10,000 Hours at the Table: How $1B in Deals Actually Get Done With Patrick Griffin

Patrick J. Griffin is a Partner at TableForce, a firm that provides negotiation training for B2B professionals. As a seasoned negotiation expert and strategist, he has negotiated over $1 billion in sales with global financial institutions, specializing in complex financial instruments. Outside of negotiation training, Patrick is the Founder of Morrigan Strategic Advisors, where he provides fractional CFO services and executive advisory consultancy.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:15] Two common misconceptions about negotiation: it's adversarial and divides fixed value
[4:27] The hidden cost of avoiding negotiation and negotiating against yourself
[6:28] Understanding cultural differences in body language during negotiations
[11:49] Negotiations as collaborative problem-solving and the shift from transactional to relational
[16:27] Patrick J. Griffin’s disagreement with Chris Voss on tactical empathy and credibility
[23:29] How Patrick’s childhood exposure to rhetoric and negotiation shaped his career
[30:54] Techniques for resetting your emotions during negotiations
[42:35] The importance of raising expectations in negotiations
[52:23] Patrick explains the "TableForce" method and how to prepare before entering a negotiation
[1:08:20] Patrick’s love of music and how playing instruments fuels his personal growth

In this episode…

Negotiations can be tricky, often creating anxiety about whether you're getting the best deal. Yet, negotiating isn’t always about winning or losing; rather, it’s about finding ways to collaborate and create value. How can you approach negotiations with a mindset that benefits both parties involved?

High-stakes negotiation trainer Patrick J. Griffin challenges the typical adversarial view of negotiations. He regards them as collaborative problem-solving, where both sides work together to uncover new value. Patrick emphasizes the importance of preparation, understanding what both you and your counterpart value, and being clear on your priorities and boundaries. By focusing on these aspects, you increase the chances of creating long-term, mutually beneficial agreements.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris sits down with Patrick J. Griffin, a Partner at TableForce, to discuss how to approach negotiation as a collaborative process. Patrick shares insights on shifting from transactional to relational negotiations, why high expectations lead to better outcomes, and how founders often overlook value outside of price.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

"Negotiation can be collaborative and value-creating, not just about dividing a fixed amount of value."
"Avoiding negotiation is really just negotiating against yourself. You are your own worst counterpart in that case."
"A tactic discovered is a tactic disarmed. Once you see it, you know it's being used."
"If you lose credibility in negotiation, the game is up. It takes so long to regain."
"To say that a man is an artist is to say he combines deliberately and enjoys the result."

Action Steps

Embrace negotiation as collaborative problem-solving: Viewing negotiations as joint problem-solving instead of adversarial battles opens up opportunities for value creation. This mindset reduces fear and increases the potential for mutually beneficial outcomes.
Prepare thoroughly for every negotiation: Understanding both your goals and your counterpart’s priorities allows you to be flexible and creative. Thorough preparation strengthens your position and ensures you're not blindsided by unexpected developments.
Use emotional control to stay grounded: Emotional reactions can undermine your credibility and influence during negotiations. By mastering emotional self-regulation, you maintain clarity and stay focused on achieving long-term goals.
Set high expectations for every negotiation: Establishing ambitious goals helps you avoid settling for less than you're worth. It also empowers you to push boundaries and unlock new value that would otherwise remain untapped.
Recognize value beyond the immediate deal: Consider non-traditional assets like customer relationships or platform evolution in negotiations. These often-overlooked elements can create substantial long-term value that enhances the overall deal.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

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Episode Transcript

Intro 0:02

Foreign Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show. Hey everyone.

William Harris 0:14

I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 10 million to 100 million and beyond. As you up arrow your business and your personal life, people tend to think negotiation is something you do when a deal is going wrong, prices are stalling, terms are tense, lawyers are circling. But in reality, by the time it feels like a negotiation, you've already lost leverage. Today's guest has spent more than 10,000 hours at the table directly negotiating over a billion dollars in business across Wall Street, global financial institutions, professional sports, major retailers and enterprise B2B deals. Most founders never get to see up close. He'll be the first to tell you that negotiation isn't about being aggressive, clever or intimidating. It's about expanding value, understanding what actually matters and building deals that are materially better without blowing up the relationship. Patrick J. Griffin is a partner at TableForce, which has trained over 35,000 professionals across 40 countries on how to turn good deals into great ones. He's also a fractional CFO, advising growing companies on when, and more importantly, how to negotiate everything from vendors and agencies to licensing capital and M&A Patrick, welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast.

Patrick J. Griffin 1:27

Thank you, William. I really appreciate you having me on.

William Harris 1:29

Yeah, I got to give a quick shout out to my good friend, Dilyar Askar for putting us in touch. Heart friend. That is actually what his name means. I don't know if you know it Dilyar means heart friend, but he is a heart friend If you've spent any time with him before failure. Thanks for putting in touch with Patrick. He is the best. Yeah, got one more interruption, then we'll jump right into the good stuff here. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800,000,001 that ipoed. You can learn more on our website at elumynt.com, which is spelled elumynt.com, okay, Patrick, when people hear the word negotiation, what do they picture and what do they get fundamentally wrong right out of the gate.

Patrick J. Griffin 2:15

So there are two main misconceptions that I tend to see, William, and that's a great question. So the first one is just that negotiations are inherently adversarial. So there's this really common media trope of negotiations being, you know, battles, right? This, this, this competitive. It's competitive fight, really. And so one of the first things we do when I'm training folks is to get them away from that misconception that that negotiation can be collaborative and it can be value creating, and value creating is really what ties into that. That second misconception is that people tend to think that negotiation is about dividing or distributing a certain amount of fixed value, and when negotiation is done well, then it it gives you the opportunity, if you're asking the right questions and understanding your counterpart, well, gives you the opportunity to identify, create new value at the table, and then claim some of that value for yourself, for your side. And so those are the two things we really combat. And the part of the problem with this thought of negotiation being inherently adversarial or distributive, in the case of of of the second example is that that that just causes more fear, it causes people to be less inclined to negotiate, because they think you have to be a certain personality type to negotiate. You have to be somebody who's aggressive. I think you need to be assertive, but you don't need to be aggressive. And this is, you know, those those distinctions make an important difference. The other aspect of this sort of distributive concept is that people think if they negotiate, they're going to lose they're going to lose something. They're going to have to give up something that they don't want to give up. That's just simply not true. And so part of the reason that we combat these misconceptions is to get folks excited to be at the table, and get them more used to going through those motions and having those conversations in a in a bold and assertive way.

William Harris 4:11

I think sometimes people just don't like confrontation in general. My wife is one of those. She's like, I just, I want to avoid it all together. And so I think this is something that you wrote, that I read, that avoiding negotiation is itself a negotiation, just a bad one. Why? Why is that?

Patrick J. Griffin 4:27

Well, when you're avoiding a negotiation, and my wife is also really conflict averse, avoiding negotiation is really just negotiating against yourself. It you are your own worst counterpart in that case. And, and you just don't even try. And what we really want to do, one of our principal things, the first thing we do when we talk about negotiation the TableForce is, is just getting people used to the idea of trying just get out there more and, and so if you're if you're not doing that. The amount of value you're leaving on the table is really substantial.

William Harris 5:04

There's, I think you told me there's, like a hidden cost of just agreeing to keep momentum, right? What is the hidden cost of agreeing to keep momentum? Well, it's, it's really the

Patrick J. Griffin 5:13

cost of creativity, or the cost of of that sort of currency, not in that, not in this monetary sense, in that sense of the currency of your understanding. Life. Commerce is dynamic. Businesses are dynamic. And when you're relying on inertia, when you're not feeding your understanding back into what's going on in that moment, then you are almost invariably leaving opportunity behind, or, you know, off the table,

William Harris 5:43

do you, and this is just out of sheer curiosity, is probably a little bit of a tangent. Do you find that there are things that like subtle, little cues, and some of these negotiations that do mean something? Like, for instance, I itched my nose just a little bit ago, and I think I've read, you know, like memes or people, like itchy nose means you're lying or something. And I was like, actually, for me, to be completely honest, it means that I have a little bit of frostbite on my nose, in my neck, if you can tell we went we went sledding or whatever, snowmobiling like negative 29 you know you're going 50 miles an hour. It's like negative 67 and so I thought I had everything covered up. I didn't cover it up as well as I should. So for me, it literally just means that my nose itches a little bit. But do you find that there are, like, truly little cues that you use, or is that another misconception we have about negotiating

Patrick J. Griffin 6:28

so there are absolutely cues that you can pick up on, they aren't necessarily body language. One of the challenges with relying too heavily on body language is the is the there are cultural differences in body language. I come from Long Island. I talk with my hands, right there's, there's my natural way of speaking and carrying myself has a lot more to do with where I'm from and how I was a culture than than just being a human. And so for most of us in the in the field, we talk a lot about that cross cultural international negotiation, because there's a lot of there's a lot of meat on the bone there, and you want to make sure that you take the physical cues with a grain of salt. That said, there are plenty of indicators of where you sit within a negotiation. And actually, one of the things that that TableForce was involved in before I joined the company, was a study, along with another organization, a contracting organization, related to figuring out whether you were a preferred or selected vendor before you even get, you know, in a competitive bid situation, figuring out sort of how you sit in the stack of your competitors before you Get to the table. And we found that that 60, 70% of the time that vendor is either highly preferred or actually selected before negotiations start. And you can find cues in that actually one of the exercises that we go through in in the training, in our main training, which we call negotiating for success, one, it's a fantastic two day program, really interactive. One of the exercises on day two involves reading four or five pages of background information both parties do. There's overlapping information. There's also separate information, of course, and and there are, in one of these, there are a number of cues buried that indicate to you that that you are really well positioned, or you've already won the bid, depending on the actual exercises that we go through. And that's real. That's realistic based on the questions that they're asking, or based on the the tenor of communication, or what steps have been going on in parallel. There. There is a lot that you can understand and that you can then feedback into your negotiation strategy, understanding where you sit, what's

William Harris 8:46

what's one of them. And I'll give you an example, because this actually came up recently. It's very rare. I feel like that we don't win a proposal, but there was a proposal that happened just this week that we didn't win, and and I asked for feedback, and it was exactly to your point. She's like, I mean, we really almost had our mind made up before we even asked for anybody's proposals. Kind of thing, we already knew who we were going with, kind of thing, right? Relationships built up over years and years and years, and we're just kind of like the, well, let's get another quote, right. We obviously didn't go into it that way. We're never gonna go into it that way. But were there things that I could have seen, or what's one of the examples that you would say that you're like, This is one of those things you'd see on where you sit, sure.

Patrick J. Griffin 9:22

Well, one thing we see commonly, and this happens in, you know, larger scale corporates, is that, you know, maybe the attorneys know it's going to take a little while to negotiate the terms, so they ask, they ask to see the draft agreement. They're not going to ask for that from everybody sure they're going, because the attorneys are expensive. They don't want to waste their time. And so they're going, you know, if you have a good idea of who you're going to use, they're going to say, hey, once you send over that, that agreement, and we can get started on it, get looking at it, a little thing, or if, or if engineers are involved in developing spec or answering questions about, about that, that's a. Another really good green light, so to speak. And so anything that that really informs the longevity of the relationship or makes that next step easier, where, if you kind of get ahead of yourself a little

William Harris 10:13

bit, yeah, I feel like if you can learn those, those little cues, it's like fishing with dynamite, it's just gonna make every deal that much more exciting.

Patrick J. Griffin 10:23

Or William, if I may say one more thing, please. The other advantage there is figuring out if you're not selected, because very often there can be somebody in the mix that maybe they're giving a chance to, maybe they, you know, they're a lower cost provider, and then that bit can be used as a cudgel to lower, you know, the preferred vendors, quote, potentially you're used as an as a position. And so if you know that you are not, we call this this party, the rabbit in our it because of the rabbit is, is, is going to get chased. It's the prey, you know, yeah, the prey, right? And in a greyhound situation, we think about this. And so, like we're seeing greyhounds, that old school kind of thing, they can be used to make everybody compete a little bit harder. They're not going to be selected. If you can figure out that you're not going to be selected, a quick no is always better. You know, we're figuring out that, okay, I'm not going to invest too much time and energy into this because I because I know it's not going to pay me back, and there are good reasons to stay in it, right? Sometimes, but, but sometimes it's useful to cut bait and know when you should cut bait early. Yeah, I'm gonna be that it falls all over the place.

William Harris 11:35

You don't want to be the rabbit that's the thing to walk away from. You told me that negotiation isn't inherently adversarial. You talked about this in the beginning too. So then when? So what is negotiation your definition when it's actually done?

Patrick J. Griffin 11:49

Well, I think of it as collaborative problem solving. It's a way of and actually, so I started teaching negotiation nine years ago, I joined TableForce in 2024 but I started teaching negotiation on my own nine years ago, because I was negotiating less having left Wall Street when I was negotiating, it was with people who were less experienced and untrained. So to scratch that itch, because I missed it so much, I developed some curriculum based on my own formal training and the books I've read and my experience. And so one of the things that we see there, or one of the things we talk about in this cons in this concept, is this idea of collaborative problem solving. I used to make people when we went through exercises, when I had them do an actual live negotiation, a mock negotiation. They would sit down on opposite sides of the table because they've seen movies and they've seen television. After a little while, I would make them get up, and I would make them sit on the same side of the table, and they'd face in the same direction. It was this silly little thing. It was very gimmicky. But what it did was orient their their their bodies in a way to reflect that, okay, you are ultimately trying to solve the same problem here. You're trying to exchange value so you can get this. You know, maybe there's one big thing, maybe it's the contract that you're trying to negotiate, but what you're doing is you are working together to find a way to make that work. You are exchanging value. You're trading things so that ultimately you can get this, this, you know, the totality of it, but along the way, you're going to solve some some little problems as well. So I think of it as collaborative problem solving. Ultimately, there are times where where it can become adversarial. It's not ideal, it's not desirable, but it'd be silly to pretend that it doesn't happen and and so then we also have tools to navigate that and to take the temperature down a

William Harris 13:44

little bit. To me, it feels like, when you come at it from that perspective, though, this carries the connotation of, this is a long term relationship. We're going to come side by side working together. Do you feel as if that actually improves the outcome? Does it improve the speed, or does it improve both?

Patrick J. Griffin 14:07

So that's an excellent question, and I really like the way that you talked about that, because we one of the ways that I will phrase it often is that that shift from a transactional to a relational negotiation, this is a challenge I have. One of the most famous negotiators is a guy named Chris Voss. He wrote a book Never Split the Difference, which I happen to keep next to me, because I talk about I get asked about Chris all the time. So, good book worth reading, but wrong in certain aspects, because certain tactics that he encourages, such as tactical empathy, they sacrifice credibility in the long run for a short term gain. Useful in hostage negotiation, less so in a B2B circumstance. But to answer your question, I think that when you make that shift, it is possible to make that first negotiation. Take a little bit longer. It's possible that that might take a little longer. It's not necessary, but it is but it is possible. But what you're doing is building a foundation that that does allow for increased collaboration, increased exchange of value, and hopefully some longevity to that relationship. You know, it's well known that, you know, any first year MBA or first year business student will tell you that it's that it's so much more expensive to find a new customer than to keep an existing customer. The same is true with suppliers and and so making sure that you're navigating that relationship well in a way that's sustainable is, is, is a real sort of force, multiplier in the B2B world? Yeah, I'm

William Harris 15:42

glad you brought up Chris Foss, because I was going to ask you about it. You've pretty much covered it. But it's this idea that it's like, you know, they say we use 10% of our brains, and I feel like we only use 10% of our hearts, that it's like, sometimes we're coming at the table with this idea of, like, Hey, I'm coming to this intellectually. I'm going to win this debate. And it's like, but wait a minute, if you come at this from a heart posture too, how are you able to increase that relationship? That relationship allows for better, longer lasting relationships and negotiations. And so you hit it, this idea of tactical, empty. It's like, where do you agree and disagree? And it sounds like the biggest disagreement there is help wouldn't have gotten in, like a hostage negotiation, where it's like, there has to be a very clear, we got to solve this right this second, and it's got to happen. There's like, people are going to die, versus, hey, we've got some time. Why don't we work through and find, like, a really good, mutually beneficial spot to be?

Patrick J. Griffin 16:27

Yeah, and not just that. So in a hostage negotiation, the best case scenario is that you will never interact with that counterpart again. Sure. And in a B2B scenario, the opposite is true. You want continued interaction with that other party. And so I really, I do recommend folks read Chris's book, but it because there are some useful techniques in there. And we talked about body language mirror. He talks about mirroring. Mirroring can be useful for increasing that, that sort of relational cohesion, but you have to know where those kind of missed sort of ideas are those I think he misses the mark a little bit.

William Harris 17:01

Mirroring is wild. I remember my first sales job, you know, young, young kid, I think maybe in high school, and I read a book called covert persuasion, and it was talking about, it was like, Hey, if you just start matching your breath rate to theirs, then you can slow your breath rate down, and they fall. It's like, I don't know how much there is to that, but I do think that, like you said, to the point, there is something to this idea of mirroring and people wanting to be a little bit more trusting that, I think is interesting, and whether you're going to use that in your negotiations to your point, or, let's just say, being aware of somebody maybe trying to use some of those other tactics, that way you can at least be aware of who's at the table with me right now. Are they trying to covertly persuade me, or are they on the same team and we're going to work through this problem more together? Yeah.

Patrick J. Griffin 17:44

And is it genuine? Yeah, right. And that's my real gripe with tactical empathy, is that it is, by nature, disingenuous and and so the you know, making sure that that you are really sharing your perspective in a way that's not just trying to fool the person or just interested in a short term gain. I really like what you said about about identifying tactics that are used, because the we say often a tactic discovered is a tactic disarmed. Once you see it and you know that they're just trying to use something on you. It's it's less of that good faith discussion is less of that good faith pursuit of shared value, of creating shared value, and more about trying to get one over on you. And my experience with you know it. It's always been very important to me to develop and maintain my credibility, and that that level of trust that I have with everybody I work with, frankly, in negotiation and in the B2B world. If you lose that credibility, the game is up. I mean, it's just the work to get that back is so profoundly difficult and takes so long it is, it is precious to maintain that credibility. And the other thing I want to I want to say about this concept of relational and that longer term focus is and I my colleagues, Bill and Mike, who are managing partners at TableForce, they had experiences working directly with automotive manufacturers, and which is funny, because I worked with automotive finance companies on sort of The other end of it, but they were directly sourcing parts and things like that. So they worked with suppliers for GM, for example, and they found that the mandate really was to get them down, to get the suppliers down to basis points. Every time get them down, skin them as tight as you can. And that was believed to be, you know, a good and useful best practice in business. But what happened was, and there was even a minor disruption in the market, these suppliers were were were just beaten down, and their their margins were destroyed to the extent that they could not weather that, and it introduced very substantial supplier risk. Ethics aside, right? I think there's an ethical. Forward to this as well. But ethics aside, it's a bad business practice, because you are disrupting your own supply chain if you take advantage and really throw your weight around in that way. And that's that's a problem.

William Harris 20:12

I love the way your brain works, and so I want to jump back into like childhood and how that shaped us. When I think about like our childhoods, to have good interpersonal skills, is something we try to teach our kids all the time. And of course, like all kids, I had imaginary friends, but not just one. I had hundreds and hundreds of them from all different backgrounds who spoke different languages, and they were from, you know, one of them, his name was Caleb. He spoke this magical language that only I could understand, you know, but I the way that I understand is that, like you grew up, though, in a family of attorneys, rhetoric mattered, debate mattered. But you told me you didn't necessarily look forward to going to museums with your friends. You were more interested in negotiating with street vendors. And so it's like there was something in your brain that was wired to want negotiation. You know, how did that shape you psychologically, even as a kid? So, excellent question.

Patrick J. Griffin 21:07

So, yeah, so I my family are largely, especially in my father's side, made up of attorneys and judges and attorneys who became judges, of course, and and so that that art of rhetoric was really important, making sure that you were communicating clearly, but could also advocate for your position well. And it's that whole, you know, As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another kind of thing, and great and, and I guess I found myself interested in the extension of that. I mean, I was expected to be an attorney. There's a very good chance that I was going to become an attorney. I went a different direction, obviously, but the but that component of it, that that rhetorical art and negotiation, all of that really fed into a big part of of what I pursued. And so you mentioned not wanting to go to to museums or to more traditional retail stores in the city. So I grew up outside of New York City, and would go in with my with my peers. It was an easy train ride, and there was a rich is, frankly, a rich tradition among street vendors in New York City, around making deals. And it was just that from the first moment I tried it, it was so much fun, but I knew that I was talking to somebody who was really adept at this, you know, this person who was just literally selling knock off Oakleys out of the biggest plastic trash bag you've ever seen in your life, was supremely gifted at this deeply human art of rhetoric and negotiation and and I just couldn't get enough of it, and I bought more sunglasses than I ever could have needed, because they also fell apart really, really quickly. But for me, the value is in the game. And I I pursued that. And it's one of those things that that becomes a through line. Only in retrospect, I don't know how consciously I was pursuing it. I just knew it was fun, and it was the most fun I had in the city, and so I was drawn to it and and then just, you know what, eight years later or so, I found myself in a corporate role in New York City, and negotiation was a huge part of it. And all of that training fed into all that sort of pursuit of training that I did myself, without, without a longer term plan, really fed into what made me successful in the city.

William Harris 23:29

Is there anything that you do like that now, just for the game? Like, I mean, to a point negotiations now you into the big scale. Are for the game a little bit right? Like, there's always a game element that you enjoy. But is there anything that you do like that, that that you're like, just to, just to hone your skills, you're like, still go into the city and, you know, haggle with people, or anything like that. Or you play poker, whatever. I do love poker.

Patrick J. Griffin 23:48

I don't get to play very often, but I love, I love yard sales. I love so we live out in the, in the in the suburbs. Now, we live in upstate New York now. So I, we get down to the city quite often, but, but I I'll negotiate deals even in traditional stores. Now, you mentioned that your wife is is a little conflict averse. My wife is conflict averse. I will tell my wife before I'm going to negotiate, because she will, she will get I'll say, Ave, you might want to go outside. I'm going to try to make something work here, and maybe it's just you. Maybe it's something simple. Maybe I'm in a hotel and I want to a slightly nicer room, or I know I want to be on the side that's not on the where the highway is or something like that. It can be. It doesn't have to be a big thing, but, but it is. It is always fun. It's just always fun for me.

William Harris 24:40

Tell me about the story you had the two pockets rule, the money in the left pocket versus the right pocket. And why that simple constraint teaches a master class in boundaries?

Patrick J. Griffin 24:51

Sure. Well, it's really about information, and so being careful with what you disclose at the negotiation table. Is really the extension of this practice. So I'll explain what the practice is first. So when I was negotiating with these street vendors in New York, I would have the amount of money that I wanted to spend in my right pocket, and I would have whatever was left over in my left pocket. And because what I didn't want was for them to see that I had, you know, that I had this, you know, I didn't want to pull out a big wad of cash, not cash. Not that I was walking around with a big wad of cash at 1514, years old. But what I didn't want was to give them the information that I had, these additional funds that they could then vie for. So if I can, if I can present a degree of scarcity on my end, in in what I share, what they can see, then it can control part of that, that conversation a little bit, or at least inform it. I'm not giving them more information than they've earned, necessarily, right? So if it's I think my, my, I think they were $10 a pair, typically. And these are the old bug oak Lees that were really popular in the 90s. And yep, and I would always try to get them for between 10 and $12 for two pairs, that that was my goal and and so I would have 10 or 12 bucks in my in my right pocket, I would have probably 40 or so bucks in my left pocket. So that I would really do two things. If we were getting close to the end of the negotiation, if I thought I was about to be able to make a deal. I would even take it out as a good faith gesture to show them, okay, I've got the actual money. We can complete this by exchanging it right now. But what I wouldn't do was pull out five times more money than I was going to spend with them, because if they then see abundance on my end, or just this increased opportunity, they might try to fight a little bit harder for it, negotiate a little bit harder for it.

William Harris 26:44

So fast forward, then into Wall Street. Because before you started teaching this after, after you go through this, you know, New York stint, and then you're, you're on Wall Street here, you negotiated some pretty big deals. Can you tell me about a deal that sticks out in your mind as either exceptionally good or exceptionally bad for one reason or another?

Patrick J. Griffin 27:08

I took a I had a bad beat once. Well, let me clarify that I didn't have a bad beat in the ultimate outcome of the negotiation. I was I was drawn into a conversation where I wound up losing face with with some of my peers and my leadership, because I had a guy on the other side of the table who was intentionally provocative and and was was actively insulting me, and was trying to get a rise out of me, because he thought that it would weaken my negotiation skills, which is a tactic that some people try to use. I was early enough in my career, and probably a pride factored into it. To some extent I was, I was probably feeling like I was kind of a big guy at that moment. You know, my 20s in New York, I felt very lucky to be there, but I probably a little bit big for my britches, maybe, and and so this, this man successfully got a rise out of me. He successfully got me to one share more information than I then I probably should have. And nothing, nothing inappropriate, but just that, that in the normal course of a negotiation stuff, I wouldn't, I wouldn't have necessarily shared with them, but he made me defensive, and he made me react emotionally instead of analytically. Now thankfully, I knew the market as well as anybody. This was for a really niche area in securities and and it was a pretty well defined market and product and service that we were talking about in that moment. And I knew it inside now, and I knew that history going back 20 years. So when the the when it really came down to it, I got exactly the deal that I wanted to because I knew it was fair. I knew it was market and everything. But along the way, I just looked, I looked, I guess, immature, probably to to my leadership. And they wound up coming in and and helping me close it, which shouldn't have been necessary. And so it, it was really, you know, in retro, it was awful at the moment in the moment, sure, and nothing. There were no direct consequences from that, except that I just carried it with me for a while, just just feeling embarrassed and and that that this man had successfully gotten a rise out of me when that was clearly his intention at that time. And so it, like many mistakes, wound up being really useful and instructive going forward. And it got me much better recognizing that a tactic like that, and therefore disarming a tactic like that. But it but it was a real bummer at the time. It was a drag to be to have somebody successfully animate me in that way.

William Harris 29:58

Sure, so. So recognizing it is one step to disarming it. How else can you disarm it? Because, let's just say that your body might not always recognize, even if you do recognize, your body still might have the emotional reaction that you're taking place. I'm thinking back to previous episode that I had on here where she talked about she was in, like, I want to say, like, you know, some war torn Middle East country bullets flying overhead. This Melanie Marshall, she used to be the deputy chief over at the BBC. And you know, you're in this moment, and you have to have a quick reset, right? You've got to have something that can help you emotionally reset instantly, so you can actually get up from this paralyzed position that you have on the ground with the bullets fly. Ground with the bullets flying overhead, and say, I need to actually move over here. Like, do you use? Like, is there like, a trick where you just, like, 321, tap myself on the shoulder? Or, like, how do you how do you get out of that emotional mindset? If you catch yourself

Patrick J. Griffin 30:54

in it? Sure. So there are a few things that you can do. I have always had a pretty steady disposition with with that, really one notable example. So, but I get my chemicals pumping like anybody else and and so there are a few different ways you can do it. I really like breathing exercises. And I can do it in a subtle enough way that that it can, that it can help me through that. For people who are maybe less adept at that, or less experienced with that. There's a term, of course, negotiation is a fancy term for taking a break. We call it an adjournment, but it's just taking a break. Hey, let's take a minute. Let's have a drink of water. Let's circle back up in 15 minutes, or in 15 days, or whatever it might be, right? Just to bring that, that temperature down, because it ultimately does wind up being unproductive. Another thing I do is I'm just really deliberate about about how I go into the negotiation so beforehand, really getting that mental clarity, which might involve meditation, or would certainly involve a keen understanding of what we're talking about, what saved me in that one scenario where the where the guy got a rise out of me, is that I knew my fundamentals, and so even if I, you know, had that emotional rush and that, that that adrenaline and all those those nasty chemicals pumping through me, My mainstay there was just knowing my business and knowing what was reasonable and what I could what I could achieve and and so that was a itself, a bit of a safe haven for me in that moment. Now I know this. I'm dead certain that I'm right about this. And so that was a that really salvaged it in many ways.

William Harris 32:42

How about subject matter, expertise? I think about, for instance, I happen to know everything there is to know about maple syrup. I love maple syrup. I love it on my pancakes. I love it on pizza. You know, I'll take maple syrup and put a little in my hair, you know, if I'm having a rough week. So to me coming to a negotiation with you, somebody who's a master negotiator, I feel like maybe I have an advantage if we're negotiating something about maple syrup. Is there an advantage to having that knowledge, or does it almost become a disadvantage because you are blind to the negotiation that's taking place, and you're relying too much now on this intellectual knowledge. That's an interesting one.

Patrick J. Griffin 33:23

It would be hard for me to find any flaw in having more subject matter expertise. But what I can tell you is that when we're teaching negotiation and we work across industries, as you mentioned in the preamble, we try not to have case studies that are directly related to to what our audience is experienced with, because it does get in the way of learning some of the principles, right? They bring in all this extra information and expertise related to, you know, hospitality or something like that, and then, and then they're paying attention all manner of things that that are not really what we're trying to focus on or teach in that moment, but they just know so much that, of course, they're going to in the moment at the negotiation table. I would say that I really can't see a drawback in that, but I'm gonna have to think about it, because there might be something to it, but it I don't think so. I think I think that that knowing your side, knowing your what you value, what you want to get out of it, what you you having an educated guess about what your counterpart values, what they want to get out of it, what they might be able to give up and really And crucially, understanding things that are of disparate value to each of you, so something That's relatively low value to me high value to them, and vice versa, because those opportunities for for a kind of arbitrage, are a superpower at the negotiation table.

William Harris 34:51

Yeah, I like that. I'm looking at the idea of, like, where the leaks are specifically and so, like, I'm thinking about this for founders, where do founders, unknowing. Only bleed the most money because they don't negotiate well enough, even though maybe they think the deal is done, but this is where it's like, up, the deal is done, but we're bleeding money here. We're Yeah, where's that?

Patrick J. Griffin 35:12

So that's the biggest problem I see with founders at times, is founders fall in love and and they fall in love with the idea of how they think the business should run, or they fall in love with a particular product or characteristic of the business. And what that does is it removes objectivity and so. So finding a way to, you know, loving, it's good, right to be a founder, you have to have that passion. You have to be able to work those hours and have that passion that goes along with it, but loving something too much can can blind you to to that objectivity that's useful in moving things forward. The other th challenge I see with with founders very often, and this is not, I'm not the only person who's observed this, of course, but in that same vein, founders can hold on too tight, and they will sometimes there's a one of the biggest issues I see is really opportunity cost with founders, so they hold on too tight to the reins. They might not give themselves the distance to work on the business instead of in the business and and so they might not delegate appropriate decision making to the CFO, right? If they have a CFO, for example. And this is something I see in my in my fractional practice, although my clients are spectacular about that kind of thing, but, but having that, it's really part of that evolution. So founders can get you to a certain point, a founder might become a good CEO, but people who are really good at building up a company and founding a company aren't necessarily the people to then bring it past a per a certain inflection point in a certain scale, and that that that love, that affection for it, that's so useful early on can get in the way later on.

William Harris 37:13

How do you recognize when you're at that inflection point? How do you start this like, what are the symptoms that you're going to see within the business, within your personal life, within whatever that you're like, I've maybe reaching this inflection point, and I either have to decide if I'm going to continue to be the founder CEO, or we need to bring in a CEO, or maybe I just need to bring in a board. Or how do you what are the symptoms that you see when you're saying, Okay, it's maybe time for us to consider what's the next move here? So I'm,

Patrick J. Griffin 37:41

you know, as a founder myself, and somebody who works with founders, I am cheap. I'm like, I do as much as I can myself. I don't pay for a lot unless I, unless I can help it. And that's that's common, right? That's common for founders, and especially, especially on the early stage side. But what happens is, if you get to a point where it's really and it looks a little bit different for each founder, but it ultimately winds up where you're just resource constrained and and then ultimately putting yourself at risk for burnout. And so it, it, I think it's it can be harder to recognize when that point is coming than it is to recognize when you have an opportunity to delegate. And so I think a useful practice is keeping your eyes open for that opportunity to you know you have. You have to have to have the right person right you have the right person who's in this seat. Maybe they're the VP of sales now, and you're going to get less involved in the direct sales efforts, even though, even though this was your baby, but, but getting that right person in and being able to trust them and let them do their job, let them do what they're good at. So it's a roundabout answer to your question, sort of but I think that, I think most founders know what it feels like when they when they're maybe approaching burnout, and very often, if they were to think back, they would recognize a time in the recent past where where there was an opportunity to to share some of that burden, to share some of that responsibility.

William Harris 39:21

Yeah, there's another good book I read by Dan Martell called Buy Back Your Time, which I appreciated, which is kind of getting into that concept of where you have, where it's, you know, basically even just took as a founder. It's like, you You asked for a lot of detail from the rest of your team, but it's like, when's the last time you actually went through and itemized every single thing that you're spending time on throughout the day and throughout the week. And it's like, when you do that, then you can look at that and bucket those things. And things that are like, these are high need, have to get done, but do not need to be done by me, right? These are things that are high need, maybe, and I might be forgetting his quadrants that he had, but it's like, high need don't need to get done. Buy meat, but I actually enjoy these ones. And so I'm gonna actually hold on to these ones. And then there's, you know, the low need. So there's basically bucketing these in different segments. And then you're saying, okay, so what are the things that I can get rid of? Because as you continue to grow, just like you're hiring people to do different jobs within your business, you're going to have to offload some of those things that are on your plate as well. Some of them you keep because you just simply enjoy them. Some of them you don't enjoy, and you're like, great, I can go ahead and get rid of this one. Sometimes you don't enjoy them, but you have to keep them because you're the only one who really

Patrick J. Griffin 40:32

should be doing that. Yeah. And then, and some of it's an analysis of all right, what? What gives me energy versus saps me and and I always tell people, if you want to find out what you're bad at, become an entrepreneur, because you will find out in short order. I had no idea how bad I am at marketing. And I'm, you know, I'm, I'm good at sales. I'm a gifted sales person. Thankfully, I've been through my my and I've got the experience in that, and I've got my bonafides. But when it comes to kind of structured marketing plans, I am, I'm I'm so weak at it, relatively speaking, and so that's the first thing where I I need outside help. I need somebody else who's going to be better at this. Because not only do I think I'm bad at it. It is exhausting to me to be good at it. And there are little aspects that I like, you know, I like to write, and so I'll write, but, but most of it, sort of the ideation and creating a real kind of comprehensive marketing plan, is that's that is profoundly tiring for me to even think about, whereas almost everything else is just exciting and lights me up.

William Harris 41:46

It's so true. As a founder myself, there are thankfully, I have a business partner now as well, Jeff Snyder, and so he takes the brunt of that. For me, most of my team would say that I'm very, very positive, because to them, I am. But when there's a moment where I'm just like, this sucks, I hate it. I don't like this at all. He's the one he gets to hear about that, and that is when we look at it, we go, okay, this is a thing that needs to be removed from my plate, because I might be doing fine at it, but I just, I hate it, and I just, with a passion, I hate it, right? And it is just burning a hole into my soul, and I need to get this to somebody else I don't enjoy it. One of your core teachings you talked to me about before was raise the bar expectations impact outcome. Why do low expectations quietly poison deals before the first conversation even happens?

Patrick J. Griffin 42:35

So it's if we think of negotiation is getting to the table and trying to create value, then there is going to be a direct relationship between how ambitious you are in your pursuit and and so, you know, we balance this. I So we say, we say, raise the bar. We say, expectation impacts outcome at TableForce I used to say, you know, be ambitious, be reasonable and really push for your push yourself. This comes back to what we talked about earlier. I think that when, when you are unable or unwilling to do that, that's one of the one of the more subtle ways of negotiating against yourself, understanding the value and what you bring to the table and and really projecting that to your counterpart is it is a fundamental aspect of that, of raising the bar and so, and of of pursuing that and so it it really has to do with, with just Trust in in in your value and what you can create. And I think that if you've got, if you have that self doubt, then then you're more likely to to short shrift, you know, what you what you pursue, what you try to get out of it.

William Harris 43:56

I've got three kids, 15, 12, 10 and 15 year old was trying out for a play pretty soon. She's very good, right? Like, she's never acted before, but she's great singer, and it's musical. She was reading us the lines. And it's like, Babe, you actually, you actually have some talent in reading these lines. I got goosebumps. That was really good. And, you know, I think the play is frozen. She's like, Yeah, I'm probably just gonna be like, troll number seven, maybe. But like, go in there. Like, this is the part I want, though I want. I want to be else I want to be on or whatever. But it's like, if you go in there saying I just want to be troll number you're gonna get troll number seven, right. But it's like, at least go in there. Temper that maybe. But it's like, have some higher expectations. Raise the bar a little bit there.

Patrick J. Griffin 44:37

Yeah, I there's a one of the funny things about growing up not too far from from the city. So I grew up about 60 miles east of New York City. Is that a lot of folks that I grew up with wound up going into into media or the arts, because the city is accessible. 60 miles is really not that far. And there was a woman that I grew up with she was actually the. A is the daughter of the pastor in my my church. Growing up, we went to high school together, and she really wanted to be an actress. She knew from an early age that she wanted to be an actress. And so not only was she, of course, trying out for for the plays and doing an incredible job there, but she was also her I mean, we were busy at my high school. It was a really it was a really challenging, rigorous environment for us. And we were all three season athletes and all this stuff, but she was taking this extra time to also go into the city. And she was doing, she was doing tryouts. She wound up being on, there was a an animated show called Daria in the 90s, and she wound up being one of the voice actors on Daria. And she was doing that while we were in high school, in school together, and then, and then she went on. She wound up being on, on Grey's Anatomy for a number of years, and all of this because she had that conviction, and she brought that energy, and she just pushed herself to accomplish it. And and she got, she got the career that she wanted because she was that hungry, and because she was willing to to push herself in that way and and it's, it's, I'm always jealous of people who had that, that certainty early on, but the, you know, my, the work that I did at that time was kind of unwitting to to that fed my career later on. But those people that that really have that conviction, it's a it's an advantage, and then to and then, if they then take that and also raise the bar, they're very often unstoppable.

William Harris 46:28

Speaking of Disney, you've worked on deals with very, very big companies, massive companies, you've also worked with founders. What? What does a huge company tend to negotiate for that smaller founders are just overlooking?

Patrick J. Griffin 46:43

That's an interesting question. I think that so counterintuitively, I think that smaller operators and founders very often are more creative in their negotiation strategies. So larger corporations, they'll have done a version of that before, right? They'll have that experience. They they they know how to solve that problem and and so they will go back to what's worked in the past, and they might actually leave some some opportunity at the table where there's where there's nuance involved, where our founders are smaller operators. Maybe they've been through fewer cycles of it, but that experience can be limiting in its way, and so that without that experience, and without that that sort of paradigm for how to solve a problem, then they have much more wide open eyes about what sort of value can be exchanged, and they're more nimble in that way. And so larger corporations have have tremendously gifted negotiators, but the bureaucratic nature of decision making can make it really hard for them to claim that value or identify that value at the table, whereas, whereas a smaller operator or founder can can really play in a different way. That's a really good point. I want to talk a little bit about the TableForce method. Then specifically, if a founder listening right now had to walk into a negotiation tomorrow, how should they think, step by step, before they ever even open their mouth? So one of the so we talk a lot about, I mentioned earlier, you know, what you can trade, what you can exchange at the table and and this ties in as well to founders having that a little bit more creativity to that by the time a founder gets to the table, and the planning process being tremendously important, a key part of that is identifying as many areas of value that they can provide as possible, and understanding how they care about Those so it might be something that you can quantify. In terms of actual, tangible value, but it might just be a rank ordering of things, right? This is high priority. This is medium priority, low priority. And having a catalog the more of those variables that you can play with at the table, to trade with in exchange, then, and knowing how you care about them, knowing how you care about them, knowing how your counterpart might care about them, that is just a it's you could say it's more arrows in your quiver, but it really gives you that that an incredibly powerful position to to be creative in your problem solving and get what you want, because you know what You can give you a really clear understanding of of what you can give, how much you care about it, and then conversely, what you believe your counterpart can give, what you think they care about. You know, your best educated guesses in that front. So it's important to raise the bar. As you said, expectation impacts outcome. You want to be ambitious with that. But you also need to know what you can do, what you can offer, and what you can ask for. And so, so we we have an exercise that we go through in our training where a few of our exercises are few of our mock scenarios, we actually are just looking at terms and conditions which most people don't think are terribly important. And and, you know, I bet a lot of folks in England 20 years ago were negotiating contracts that were subject to EU law and that felt very normal and unimportant until Brexit, and all of a sudden, it was profoundly important that the domicile for this the regulatory sort of courts for this agreement are, you know, in that case, foreign at that point, cross border in that point, sure. So we have people identify terms and conditions, rank, order them, and then figure out how to play and trade them back and forth. And one of my favorite exercises that we do, we actually, we do assign point values to those, and then it's a it's a competition for who can who can get the most points. That does some of the work for you, because it tells you, you know, we tell them how important these things are, if it's worth X points. But one of my favorite things about that exercise also is that I look at two things when I teach it, you know, you want to see who gets more points, right which side of the table gets more points if there's 10 teams out there. And this is, this is a complex enough exercise that we have people do it in teams. But I also look at aggregate points, because I care about who created the most value at this table. And so it so walking through that, and maybe it's like, you know, somebody might get 20,000 total points, and they and they and they blew the other side out of the water, right? They got they got 15,000 the other got five, or something like that. But then I see somebody else, and in aggregate, between the two teams, there's 25,000 points worth of value. And this might be a little bit difficult to visualize without without going through the exercise, but understanding that these terms and conditions not only give you a better position, you know in which to trade, but also can help you create greater value holistically. The Harvard program in negotiation, we call this growing the pie, and so moving away from this idea of a fixed pie, this mythical fixed pie of value, growing that pie and then claiming some of that extra value that you helped create. Helped create.

William Harris 52:23

I've never heard it explained like this, but I like it a lot. I like chess. I don't know if you play chess as well, but the pieces have values as well that we use. Technically, there's, there is no value to the piece, right? Like the if your king is checkmated, that's the end of the game. That's really the only thing that matters. But in order to kind of gage where you're standing so far within the game, knowing that it's like, I'm up three, I'm down five, whatever that might be, kind of helps you to understand where you're at in how you're playing. I like this idea of, like, trading points. I would say I like that piece. But then you took this to the next step of it's like, but wait a minute, we can actually make a situation where there's more aggregate points for both teams, both sides, and that's an overall better deal. It's not just back and forth on points. I took your, you know, rook, you took my queen, whatever this is, yeah.

Patrick J. Griffin 53:17

So instead of a distributive so the chess is, is you do have fixed points on the board. It's ultimately distributed in that way, and and negotiation moving instead to that value creation exercise. I love chess. I played growing up. I didn't play for a long time, and now my three kids all play, and so we play more, and that's actually part of my start in the morning as I do some chess puzzles getting started. But, and I'm not, I don't think I'm very good anymore, but the but that's that is absolutely part of it, knowing that, that, no, I don't want to trade my bishop for a queen, because I know the Queen's more valuable is more nimble, can do more on the board, but I'll trade a bishop for a bishop. I'll trade a bishop for a night, right? And and so that that's helpful, because it it, it can ease some of that decision making. And similarly, a founder getting ready to go to the table, knowing beforehand what they care about, what they can offer, understanding those value metrics, so that they can be more nimble and make those decisions faster at the table.

William Harris 54:25

And sometimes you are willing to sacrifice the Queen because of the position that you're going to trade that queen for that position, because that position could put you in one move away from checkmate, exactly. So, like, there are times in which that makes sense, yeah, um, why do founders obsess, it seems like, over price and numbers versus season negotiators, it seems like they're looking at, like this total deal that you mentioned, whereas, like, founders were just looking almost like superficial. I think that,

Patrick J. Griffin 54:51

I think, and this is not meant to be a ding, but some of it's just training, right? So it's, it's, it's easy to think about. Price, it's easy to think about margin, top top line revenue is really flashy and fun, especially if you're thinking about valuations, right, if you're thinking about going to outside investors, but looking at it as as a value prospect instead, I think is a, is a largely an artifact and manifestation of experience and understanding that the that that that flashy component to it as attractive as it is, right? I love i When my my business is growing every year. I love looking at those numbers, right? That's fun, but it's understanding that value is a more comprehensive perspective, and it and it forms more it's funny. I know a lot of folks, and I'm not going to call anybody out in particular, but the who will look in oh my goodness, wow, that business did, did $10 million last year. I can't imagine what they're worth. Be like, okay, they did $10 million last year. But what was their profitability? What was their EBITDA? What was their you know, what does that 10 million actually get them? Because if they're scraping by, then that company's worth, you know, actually, it was a funny example with, forgive the tangent, but Uber right? Uber on on paper, worth a lot of money. I don't follow them, but I imagine they're hopefully profitable by now. But there was a decade during which they were losing money, and actually investors were literally subsidizing every single rider, every person who was getting into an Uber was being subsidized by investors because they were just burning investor cash for a long time. And every single founder I know during that 10 year period, technically, speaking, their business was worth more than Ubers, because, because, on paper, that that that loss and that that incredible rush of cash that went through that had to in order to to kind of move the market in that way. And so, I guess the numbers are very often superficial. The top line numbers are very often superficial. And you really need to understand at a more comprehensive level where that you know, what's really driving that value.

William Harris 57:24

We help a lot with the both the buy and sell side, running some of the numbers for some of the PE groups that we work with and brands that are trying to sell them. And we've helped with 13 acquisitions now. And one of the things that we've helped to get people out of you know, it's just like multiple of EBITDA. And it's like that. That is largely what the conversation is in E commerce, right? It's multiple of your EBITDA. But one of the brands, I remember, they had a very good YouTube channel. And if you are going to sell that YouTube channel, take that away from the actual EBITDA of the business. If you're actually just going to sell the YouTube channel millions of followers that are watching your videos, there's value in that as well. And so we were able to help work with them to get value for that piece of this, aside from E with us. So basically just got them a bigger multiple. But aside from those kind of things, what are some other things that you were saying that could be traded as value that E commerce brand owners are maybe not looking at that they should be looking at within their business. Like, these are the pieces that are probably value that you need to look at. You mentioned terms and conditions, right? It's like, what are some of these

Patrick J. Griffin 58:33

pieces that we should be so we're thinking in this concept when they're working with with other companies, as opposed to to an actual sales effort, or I just want to make sure I understand,

William Harris 58:44

yeah, so that's a good question. In this concept, I was thinking of like they're being acquired, right? And so what's the other piece of value outside of just EBITDA? But if it's more interesting, you could tell me, based on what you think. If it's more interesting, we could talk about negotiations potential with vendors.

Patrick J. Griffin 59:04

So I hope I have a good answer for this. Let me, let me think about it the very often that value I feel. Can I be curious to know why the the YouTube following in the example that you used, wasn't able to translate the EBITDA? Where was that, that gap in conversion to actual value? But one of the things we see in in other value so similarly, right? Customer base, if you're an E commerce company that has that has the customer information, contact information for loads and loads of customers, and you know that they're into your particular niche product, right? That's valuable, right? Having that those folks who you know spend money on this sort of thing, even if they haven't spent money in the last 12 months, and therefore it's not showing up on your on your income this year, or even just a. Some sort of platform evolution. I know a lot of folks who built their own internal systems to get to just eat make the business move a little bit easier, and a lot of them don't know that that's that that then can be productized on its own, to make that into a verb. But, you know, I have worked with a company called eclassia, and a classy is a really, a classy is used to really map chain of custody and track, from a regulatory perspective, that the handoffs of cannabis within the testing regime. So the you'll have cultivators working on cannabis, they then bring it to processors. Ultimately it gets to market. Gets to market. But each of those handoffs needs to be tracked a class. He was built because, because they needed to track it. They had, they had a chemical testing company. They needed to track where things were being handed. And then they had the light bulb moment that, wow, this isn't just useful to us. This is something that every operator in the market needs a class. He became its own its own product, its own company, its own value proposition. And so sometimes that, and I hope this is what you're getting at with your question, but sometimes that the problems you solve along the way are of outsized value relative to your enterprise. And so you can use those to then to then make other operators more efficient, or make other operators boost their own value.

William Harris 1:01:29

I love that, and we've seen that happen so many times. Of brands that are able to like spin off these things that started off within their own company, and they say this could actually solve a bigger thing for a lot more people. And to your point, sometimes becomes even bigger than, yeah, it's

Patrick J. Griffin 1:01:44

wild when that happens. But this is part of the reason that I, I always say I like people who are are building things, because it's, it's interesting enough what they're building and what kind of problem they're trying to solve. But there are so many problems that you solve have to solve along the way to get to the market to finally, you know, offer your products and and there's just so much kind of invisible creativity along the way. It's fascinating.

William Harris 1:02:13

Yeah, I want to transition into who is Patrick J. Griffin, because I think it's fun to get to know the human being behind these thoughts. But before I transition into I just want to say, so, you know, I'm not perfect. Who are kidding? Neither are you. Like none of us are perfect. We're imperfect people who are coming together at a table, trying to work through these things. And I think that the more we can come with knowledge, like what you're presenting here, this idea of sitting on the same side of the table, instead of sitting across the table from each other, we're on the same side. We're trying to come up with the same solution. I think that that's just going to make things work significantly better. So I appreciate the way you've

Patrick J. Griffin 1:02:53

Oh, it's my pleasure. And I think I on that subject of of not being perfect. I mean, I, I, I try to chase constant improvement. But one of the things I've learned as I've gotten older in my career is just the humility of of not knowing everything, knowing that I don't know everything, knowing that I'm that, that I am imperfect, and working through it and and one thing I've noticed about that, and it's genuine for me, and it's something that I think I had maybe a little bit less of in my 20s, is that that the earnestness that comes with humility for me at least draws people in and, and it's it is useful in negotiation. It's useful in my business practices, where, because it allows me to be more genuine and, and while also recognizing that, yeah, I'm just, I'm going to continue to try to get better at this. They're things I'm good at, but there's nothing that I'm perfect at, and there's, there's really very little in my life that I'm not trying to tweak and iterate and improve on.

William Harris 1:03:56

Yeah, speaking of tweaking and iterating and get better at things. The first thing that I had to ask you about was all of the guitars you have in the background. Because I love music, I play the guitar. Do you play?

Patrick J. Griffin 1:04:08

All of you? So back there, I'll pan a little bit. So I have here, I've got a guitar. So guitar, ukulele, violin is brand new. And then I have a mandolin over here, I do play all of these instruments. I do not pretend to play them particularly well, but I can get around on the guitar, ukulele as well, and the mandolin I've made great gains at over the last few years, the violin i just started playing three or four weeks ago. So that's that's that's brand new, but the mandolin and the violin are cousins, so there's a bit of a head start there. I play them. But really, what I love about it is, is the learning process, so that when I started learning guitar, so I grew up playing, playing music, singing. My family's been musical for Jen. Generations, excuse me and but I specifically didn't play guitar. My father plays guitar. Two of my siblings already played guitar before I was before I would have gotten started, and we didn't need another guitar player. So I specifically didn't play guitar until I was becoming a father 13 years ago or so. I haven't My oldest is currently 12. She'll be 13 in in May, and so a little before she was born, I bought this exact guitar and and started playing, and I felt like it carved new neural pathways in my brain. And that sounds crazy, but it's really what it felt like. I mean, the I grew I played a little bit of piano. Growing up, piano is really linear, super easy to understand. Guitar is not, and it's, it's really not the way my brain worked, and so learning how the left hand, right hand techniques go together with guitar, that experience was fascinating to me, and and it was not, it wasn't to say that it's all joyful. There was a period where I was, I was going through a really stressful period. I was transitioning out of, out of Wall Street at a time, actually, and and I wanted to practice every day, but I couldn't feel the music in it. But I kept at it. And then, and I was working on this, this sort of finger picking technique that they call Travis style, which I really like and and so I could do it, and I could, I could roll through some chords with it, but I couldn't connect to it at that, at that kind of soul level, that musical level. But I kept banging my head against this problem. And then after maybe six months, and you know, maybe I, maybe I, maybe my stress levels dropped a little bit or something, but all of a sudden it unlocked, and I could, and I could play the style. I could play Travis style and and I could feel it, and I could get into it. And I became completely addicted to to that breakthrough, and that that effort and that feeling of going through it. And so I still play guitar. I play guitar most days, but every few years I try to add a new new instrument, because I'm constantly chasing that those breakthroughs, and I get them. I get them at different at different you know, at different times, of course, but it and some instruments are harder than others. Mandolin was, it was pretty difficult. So difficult for me, and because it's pretty small and everything but it but I chased that feeling and that that it's just one of the aspects of my life where I where I'm constantly trying to get better, and I can't remember William if we talked about this when we spoke before. But another example I often use for this is cooking. I love to cook. My my love my wife is an excellent cook as well. I happen to do most of the cooking for dinner at home. I have a whole host of recipes I make, and I have maybe two that I make the same way every time, because I'm constantly tweaking. I'm constantly iterating on it, just to try to make it a little bit better. Or, you know, maybe this technique will, will move the needle for me a little bit and, and it's, it's, I guess it's kind of a core part of my character now, and maybe it always was, but it's one of my I don't, I don't claim credit for it, but it's one of my favorite things about myself.

William Harris 1:08:20

Yeah, we we share the love of music and cooking, then together. So that's really fun. I've been playing guitar for man. I want to say it was high school. Actually. Buddy of mine is one who taught me guitar, if you're familiar with the band, 10th Avenue North. He played the keys for that Brendan Shirley. So he taught me guitar back in high school. But I will say similar my family, very musical. I didn't play the piano, though, and it wasn't until adulthood that I started doing that. And to your point, I love math. I started playing the piano, and I go, do you remember the show numbers? It was like a crime show, or like he was a mathematician, and like, like, you see, like, these numbers spiraling around. Sometimes that's what it felt like. It was like, it's like, it was like, it's like, I could finally see the math of music so much more clearly when I played the piano. Because to your point, it's so linear. You just like, Oh, I get it a third. It makes sense now. But I will say that my dad very incredible musician as well. He tried the violin. That one was a tough one for him, but he could play pretty much any other of those in sprints, but violent. So I love that you picked that you picked that one up that you are I am gonna push it to limit on that. So we went

Patrick J. Griffin 1:09:25

down to Nashville for the holidays, and it was my birthday around that as well. And and so my wife, this was her idea, she said, she said, Let's look around Nashville for something for you for your birthday. And we went into this really cool used, used book shop that has instruments as well. I wasn't planning on getting a violin, but I'm, I'm really enamored with the instrument, and always have been. And the price was right, the quality was right. It's an it's a nice piece that's that's good for students. They say it's good. Up through intermediate players, I will never be better than than an intermediate player if I even. If I ever even get to that stage. But one of the things that was pleasantly surprising for me was the Boeing. Because the Boeing, I can imagine that being really tricky, and I think I played violin for a year when I was in fourth grade, or something, like everybody else did in New York state, at least. But I, from the moment I picked it up, was really pleased with the tone I was able to get out of it, and and I've been banging my head against the mandolin for a while. I really love the mandolin, but it's really difficult for me. And there's a there's a there's a precision to the to the picking that it, it, it's pretty easy to make a mandolin not sound great, and it's and it can be difficult to make it sound really, really great. And for me, that initial learning curve on the violin ended up being much more approachable, while also, and this is the really fun part, so violins and mandolins have the same strings. So mandolins have pairs, but they're all G, D, A, E, and so if you know your way around the neck of a mandolin, which at least that I know, I know, I know core formations and everything, and I could play some scales on it. Then, then that made violin a little bit easier. I knew where to go on the neck, and there's no there's no frets, so it's it is different, but it made it just a little bit easier. And then knowing that I could get a good tone with the bow and just create beautiful tone, because they're just such gorgeous instruments, even as a novice, to be able to get a beautiful tone out of it was really fulfilling. And so I'm working on a few things with that right now. We have a big family party in march around St Patrick's Day in Brooklyn and and I'm trying to see if I can get something playable in order before then I don't have a lot of times what, seven weeks or so. And my daughter, who's 12, I mentioned she plays cello, and I had her music teacher at school recommend a site to me where I can find pieces for us to play together. And so I'm going to try to find a plea, a piece that that I can play with her, and she's been playing for three or four years, and and does a really nice job on that as well. So it if I can sit next to her and make some music with her, that'd be pretty thrilling.

William Harris 1:12:17

That's really cool. Do you like to share this with other people? Then, as well? Like sharing

Patrick J. Griffin 1:12:25

you mean alongside them, or what do you mean? Talking about it, forgive me, yeah.

William Harris 1:12:32

Well, I'm hinting at the fact that, if I remember correctly, you shared your man. So I mandolin for,

Patrick J. Griffin 1:12:39

for, for that. So I have a young boy in my community who's friends with my kids and and I wound up getting I feel really lucky this summer, because our house, all of a sudden became a place where the kids were congregating, my kids and some of their friends were on their bicycles all the time, and and this boy would come over. And I've been a fan of this kid for a while. Redheaded kid. He's, he can be a little bit surly at times, which just makes me like him even more. But, but he's, we know his parents were friends with his parents. He's a really gifted and committed viola player, and he plays actually, in our local youth orchestra. And so he's his discipline is really remarkable, and his love for the art. And so when he would come over to our house, he would come into my office, and the kids are allowed in my office, and he would see the wall, and he would start asking to play instruments, and I let him play almost everything. I have a kid's guitar that I let him play, I I would let him play my guitar, but, but I had an alternative for that. I think the only thing I didn't let him play was a banjo, which is, is not in this room right now. But he kept going back to the mandolin and and I wound up upgrading my mandolin about a year ago, so I had a spare, and he kept wanting to play it. Kept wanting to play it. And finally, I said, I said, Rory, you know, why don't you borrow dismantle and why don't you borrow it for two weeks? This was in October. I said, Get it. Get it back to me by Halloween. And, you know, see if you like it. And so he took it home, and the next thing I knew, a day or two later, his mom texted me a picture of him playing, and he's trying to learn some who was it. It was like, a might have been a Green Day song, some punk song on the mandolin. I was like, that's really, that's really interesting, sure, but apparently every day he was coming home from school, that was the first thing he would do, is he go play the mandolin, even before Viola. And so I'm, you know, I only loaned it to the kid, but that made me feel incredible that I got to share a bit of music with this kid and introduce him to something new and feed his passion. And as I said, the mandolin was was a spare so I didn't need it. And this bit of clutter, and my I'm not great at getting rid of clutter. My wife's amazing. Using it, getting rid of clutter. I need to get better at it. So. So finally, meaning that I saw that he that he took that discipline immediately applied it to the mandolin. I texted his parents, I found out they had been talking about getting him one for Christmas. You know, mandolin, good beginner mandolin. Your least spent a five or 600 bucks. I'd love it, if that wasn't strictly necessary for them. This mandolin, by the way, was not a $500 mandolin, but it's got a nice tone. And I say that because I checked with his parents. I said, Hey, is it okay if I just give this mandolin to Rory? And then he was sitting, actually, in this room that I'm in right now. He's sitting on a couch that's out of sight, and I and he was playing it, and I said, Rory, how do you feel if we just call that mandolin yours from now on. And he just looked at me in disbelief, and he's like, are you serious? And I said, Yeah, you know, it's, I don't need it. You're playing it. I'd like it to be played and so, so why don't you take it? Why don't you keep it and remind you this is, you know, 12 year old kid, 12 year old boy, pre teen. And he gets up, he said, Can I give you a hug? Which, you know, not, not often an easy thing to get from, from, from, you know, 12 year old kid and and so since then, he's been, he's got it. He's been playing it. And he said to me, and this is not accurate the message of what he said, but he said, I'm going to be an amazing mandolin player, and it's all because of you, and that's that's just simply not true. He's going to be an amazing mandolin player because he's disciplined and he loves it, and he's going to keep at it, but I got to help just a little bit. And and music is this is something that I don't always vocalize, but that ties into my love of music, you buy a guitar, you buy strings, you keep it in tune. Strings are going to last you a long time. Strings cost, you know, good strings, maybe cost 20 bucks the amount of value that you get out of that. That thing that you're not depleting, it's a resource that really, really you're not depleting, or it takes a long time to deplete. There's such a well of joy in these instruments. And so to be able to share it with Rory, this thing that was was not terribly expensive to me, was now less valuable to me, because I, because I have another mandolin, and to be able to just get a little bit more music in the world and and and feed this kid's passion, was he, it was technically a gift to him. I think I got just as much out of it as he did, because it fills my heart that I got to share that with him and that he that he is still at it. So I feel very lucky simply that I had the opportunity to share that with him.

William Harris 1:17:40

I love it. I love sharing music with people. And that concept of the joy that you get out of something like that, buddy of mine, Sujin Patel, calls it the foi. What's your fun on investment? Right? There's an ROI, and that's important to calculate. But how about you calculate what's the fun on investment, too? And sometimes that could be outweigh the ROI. Is there a quote that you live by, something that you're like, ah, people who know me know that I've got this quote on my wall, or, you know, I'm going to quote it off in a quote that you're like, This is just a comm quote I love to share with people. So the

Patrick J. Griffin 1:18:10

first quote I think of is, is less of a mantra, but there's another one. So I'm on the so in addition to my businesses, I'm involved as a nonprofit trustee for a couple institutions in my community. My community, and I was working a table for my local library, because I'm just such a library nut this summer, and I found a sticker in the box, in this bucket of stickers that we were giving out and and I stole it, and I put it on my coffee cup, and I keep going back to it, because what it says is, and I feel like I'm going to miss phrase it a little bit, but you don't stop when you're tired. You stop when you're done, or something, something like that. And just that, that pushing yourself, that pursuit, I love to hike, and so that one of my favorite ways when I get to hike is when I feel like I'm depleted and I still have a ways to go, and I managed to tough through it, right? And but the but the other quote, the first quote, the principal quote that always comes back to me. A lot of people will talk about what, what art is. And so this is a little bit of a of a non sequitur, forgive it. But there was a writer named g k Chesterton, really prolific British guy about 100 years ago, and he wrote detective stories and he wrote op eds and things like that. And he had some some controversial bits to him. But one quote that I found when I was reading this Compendium as a teenager was he says, to say that a man is an artist is to say he combines deliberately and enjoys the result and and I think about that all the time because, because I really do feel like, I don't feel like a particularly creative person relative to things. That people traditionally think of as creative. I don't write music as well as I'd like to. I'm reasonably creative in the kitchen, but a lot of what I do is in pursuit of artistry. And I really love that expansive definition of what it is to be an artist, and therefore what it is to to be art, for something to be art. And I and I really just think he nailed it, to combine deliberately and enjoy the result is just such a lovely idea. And I think that that that when people are able to reflect on that and see the artistry and what they do day to day, and the million trillion different shapes that can take is just a is, there's, you know, just to use the word again, there's just a lot of joy in that. For me,

William Harris 1:20:47

it's a brilliant quote. Um, it has been a lot of fun getting to know you and learning from you, if people want to work with you, what's the best way for them to work. So follow you. We are for the negotiation business. We're really easy to find. We are negotiation training comm.

Patrick J. Griffin 1:21:03

I'm active on LinkedIn. I can be found there that is my only social medium. And the only tricky part about that this is actually why I put my middle initial in in this today, is that this is how I'm listed on LinkedIn. So if you just look for Patrick Griffin, I found out I can be a little harder to find, but if you look for Patrick J. Griffin, I should be pretty findable. And I'd love to hear from people i i, I love talking to people I have, I have, you know, non business conversations. I have business conversations all the time, and love to connect with people. So if anybody does want to reach out, I ask him not to hesitate.

William Harris 1:21:41

Last question before we go, it's almost dinner time. I have on the menu for tonight, so I had

Patrick J. Griffin 1:21:47

to go gluten free a few years ago, which was heartbreaking and and I wound up, a year or so ago, I wound up finding a preparation for for fried crispy chicken cutlets that's gluten free, but unreal, like crunchy and delicious. And then I figured out, after making it a couple of times that it it goes really nicely with this Trader Joe's Calabrian pasta sauce. So it's this spicy Calabrian Pepper Pasta sauce and and so that tonight with gluten free pasta for myself, regular pasta for everybody else, but these, these bread chicken cutlets in this spicy Calabrian sauce. It's just, it'll blow your hair back. It's snowing here right now. The high tomorrow is eight. So I might be colder where you are, but it's pretty cold here, and having something a little bit, you know, warm to line your stomach. That's the, that's the goal. Tonight,

William Harris 1:22:46

we're in the same boat. It's cold here. I've got Italian as well. Tonight I'm doing Italian wedding soup. I make the the meatballs myself. You know, like over 100 little, tiny meatballs, fresh sage. I mean, it's just, it's, it's really good. I like using fresh ingredients when I can well, Patrick, it's been a lot of fun talking to you today. I appreciate your time and your wisdom.

Patrick J. Griffin 1:23:05

I appreciate you having me on William. It was really a good time. Yeah. And thank you everyone for listening. Enjoy your night.

Outro 1:23:11

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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