwhelmed and is up until eight o'clock at night working all the time, and maybe there's a way that his biggest need right now is just less work.

What does your boss struggle with, both in terms of business but also in terms of them as a human?

And then finally and relatedly, what problems are causing them the most pain?

Something that we haven't really talked about yet, but, you know, we're drawing this Venn diagram, this a little overlapping Venn diagram. And the dollar signs, the most dollar signs are right smack in the middle of that. You want to have things that are the most painful, the most important.

The closer you can get to the center of that Venn diagram where things really, really matter, or are really, really important, or are really, really frustrating, and you can solve them, are really going to help. So, I want you to really think about that as you're looking at this business needs side of things, what problems is my boss or this business are causing the most pain right now? What are they really focused on and what are they really hating?

Now we're going to look at the overlap. Some questions you can ask yourself as you're trying to figure out how these things overlap are, how did you make your boss's life better?

Maybe you made it so they could go home on time. Maybe you made it so like Sabrina, head office wasn't screaming at you every single time you submitted a report because it was incorrect.

That's a massive improvement. He looks better to his bosses, he's not tired of being yelled at, he's not trying to manage his emotions every single time he gets on a call with corporate. There's something really good in there. How did you make your boss's life easier?

And what business value did you create? This looks a little different for every business, but a standard shortcut is how did you either increase revenue, reduce cost, or reduce risk?

When we look at what we said for Sabrina, 15% production increase, that's increased revenue. That means that we're going to dig more dirt that has more gold in it, and then we can sell it. She didn't do a lot around reducing costs, but she did a lot around reducing risk.

The production reporting stuff that she did made it so that they're way less likely to be sued or worse by shareholders. And the stuff that she did around the old mapping project meant that nobody died on-site, and that is hugely expensive and also emotionally devastating.

So, she reduced a lot of risk there. Sabrina really has some key business value drivers that she's touched in doing this work.

A few more questions you can think about are what problems does the business have that you've solved over the last year. We took a look at what things matter to them and what they're struggling with, how have you solved them?

And question number four is, what do you provide that stops pain from happening? Now, part of the reason this question's in here is because sometimes what we do has created a tangible change over the last year.

Sabrina improved production by 15%. Something's better and different than it was before. But sometimes, our role is not to make something different, it's just to stop something terrible from going on. And that's also really important.

What have I done that stopped something terrible from happening just by the fact that my job exists? That's another key area of value that most people kind of overlook, but I think can really matter.

Those are a couple of places that you can look as you try to build your Sabrina version rationale for why you're going to ask for, in Sabrina's case, much more than $6,000. This is the model, friends. Sear it into your brains, take a photo, write it on a post-it note, as I have right here, on my desk at all times, because I talk about it so often with my clients.

Lesson #6: Focus on Business Value

The lesson here, that I really want you to take away is to focus on the business value that you're providing.

Now, friends, there's a lot of ways that you can make a case for a raise. You know, some of the things that folks talk to me about all the time are;

Or, you know, or, or, or, there's a million different ways to make the case. The reason why I've started with this one is because generally speaking, not always, there's always room to think about what the strategy's going to be in a negotiation, but generally speaking, making a case around the business value that you provide is going to be the easiest, most reliable, and most quick to get a yes. Again, not always.

The safer route, and usually the more reliable route, is focus on the business value. So that's lesson number six.

You can see from Sabrina's excited little face here, that she's starting to get the idea. She's going, "Ooh, okay, I see. When I change the way I talk about things, people can see the value more, and then it becomes easier for me to ask for more money. That's interesting."

I wonder, friends, if we could kick it up a notch a little bit. Is there a way to make this all seem better, and more expensive, and more interesting? And the answer is yes, obviously.

So what we want to do now, is take a look at this improved production by 15% thing. That's really interesting, but it's a bit abstract. 15% is a good number, it's not a particularly high number.

If she improved production 80%, I'd be like, "Oh, that's really high." 15% is high. Most of the time, we're only improving production by 2%, 5%. Small little numbers. So 15% is good.

But intuitively, I don't feel like that's a huge number. I wonder if there's another way for us to contextualize that.

What we know is that she improved how much dirt we're moving overall. Let's translate that into, A, how much gold we produced, but more importantly, how many dollars we produced. Let's see what it was.

$57 million, friends.

This is a huge sum of money. Did anybody here see this coming with the 15%? I didn't. I literally did the math. I've known this story for years, I just did the math on it as I was building this presentation. I had to check the math like eight times because I wasn't sure it was correct. It's a huge sum of money.

We're all losing our minds over this $57 million. How much would we give Sabrina now, now that we know that her 15% increase made us $57 million?

It's, I promise you, no problem for me to say yes to the six grand, no problem for me to sell that all the way up to the highest levels of the company. Everyone's saying yes to this and they're going, wow, we got away like bandits. It only costs us $6,000 and we made this much more money, gold mine, amazing.

We need to ask for a lot more money. So, it's really important for us to contextualize this information. Bring it right down to the dollars and cents. Because when you bring it down to the dollars and cents, it has a way of clarifying things instantly.

Lesson #7: Quantify The Value

Lesson number seven is quantify the value. Always, always quantify. Now we did quantify it, 15%. Bring it down to dollars and cents as much as you can, unless the dollars and cents are tiny, then bring it back to percentages.

I told you a story earlier about, you know, my clients who had gone and negotiated. And client number two got $25,000, and I said to you that she had asked and her boss had said no, and then later on she'd managed to get $25,000. Here's the full story of that.

So she went to her boss and she said, "I'd like a $10,000 raise." And her boss said, "Absolutely not." She had an ask sort of similar to Sabrina's like, "I think I deserve it. I've been doing this role, I'm doing pretty good."

Kind of generic, not too quantified. And he said, "No, I'm not going to give it to you."

She was very upset because she really felt like she deserved it. And he said, "Listen, it's a no, and you should go and hire a negotiation coach and then come back and ask."

And then he actually gave her my number. It was a very unusual move from a boss. Most bosses don't do that, they just say no and send you on your way. But he said, "Go hire somebody and come back and ask again."

She and I worked together on this. And her boss actually demanded that she build a PowerPoint, which is an unusual move. Normally you don't have to make a PowerPoint to justify a raise.

But she did, she had to build a PowerPoint, and then she had to stand there and give this very high pressure presentation to this man who had already said no to her, and then demanded that she do it again. The most stressful situation any of us has ever been in.

She sat there, desperately trying to keep her emotions together as she delivered, what I think in the end was actually a very powerful case for her to get a raise. And here's the thing that clinched it. We made the case in a couple of different ways. We didn't just rely on one thing.

But I think the main thing that did it was we took a look at just one thing she had done this year. This is somebody who also works in the mining industry, and she had changed a little bit the procedure around ground support.

She had changed it so that there was less disruption to the production crews when they had to make sure that the rocks above their heads didn't fall down on them. There's a whole procedure for how you do that. She changed that procedure slightly so that there was less disruption to production.

And she just ran that as a small experiment at first, and then it ended up working so they continued doing it. We took a look at just that trial period that she did over, you know, I don't remember how long it was, three to five days or something like that.

And we looked at over that period of time, the fact that the mine was able to operate at increased capacity rather than being shut down as it normally would in certain areas, how much money was that worth?

This woman worked for a whole year, just that one thing she did over just those few days was worth over $100,000. She shared that as part of her presentation. She said, "Listen, in just this little thing, I made over $100,000. And as I move into this new role," she was getting a promotion as part of this, "As I move into this new role, not only am I going to do that for more than three days, but I'm going to have a whole team underneath me of people who I help do that."

Her boss looked at that and went, "Yeah, $10,000 for a $100,000 in just three days is an amazing deal. This is no problem." And so, she was able to not only get a yes to the $10,000, but actually add in an extra 15K and get a yes to that, despite the fact that during the presentation, she was so stressed out, she was almost crying.

She did amazing, friends. And part of the reason she did amazing is because of that emotional fortitude to be able to show up to such a high stress situation. But also, part of it was that we were really able to quantify that value and make the yes a no-brainer. When her boss saw that number, the game was over.

Quantify the value. We did it, we made our ask, we survived our high stress PowerPoint presentation, or the conversation that Sabrina had, or whatever weird situation, maybe it's only a 15 minute phone call. We made the ask. Hooray. Great. Now what happens?

Because we've done it, but now they're going to say something back, they're going to say yes, or no, or maybe, or God knows what else. Well, hopefully for most of us, we're somewhere in between this 50-70% and we get that yes. I really hope that that's true for you. And chances are, it probably will be.

But They Might Say No

But they might say no. It's totally possible. 50% chance for women of colour, 30% chance for everybody else. Most of us worry that if we get a no, it's going to go like this,

And this is terrifying. This is awful. We talked earlier, about our worst nightmare being almost crying in front of our boss. This is the new worst nightmare, I'm not talking you into negotiating at all, now we're all scared, yuck. But the good news is this is very rare, exceptionally rare.

This is the kind of thing that happens so infrequently that you probably don't need to worry too, too much about it. Here's why. It is exceptionally hard to hire people.

Think about how many terrible people you work with and how they still have jobs. That's proof number one, okay? But proof number two is if you want to let somebody go, at least here in Canada, what you have to do, usually, is go and talk to HR and say, "So-and-so is terrible, I want to fire them."

Most of the time HR is going to say, "Sucks to you, go manage your people." But the odd scenario, they might say, "Okay, tell me more about it."

Then they're going to make you really substantiate it. You're going to have to put that person on a performance improvement plan with defined metrics that they have to hit. It's going to last over weeks or months.

You better hope they don't hit them, because if they do, then you're stuck with them. But if you can manage to construct them in such a way that they fail and they won't make it work, you can finally fire them, but then also, you're going to pay them a bunch of money in severance so they don't sue the company.

It takes forever, it's hugely expensive, and now you've going to go hire somebody, and then that also takes forever and is hugely expensive.

Most bosses are not going to go and fire you and invite all this drama into their life just because you've asked for more money. It's just not worth it for them. It's so annoying to do this process.

You'd have to really piss them off for them to decide this is the right course of action, or it'd have to be worth a death wish for themselves and their productivity over the next little while. It doesn't happen very often because it's massively disincentivized.

But you might be going, "Well, Holly, I don't have a job. I'm negotiating at a new job. Why don't they just opt not to hire me? Just pull the offer and say, "Sucks to you, I don't want to hire you anymore, I'll go find somebody that doesn't ask me for more money."

Well, the good news is that's also very rare. Employers don't usually pull offers. And the reasons there are basically the same as they are internally. Because if they've gone through the process of interviewing and they've decided, "It's you, you're the one I love, I want to hire you. I can't wait to have you as my employee and then we'll be incredibly productive together and just have a great time at work."

They've, one, already emotionally committed and decided it's you, you're the one. But if you don't take it, they have to go and start this whole process again.

Your potential boss has just finished weeks and months of putting up a post on LinkedIn, waiting for a bunch of people to apply, then going through a literal thousand resumes, only five of which are any good, but you've going to read them all because you never know when the good one's going to show up.

They've read through so many resumes that their eyes are crossed permanently now. They've gotten on phone calls, they've dedicated all this time to interviewing them. All their team's been pulled away from their normal work to interview these people.

Some of those people that you liked went and got other jobs, and so they didn't pan out, and it takes forever. Finally, again, they decide on somebody new. And not only that, not only did it take all this time, but also, they're down one person on their team, so they're already doing more work, and their team's already doing more work, and they just want it to end so badly.

So, imagine the degree of self-own it is for them to just go, "You want $20,000? No. And get out." They could just say, "No." And then you'll probably take the job anyways, that's what happens most of the time.

They usually don't pull the offer, they usually just say no and then you take it or you leave it. But it's very rare for them to actually invite this chaos into their life by saying, "Sucks to you. You're out. We'll find somebody else. We'd rather start over." It's just so much work.

The great thing for all of you all is it never feels like you have leverage when you're negotiating against your powerful company or when you're, you know, jobless and looking for somebody to please pay you so you can start paying your rent again because you're so stressed out.

It feels like you don't have any leverage, but you actually do have a lot of leverage because it's very painful to hire people or fire people.

Lesson #8: Your Job Is Safe (most likely)

So just know that this is actually far less common and your job is safe, probably. Most likely. I can't guarantee it, but odds are this is unlikely to be the case for you.

I want to say, friends, I trust all of you in this room. I trust your judgment. If there's a part of you that goes, "Listen, Holly, I can't tolerate even 1% risk around this". With the way the economy is, or the way that my life is or whatever, there's no room for error around my job security."

That's okay. Negotiating might not be the right thing for you right now, and I don't think you should feel bad about that. It's okay to protect against risk if you really can't take it on.

But if you're somebody who has some amount of savings and you could probably be okay, and it's a teeny-tiny chance that this could happen, and there's a backup plan that would mean you're fine even if it does, then you're probably okay to sit there and go, "It's okay, I'm safe. I can try, I can negotiate."

But What If They Still Say No? (& Why No Is Great!)

So, what if they still say no? They don't fire me instantly because they're not evil cartoon characters, you know? Like Snidely Whiplash tying me to a railroad track, twirling my thin mustache like a vaudeville villain.

What if they still say no even if they don't fire me?" Well, then I'm very excited for you actually. I don't know if you all are very surprised by this, but I actually love no. I actually think no is great.

I know we spent all this time at the beginning of the presentation talking about, no is terrible, and we're all afraid of it, and it's our worst nightmare, and isn't it bad? And I get that, it is. But no is incredibly, incredibly underrated, and for me, not a reason to not try.

Let me walk you through why I love no. And this is a very long list, friends, so let's talk about why I love no.

First of all, the best thing about you hearing no is that your ask wasn't too low. This is one of the biggest hazards in a negotiation actually, is that you go in and say,

If you hear a no, that's great, that means that you didn't sell yourself out and ask for a number that's far too unachievable, which is a huge risk.

The biggest compliment I've ever heard one of my clients get in a negotiation was one of my clients several years ago, she was negotiating back and forth about how much money she'd want, and the guy said, "You're turning out to be much more expensive than I expected." And then he hired her, and he paid her the more money. It was great.

That's exactly the sweet spot you want when they go, "Ouch. And I'm in." Right?

So, if you get a no, that's great. Your ask wasn't too low. There's still some adjusting to do, I hear you, but it's fundamentally good news in my books.

The other thing that's great about no is that even if they don't give you what you want, they view you differently now. If you're negotiating at your company, they know that you are not somebody they can pass over anymore. They know that you're somebody who's going to come and proactively have conversations with them, and demand to get paid what you want to get paid.

You know, every year bosses get given a budget of, you know, X dollars or X percentage so that they can sort of pick and choose between their employees, who's getting what, they know that they can't go, "Well, Sandra, if I don't give her anything, she's not going to complain, so instead I'll give it over here because this person's really been driving me nuts and they desperately want a raise.
So, sorry, Sandra. Not this year," right?

They'll know that they can't get away with that because you're going to have a conversation with them. And instead of being the person that doesn't get the money this year, you're the person that definitely does because you've been a bit of a squeaky wheel.

It also means that they're going to view you as somebody who takes their career in their hands and is really, really proactive, and understands their value.

One of the things that I mentioned earlier that I love about negotiation is it changes how the other party views you, but it changes how you view your own skills. Imagine how differently Sabrina feels about herself when she knows that the work that she does every day earns the company $57 million in a single year. She shows up differently to work, she creates different outcomes at work once she knows that.

So, they will view you differently and you will behave differently fundamentally. Going through this process of preparing an ask and making a negotiation, it makes you show up differently, so you'll be seen differently even if you get a no, and I think that's great.

Also, something that I know about no that makes me fall in love with it is that no now doesn't mean no forever. There's a huge amount of difference, there's a huge spectrum of things that no can mean. No might mean,

No could mean all kinds of things. Even more than that list I just gave you. Lots of different options. But there's a huge variability of what no can mean that isn't no, and there's no chance for you ever.

There's lots and lots of place of possibility even when you hear a no. The other thing that I love about it is that no is crucial information, especially if you're in the situation that I just mentioned, where they go, "No, I don't think your skills are worth it."

Think about it, there's only two ways this can go. If your boss thinks that you're not worth the money that you want to be making, you can ask for it, get a no, and know that information now, or you can not ask for it, not get the no, and then be in the exact same position next year not knowing it then.

That's the only way that it goes. So, I would rather you have that information now, because if you have that information now, it won't be any different a year from now, probably, because you didn't know that you weren't and you didn't know why.

It'll just be the same, and next year you won't get your raise and you'll have a whole year of not making the extra money on top of it.

But if you know that information now, you can start to change it. Either you can change the way you show up at work, you can change the type of projects you focus on, or you can argue with your boss to change the perception of your work. Or you can argue with your boss to change the metrics that he's using to decide whether or not that's the important thing to measure you on, because he might be wrong about that.

If there is a no that is related to how you're showing up at work, that's essential information for your career and you want to know it now. Now is better than later, so I love no for that reason, because it helps you construct what the new version of you that's going to get a yes is going to be.

On that same note, part of the reason I love no, is because it creates an amazing space for you to start asking questions. If you say to your boss, "Hi, I'd like to make $220,000," and they go, "No, we're not going to be able to do that."

You can say, "Okay, tell me a little bit more about that. What makes that not the right number right now?" And then you'll start to get some of the information. Is it budget? Is it you? Is it something else?

You can build out whether that no is now, whether that no is forever, what's causing that no, how can I change that no, from that point when you ask questions.

When you ask directly and get a no, you open the door for you to go and ask those questions in a way that it wasn't previously. because it would be weird for you to go into your boss not having had the conversation about the salary and say, "How's the budget this year? Any room for raises?" It's just a harder conversation to have.

So no creates the ability for you to ask a bunch of questions. And finally, you may have seen this coming, you can still get to yes. Most of the time when my clients hear a no, there's a yes coming.

Now, I've never worked with a client who hasn't gotten a yes within a year. I've had two clients who didn't get a yes right away, both of them got them within a year, either at their employer or elsewhere for twice the money.

Yes is still coming, and getting the no now, making the asks that you need to ask to understand what has to change for you to be able to get a yes in a year, is an amazing thing for you to start with.

Some questions that you can ask that will help put you on that path to yes, are, "Okay, my goal is to make $220,000. What would you need to see out of me to be a yes to paying me for that".

And then you can make a plan with your boss and go, "Okay, well, I need to do this kind of project, I need to show off this kind of skill, I need to have hired somebody and fired somebody."

Whatever the things are that your boss wants to see. And then you can go, "Okay, in the next three months, how do we make a plan so that I can do that? And then how will you support me so that I'm successful in doing that?"

Then when you inevitably do those things and are successful, because you created that plan with your boss, then you get to go to your boss and go, "Look, I did the thing on your checklist. Let's check it off together and remember that we've done it."

And then a year later, when the whole list is checked off, you get to go, "Ah, you already said this would be a yes and we've already done it. How convenient. Let's talk about that $220,000."

You'll probably do it a little differently and less cheeky, but still, that's the conversation that you get to have, and isn't that a good conversation? It's not uncommon for negotiations to happen in more than one part, you know? More than one conversation.

No's are not a bad thing, they happen all the time, and they can be really helpful moving you forward.

This is especially true if you are not just asking for more money for what you're doing now, but if you're trying to get a promotion. You'll see this more often than not, where negotiations will stretch over multiple review cycles or multiple budget cycles for a variety of internal company reasons or maybe related to your own skill set.

This is a really normal thing and it's not bad, it just means you're on your way to success.

Lesson #9: No Is Amazing (no, really)

Lesson nine is that no is amazing, actually. Actually amazing. We love it. We love yes, but we also love no.

Okay, friends, and then we've got one last little thing to talk about, because we've got a 10 item list and we've already done with item nine.

The last thing that I want to say is that most of us think that negotiations kind of go like this. It's a single conversation where we go,

That's the negotiation.

That's not the negotiation at all. That's just the haggling part. That's the part that we see on TV where fancy dressed lawyers pass numbers back and forth on post-it notes across a table, but that's not actually the negotiation.

Build Your Case Over Time

The negotiation happens over time. I mean, you can do it, you can do it on hard mode in a single conversation, and try to convince your boss within the space of half an hour to give you $30,000, having never previously thought about it. That's doable.

My client at the beginning did it. $42,000, 15 minutes. It's possible.

But what's way easier is to build your case over time. Have the conversation nine months before you want to get promoted, and go, "Hey, I really want to be a VP next year. Can you and I sit down and benchmark my skills against the job description for the VP role? See how I'm stacking up, and then make a plan for me to meet that?”

And then you can do that plan like we talked about. And then as you get closer you can say, "Hey, it looks like this is going to happen. When is the budget review cycle?

How do we make sure there's room in the budget? How do we make sure that HR has all their I's dotted and T's crossed? This is the salary I'm looking to make. Do we think that's going to be reasonable? Who do we have to convince?"

Quite often, these conversations aren't just a simple yes from your boss, there's a whole bunch of people involved in the approval process. Companies have all kinds of different ways of doing, especially promotions.

These can get pretty involved and multi-step. And that client I mentioned earlier, the one who said, you know, $83,000 is a starting offer, she worked on her raise for over a year, actually.

We had time, we started early because she hadn't got her P.Eng yet. But she built her case over time, and really amazingly, was able to go from a position where people were going, "This is impossible, you'll never get any money, and they'll decide how much." To people going, "10% is insane, you'll never get 10%."

To her getting not only a 15% raise for herself, but also HR and her boss realizing that actually everybody in the department was underpaid. And so her boss, who had never asked for a raise, and a bunch of her colleagues also got raises, because she had the audacity to ask, and because she spent a year of time doing the effort back and forth, to convince people.

It wasn't just that single haggle. If it had been that single haggle, I don't think she would've got it. The amazing thing that I hope takes some pressure off for all of you is that it's not just down to this one high stakes conversation. You set yourself up for success with this conversation again and again and again.

Client number one, the reason she got a $60,000 raise actually wasn't really anything that she did in the negotiation. It actually was due to how she presented her skills in the interview process.

She did that Sabrina thing amazingly. She had that little like Venn diagram nailed. She showed off her skills so that they already knew how valuable she was.

And, friends, the truth is, we taught her how to negotiate, and then she went, "I'm too scared, and $60,000 is a great offer, and so I'll take it." She took it. She didn't negotiate.

But she was negotiating the entire time. She was building her case. She was showing off her skills. It didn't look the way that a traditional negotiation looks like, where they say X dollars, Y dollars, duck season, rabbit season, but she was negotiating.

So, you are too. The entire time that you're interacting with your boss all year round, you're negotiating.

Lesson #10: Negotiate All Year

Lesson number 10 is negotiate all year, or all interview cycle if you're looking for a new job, okay? You're always negotiating. Do it all the time.

The Top 10 Negotiation Basics Summarized

We have been through "The Top 10 Negotiation Basics." I have so much that I could tell you some more, but let's summarize what we've talked about so far.

Number one, ask. Make sure you're one of the one-third of women and 50% of men who actually ask, because there's a 50-70% chance that you get what you're looking for, and whatever the rest of it is, is that you get a no. But also we like no, remember? So please go ask. That's thing number one.

Number two is when you make that ask, make sure it is an actual number, not a vague statement about your politics or feelings about pay. Make it a real number with a dollar sign in front of it, and don't negotiate for the other side.

Make it a number that you actually want and choose what information you're going to spotlight, because just because you know it doesn't mean they can. So, you can actually just ask for what you want, and it's okay if they say no at first.

Then, when you have to do the rationale, focus on business value and make sure you quantify it, because quantifying it is so shockingly effective, so make sure you get that done. Know that if you're terrified, your job is almost certainly safe.

If it's not, that's probably a huge red flag of the employer. But your job is probably safe. And even if you hear a no, that's actually probably good news and you're probably still going to be successful, just a little ways down the line.

Because that's true, we want to make sure that we start early. Negotiate all year, give yourself as much time as possible to build in the consensus, the agreement, to have your boss see how great you are, to reinforce those wins all year long.

"Oh, boss, another million in the can because of the production improvements that we made in just this week alone." "That's pretty impressive, Sabrina. Okay, I'll remember that."

Really be negotiating all year.

Look, if you can do all 10 of these things, you'll be in good shape. If you can do any of these 10 things, you'll be in better shape.

You know, something I tell all of my clients is in every single negotiation you go into, you're going to kick yourself over at least one thing that you did. It never goes flawlessly.

There's always at least one thing where you go in and you go,