From a psychological point of view, fear is a reaction from your Lizard Brain – the part of your brain that is very primitive.

Fear is a survival tactic – it warns and protects us against dangers. It can also paralyze us from taking action.

In business, fear can be our worst enemy and it can come at the most inopportune times.

You might think, looking at other startups and small businesses, that you are the only one who is fearful of failure, being lost, etc.

You are not alone.

Fear is a common denominator that ties the business community together.

Nearly every entrepreneur experiences fear at some point in their business careers.

It usually starts for most people when they’re struggling to figure out how to start a business.

But fear doesn’t stop there.

The perceived fearlessness you see around you is typically entrepreneurs re-framing their thoughts to sound brave.

The truth is often very different.

Jen Groover, author of What If? and Why Not?: How to Transform Your Fears Into Action and Start the Business of Your Dreams, a book about transforming your fears, says that rejecting fear creates destructive self-doubting habits:

Until you can jump over your inner roadblocks, the outer ones will stay firmly in place. Overcoming these inner obstacles is about learning to rethink the fearful thoughts that can lead you to quit before you start.

Groover makes the connection between re-framing and using fear to your advantage.

Fear can prevent bad decisions and negative situations, but fear can also be fostered in a way that propels you forward.

For example, fearing failure can push entrepreneurs to work harder in their business, and make better decisions, all while avoiding mistakes.

The key is to avoid shutting down.  Entrepreneur and author Jonathan Fields, in his book Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance, explains:

One of the single greatest determinants of high-level success as an innovator or creator in any realm is the ability to manage and at times even seek out sustained high levels of uncertainty, bundled lovingly with risk of loss and exposure to criticism. These three psychic horsemen of creation must often not only be sought, but embraced repeatedly and with increasing level of intensity over extended periods of time.

What do entrepreneurs and small business owners fear, and how can you take advantage of these fears to improve the success of your business?

Here are four of the biggest and most debilitating fears that all entrepreneurs and small business owners experience and how to overcome those fears.

1. Fear of feeling lost.

Every entrepreneur or small business owner will feel lost at some point.

It’s crazy to expect to know what you are doing 100% of the time or to always assume that the plan will work without problems. Things change fast in business, and you must constantly adjust and evolve.

It’s okay to feel lost, but it’s not okay to stay that way. Always have a Plan B and adjust to changing situations through trial and error until you get it right.

2. Fear of not having “enough” funding.

Plenty of businesses start from nothing!

You don’t need Silicon Valley unicorn-level funding to ensure success. Many successful entrepreneurs and business owners bootstrap.

Remember that fast growth isn’t always right for every business. There have been so many spectacular failures among well-funded startups and businesses that the term “unicorn” has already become pejorative in the startup community.

Just think of how Apple started – a few people in a garage, working together towards a common goal. They were not always the revolutionary tech industry leader they are today.

There are many other similar stories, including stories about some of the most successful companies today.

3. Fear of what others will think.

It would be nice to always have everyone on your side and happy with what you’re doing.

The truth is that sometimes, family and friends think you’re nuts for investing time in a business they don’t understand.

Maybe they’re right to be skeptical, but as long as you believe in your business, chances are that others will too.

People who think differently end up making a difference in the world.

Steve Jobs accomplished this with Apple. Jeff Bezos accomplished this with Amazon. And Elon Musk has made a difference across multiple companies, including Tesla and SpaceX.

People who question what you’re doing are often just fearful themselves of the risks at stake. Their fears tend to impact you.

Believe in yourself – don’t let others bring you down.

4. Fear of failure.

The fear of failure perseveres in the minds of all entrepreneurs and small business owners – even the most successful ones.

After all, if you fail, you fear that others will think you made a terrible move to quit your job to chase a pipe dream.

The truth is, you will be some letdowns, delays, and disappointments.

Everyone fails at some things. But without those mistakes, you can’t learn anything or improve from the experience.

If you can’t learn and improve, you can’t get better.

If you fail at something, ask yourself what you learned from that situation. How can you grow and improve so that you won’t make the same mistake(s) next time?

Be careful not to celebrate failure because not every failure is a learning experience.

Knowing what not to do helps you focus and avoid setbacks, but doesn’t help you adapt to changes. You know what didn’t work — does that help you next time when you need to figure out what will work? If you ask successful entrepreneurs whether they would rather hire someone who has failed or someone who has succeeded, I suspect most would prefer to hire the person who has succeeded. This is not surprising — scientific research shows that we learn more from success than from failure.

A recent University of California, Berkeley study revealed that the threshold of risk and success plays a large role in how motivating or debilitating a fear will be.

The study found that when the chances of success were high, people were more likely to use their fear as a motivator to overcome the challenges. However, when the chances of success were likely to be low, people gave in to their fear.

There’s another interesting aspect to the fear of failure. Some people imagine success and believe they will not fail.

Although this seems intuitively right, this could actually be counter-productive. Positive thinking alone is not enough.

Scientific research has shown that we create best outcomes when we balance positive thinking with visualizing future obstacles and ways we must overcome them.

Fear is real and can be paralyzing.

However, if you risk nothing, you risk everything.

The post 4 Fears Leaders Must Overcome To Help Their Businesses Succeed appeared first on crowdspring Small Business Resource Center.

But how can you manage two jobs?

How can you decide when it’s time to either abandon or pursue your start-up dream full-time?

How can you properly measure the risk involved in becoming an entrepreneur?

Mike and I met in late 2006 with a former classmate of mine from high school who had started numerous successful online businesses.

He liked our elevator pitch and asked a simple question: do you have kids? Sure – I had three (Mike had 2). He proceeded to talk about the effort in starting a technology business and pointed out that it was not a coincidence that most founders of technology startups are young and single. He talked about crazy hours, the hard work, sleeping under desks, and many more things we had read about in stories about technology companies. He wanted to make sure that our eyes were wide open to what we were about to experience.

In 2006 and throughout 2007, I maintained a very active law practice – I was a partner in a Chicago law firm and was representing U.S. and international clients in all types of complex commercial and intellectual property disputes.

It was – in many ways – crazy to think that I could maintain an active law practice and pursue a dream I had from early childhood – ever since my family emigrated from Kiev, Ukraine – to start a technology company. I had opportunities in 1998 and 1999, right before the Internet bubble burst, but never found something that I was passionate about (probably a good thing). Crowdspring was different.

I decided not to leave my law practice in 2006 to pursue crowdspring full time. We had not yet committed to forming a company (we did that in May 2007) and we hadn’t even decided that it could be a successful business. So – I was faced with an early choice – how much effort to put forth in doing the research and in trying to figure out whether we could make something of crowdspring.

In his video, Gary talks about having to work hard. Real hard.

And it’s true.

Ultimately, while bootstrapping is a popular practice, it’s not always so easy – both for professional and personal reasons. Mike and I set two milestones. The first was to give ourselves time to research, plan, debate, and determine whether we could build a successful business. We gave ourselves until the end of 2006 to do that. After we decided in late 2006 that we would aggressively pursue our dream, we set a second milestone – my transition from my law practice to crowdspring.

Meeting the first milestone – for me – was much easier than meeting the second. I was fortunate to have learned good time management skills early in my career and it was not difficult to replace many of my interests (movies, books, sports) to instead focus on crowdspring during the latter half of 2006. By the end of 2006, we decided, after much research, analysis, debate, and planning, that we would pursue our dream.

In early 2007, I had to decide what to do about my law practice. We had not yet raised a penny in funding, hadn’t even incorporated our company, and were six months away from writing a single line of code. I had a very successful law practice, was working with my friends and mentors, and was fortunate to make a good living doing what I loved.

After much discussion (with Mike and with my wife), I decided that I would maintain my law practice and work on crowdspring until such time that doing both would negatively impact either my law practice or crowdspring.

At the time, it wasn’t clear when that would happen, but it was really important for me to set a milestone tied to an event – a negative impact on either of my jobs. If I hadn’t set that milestone, I could have drifted for a long time and both could have easily suffered.

It was not easy to set that milestone.

It would have been much easier to just leave my law practice.

My friends know that I’m not afraid to take risks.

But it wasn’t fear of taking a risk that moved me to maintain an active law practice – it was the reality of startups. Most startups fail in their first year. Of those that survive  past the age of one, most fail. Leaving at that time would have been foolish – while there are stories of young adults founding successful internet companies and selling them for hundreds of millions of dollars – those stories are scarce. There are far more stories about those who didn’t make it.

At the time, we had no idea how successful crowdspring could be. We knew we were on to something important and exciting. We knew that we desperately wanted to pursue our dream. And we committed to work hard to do so.

For me, the most important decision at that time was the time investment necessary to work two jobs. I recalled our conversation in 2006 with my former classmate and his caution about technology startups and the time required to run them successfully. I wasn’t afraid of hard work, but I was terrified that I could not balance two jobs and my family. In early 2007, my oldest daughter was 8, my son was 5 and my youngest daughter was 1. My wife and I discussed the pressure this would put on our family, the need for her to take on more responsibility with the kids, and the extra work I would have to do to continue to create some balance of work/family.

You have to know yourself to understand the risks you are willing to take and your breaking point.

Each person is unique and each person’s breaking point is different.

Young founders have a high tolerance for risk. They don’t have families and typically haven’t started other careers.

Older founders with kids have much more to lose.

My advice – based on my experience – is to fairly and seriously measure what you’ll need to do in order to manage two jobs and – if it’s relevant and important – manage some semblance of family life.

This is not a simple measure.

If you’re not honest with yourself, you’re likely to fail. And nobody but you can make this assessment. I realized that I would need to stop, cold turkey, everything that wasn’t related to my law practice, crowdspring, or my family.

Everything. All at once.

In one respect, it was easy to do. I knew I was pursuing a dream in co-founding crowdspring and also knew that I could do so, while maintaining a law practice, only if I could leverage my time properly. But it was also very difficult because it meant, among other things, no more movies (I used to watch 6-7 movies every week), no vacations for a period of time, no more books, no more golf or tennis, no more television, no more fishing trips, no more reading multiple newspapers every day, and very limited interactions with friends. I stopped all of these things (Mike did too) so that we could work very long days, seven days per week. For a year.

There were many moments in 2007 when things got really tough. Working two jobs takes its toll. It’s hard and even if you are very efficient, it’s still two jobs. There were many weeks when I didn’t see my kids for 6, 7 days at a time. There were many weeks when my conversations with my wife were limited to phone calls.

At one point I received a voice mail from my oldest daughter. She wondered when I was returning home from Germany. This message confused me because I was not in Germany. I was right there, in Chicago, 20 miles from our house. But it reminded me that I hadn’t seen my kids in seven days.

That was a really rough moment for me. It tested my resolve in pursuing a startup and it tested my resolve to continue. I cried. But I was mentally prepared for that moment – as painful as it was.

I didn’t waver, but I realized that I hadn’t accurately predicted the sacrifice I would have to make.

The reality is that no matter how hard I tried to balance two jobs and family, I could not do so over extended periods of time. This was not unusual.

Many entrepreneurs have similar stories to tell about their personal sacrifice. I mention it mainly to emphasize what my former classmate told us before we started down this path – startups are tough. They require hard work and they take a toll on the family.

And if you’re working another job at the same time, that impact is magnified many times over.

By December 2007, I could no longer maintain an active law practice and work on crowdspring. We were still months away from completing development and launching to beta, but I was approaching major trials for clients in several bet-the-company cases and unless I acted promptly, those clients’ interests would have been prejudiced. We were also running into major problems in our development efforts and I had to focus on those efforts. I was working 20 hour days. Seven Days a week. Since late 2006.

I was not willing to further sacrifice lost time with my family.

That was the tipping point and the milestone Mike and I talked about in early 2007. I promptly resigned from my partnership and on December 6, 2007, started to focus solely on crowdspring.

So, what takeaways can I offer from my experience in maintaining a full-time job while pursuing a start-up? Here are five:

1. Love your dream.

Don’t kid yourself. It will be very difficult to work two jobs. You’ve got to love what you are trying to do with your startup.

You have to have a passion to work 20 hour days for a long period of time.

2. Assess how much time you have.

The cliche “time is money” is not a joke. Most people grossly under-estimate how much time they have to devote to something.

Working two jobs swallowed up every available minute of my time.

3. Be honest with yourself about what you’re prepared to sacrifice.

You know yourself better than anyone knows you. Understand what you will need to give up and understand the sacrifices you’ll have to make.

And consider that you might be under-estimating all of these things.

4. Know your breaking point.

At some point – and perhaps multiple times – you’ll find yourself near your breaking point. For me, it was the voicemail from my daughter asking me when I was returning home from Germany (I hadn’t seen my kids in one week). For others, it’s finances or other interests.

When you approach your breaking point, sit down and assess your resolve.

Make sure that you are still committed to doing what you’re doing.

5. Learn as much as you can about what you are about to do.

If this is your first start-up (as it was for me), understand what motivates you and what you don’t know. Learn everything you can about your product, market, competitors, customers, users, etc.

You will run into many problems along the way, and will be able to deal with them only if you continue to have a search for knowledge and only if you understand the scope of what you are doing.

The post When To Leave Your Full-Time Job appeared first on crowdspring Small Business Resource Center.

Richard Branson of Virgin agrees that passion is the fundamental reason behind his company’s success:

When you believe in something the force of your convictions will spark other people’s interest and motivate them to help you achieve your goals. This is essential to success.

Richard Branson has been immensely successful and it’s natural for you to respect what he says about entrepreneurship.

In theory, following your passion appears to be a great foundation for a successful business.

The reality for most aspiring entrepreneurs is quite different.

Most people do not feel true passion.

Sure, many feel the need to be passionate and to speak passionately about their ideas and startups.

But there’s a very important difference between feeling the need to be passionate and actually being passionate about an idea.

Richard Branson was passionate and has continued to inject his passion into every business he started. But, even his passion hasn’t fail-proofed his startups. There have been plenty of failures along the way.

Passion is exciting, contagious, and interesting.

We celebrate people who appear passionate – and we should.

But passion can also be fleeting.

Here are three reasons why passion might not be enough, in the long run, to help you launch and sustain a successful business:

1. Passion does not compensate for no expertise.

I could be very passionate about building passenger rockets.

It could be my dream to launch a company that can send people to space – much like airlines do across the world.

But no matter how much I am interested in passenger rockets, that doesn’t mean that I know the technical, financial, or logistical aspects.

There are billions of people in the world and many are passionate about space. Who other than Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are converting their passion into a for-profit company looking to solve the space travel problem?

Lack of expertise leads many aspiring entrepreneurs to believe that their product is great. Reality can be harsh.

Too many aspiring entrepreneurs fall in love with their idea and ignore the problem.

Ideas are shiny, new, and interesting. But often, they don’t solve an actual problem.

2. Passion is fleeting.

Passion is a powerful feeling of extreme love or hate and is classified as an emotion.

Here’s the problem: whether we like it or not, emotions aren’t permanent. They appear just as quickly as they fade.

According to a series of four studies on finding a career based on passion, or developing passion in a career chosen by skills, researchers found that “both facilitate success”.

However, the same researchers noticed that there were differences in the motivational and productive patterns of the workers.

The most interesting finding: those who found passion in a career they chose based on objective reasons ended up being slightly more successful than those who simply just followed their passion.

Think about it – if the passion disappeared (as it nearly always does), what else will motivate you to continue pushing forward with your idea?

Don’t kid yourself that your startup will be a rocket ship. Few are. Even the most passionate entrepreneurs hit a wall. After all, startups are like roller coasters and while the highs are great, the lows are equally depressing.

3. Passion doesn’t replace a strong work ethic.

Some of the most passionate people I know are also some of the laziest.

It doesn’t mean that all passionate people are lazy (in fact, most are not), but it does suggest that passion does not always result in a good work ethic.

A good work ethic reflects a person’s resiliency, discipline, and desire to do a good job. They have to be willing to put in the time and effort to start a business, to take a pay cut, to push through times when they face failure. Passion will not get them through it, because it will most likely disappear in times of trouble.

I’m not suggesting that entrepreneurs should ignore their passion.

Passion does play a large role in starting and growing companies. Passion is often the reason why we take risks.

But passion clearly isn’t enough to keep a business afloat when you hit the entrepreneurial wall – and you will. Find your passion, but also be sure you know what else can motivate you to move forward when your passion starts to fade.

The post Why Follow Your Passion is Bad Advice For Entrepreneurs appeared first on crowdspring Small Business Resource Center.

If you run or work at a startup, you experience many highs and lows and you can’t always anticipate what’s ahead.

Education and experience help us to overcome many difficult situations, but education and experience are rarely enough.

To be successful, we also must be creative in the ways we face and overcome problems.

Why isn’t education and experience enough?

Startups don’t typically have the same resources, capital, or credibility found in established companies.

This forces entrepreneurs and their startups to think outside of the box and to take actions that are very different than those an established company might take.

For example, established companies rarely bet their entire company on a single new product, yet startups regularly do this.

Established companies tweak marketing, product design, sales, and many other processes in incremental ways. Many established companies talk about innovation, but few actually understand how to innovate and even fewer are innovative.

Psychology professor Thomas B. Ward found that a majority of an entrepreneur’s creativity is invested in solving paradoxes. The Routlegde Companion to Creativity summarizes one of his findings:

For example, in introducing a new product in the market, entrepreneurs will have to combine novelty and familiarity, the former for catching attention and the latter to prevent outright rejection.

This paradox happens because startups must be able to do many things well, but lack resources. The Routledge Companion to Creativity explains:

In a physical sense, the most critical of these paradoxes, as apparent from the situation described above, is the mismatch between the requirements and availability of resources. Building a new enterprise and establishing it in the competitive field would need a lot of resources, which the newness and smallness of the enterprise/entrepreneur prevents them from attracting. In prioritizing the tasks to be performed while implementing their entrepreneurial vision, entrepreneurs have to focus on the critical tasks, but paradoxically have to take care of every routine, in the absence of robust organizational systems and procedures. Such paradoxes can also cloud the mental processes of the entrepreneur.

Even though entrepreneurs are asked to do the impossible and to disrupt our daily lives, they often struggle to find the right way to do this.

Before you conclude that creativity is only necessary when you’re trying to figure out a new business idea and that education and experience can lead the way afterward, consider the following research study published in The Journal of Enterprising Culture.

In that study, researchers discovered that the creativity linked to innovation (i.e. ideation) directly affects an entrepreneur’s managerial/leadership skills. In the study, the more innovative a person, the better they were at being a leader.

It turns out that innovative people use that same nexus of creativity to problem solve financial issues or employee conflict and to create a unique company culture. Without these important skills, no company can become sustainable.

But what happens if you get a creative block? After all, we’re all human and rarely perfect. Do you stop being a good entrepreneur when you’ve misplaced your creativity?

Don’t worry – this is a temporary problem.

According to Good Therapy, creative block affects a majority of creative people.

When creative block strikes, truly innovative entrepreneurs push forward and overcome the block. They either know how to harness their energy, refocus, and let their creativity recharge – or they take specific steps in order to return to their creative state.

Before you conclude that putting your head “in the clouds” is worthless, you should know that scientific research supports this approach.

A study on creative cognition revealed that the more distant a creative was from the issue blocking them, the faster and better they solved the problem. The study highlights this idea as “cognitive distance”, which is like mentally walking away from a situation that is at a standstill. The study also examines the idea that within that distance, there is an ability to daydream – what the Psychology Today article refers to as “head in the clouds”. Daydreaming allows us to delve deeper into our psyche, and release any mental inhibitions we may have, which are often the cause of the creative block.

We might not all be MacGyver, with superhuman skills to make creative things out of ordinary objects, but we can all leverage creativity to overcome problems that seem insurmountable. Many times, our ability to overcome such problems is the difference between our companies succeeding and failing.

The post Do You Have To Be Creative To Be A Successful Entrepreneur? appeared first on crowdspring Small Business Resource Center.

Success and failure don’t happen by chance.

Highly effective and successful entrepreneurs share common habits.

Here are seven habits of highly effective and successful entrepreneurs (plus a bonus 8th habit):

1. Highly effective and successful entrepreneurs measure progress.

It’s very difficult to succeed unless you are able to measure your progress.

This is especially important in the beginning when you’re just starting your new business.

But, measuring progress never stops being important.

It’s easy to measure success if you have billions in your bank account, but for most entrepreneurs, overnight success takes 10 years.

How can you succeed if you don’t recognize what is working and what isn’t?

Set up your accounting and bookkeeping systems and then set targets for marketing, sales, and profitability, for customer service and other areas of your business, and understand which initiatives bring you closer to those targets, and which initiatives take you further away.

If you delegate authority and responsibility to others, measure performance to make sure that the work is done in a timely and effective way.

Everyone expected to carry out a task must understand the goals, how their performance will be measured, and when you expect them to deliver results.

2. Highly effective and successful entrepreneurs take calculated risks/are willing to fail.

Nearly all successful entrepreneurs failed before achieving success. Some failed many times.

Successful entrepreneurs and successful people, in general, have in common an ability to see beyond ideas that don’t work out, businesses that fail, and opportunities that don’t bear fruit.

But it’s important to understand that not every failure is a learning experience. In fact, failure is often overrated.

3. Highly effective and successful entrepreneurs never stop learning.

Effective and successful entrepreneurs never believe they have enough success, or that they know as much as they should ever know.

Richard Branson, for example, achieved great success with Virgin Records, but then went on to launch Virgin Atlantic and many other successful companies. Successful entrepreneurs learn from success and failure—both theirs and others’—then adapt, re-evaluate obstacles, and refine their ideas. Many now use free microlearning apps to build skills in quick, focused sessions without disrupting a packed day.

To be truly great and successful, you have to continue to stay dissatisfied and hungry.  Apple’s iconic Stay Hungry, stay foolish campaign smartly reminds us why this is important.

4. Highly effective and successful entrepreneurs delegate wisely.

Effective and successful entrepreneurs like to work smart. While some see 20 hour days as the entry fee to success, this is neither necessary nor, for most people, effective. The challenge with delegation is that you must learn to delegate to the right people AND to do it the right way.

Many successful people, when starting a business, do various jobs themselves. This is normal – don’t delegate until you’ve done it.

But as the business grows, the job becomes too large for one person so you must hire someone to take over some of your duties. Successful entrepreneurs know how to hand over both authority and responsibility to the other person.

People who are ineffective try to retain authority, even when handing over responsibility, and this often results in mediocrity.

When you delegate, be certain the other person knows what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, and to what standard.

This is especially important when managing remote employees. Then make sure that the person has the time, resources, and support to get the job done right.

5. Highly effective and successful entrepreneurs acquire and manage talent.

The difference between a successful company and one that fails is rarely the leader. The best leader, without a great team, can’t accomplish very much.

A strong leader with a great team can change the world.

Successful and effective entrepreneurs know this – and spend a good deal of their time building great teams.

It took us some time to understand that it’s more important to hire the right candidate, instead of hiring the best candidate. The best candidate from a pool of 300 applicants isn’t necessarily the right candidate, and the wrong hire, particularly in a small startup, can do much damage.

We offer many tips, including interview tips, in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Employees.

6. Highly effective and successful entrepreneurs know when to say “no”.

Steve Jobs wisely said that “innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying NO to all but the most critical features.”

In fact, “no” may be the most powerful word. It lets you focus, protect your priorities, and reduces the chance that you will fail. Saying “NO” to customers can save your company.

7. Highly effective and successful entrepreneurs have a laser focus.

Effective and successful entrepreneurs are geniuses when it comes to identifying market needs and focusing their energies on solving real-world problems. They spend little to no time obsessing about the location of their business or other factors that often are irrelevant, and the vast majority of their time obsessing about building great things.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, attributes Amazon’s to a laser focus on customers:

If there’s one reason we have done better than of our peers in the Internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience, and that really does matter, I think, in any business. It certainly matters online, where word of mouth is so very, very powerful.

I promised to highlight seven habits of highly effective and successful entrepreneurs, but there’s one more habit I want to mention.

8. Highly effective and successful entrepreneurs listen more than talk.

The most effective and successful entrepreneurs first seek to understand, before they push to be understood. This is important. You can improve your team’s performance only if you listen and understand their challenges.

This is an important distinction. Successful entrepreneurs listen to understand, not necessarily to respond immediately to what was said.

Listening is not easy for most people.  Most people prefer to talk and rarely take the time to listen. Most people ask few questions and spend their time giving answers.

Effective and successful entrepreneurs listen and ask many questions.

The post 7 Habits of Highly Effective and Successful Entrepreneurs appeared first on crowdspring Small Business Resource Center.

But it’s difficult and perhaps impossible to start a new business or operate a small business or startup and not negotiate agreements with employees, vendors, customers, and others.

I’ve negotiated with thousands of people (for 23 years as an attorney and for over a decade as an entrepreneur and business owner).

Here are ten suggestions that I hope will help you negotiate, based on my experience and practice.

1. Know Your Objective

Successful negotiators know before they begin negotiating what they want to achieve during the negotiation. They also know their bottom line – what they absolutely must have to make the deal work for them.

A successful negotiation is one that falls between your goal and bottom line.

Although most people can adequately assess their goals, many skip an equally critical step – evaluating Plan B (your best alternative to a negotiated agreement).

What will you do if you are unable to reach an agreement? Do you have a number of options and are those options both realistic and practical? If you create the best alternative, you’ll always understand your bottom line since it will be just slightly better than your best alternative.

2. Prepare

Most negotiations require a great deal of preparation and strategizing before you begin negotiating. Part of the preparation involves identifying your goals and bottom line, as well as your best alternative (see point 1 above).

But research is equally important. The more you know about the other side – the more options you’ll have during the negotiation. You’ll rarely be able to find much information about the person with whom you’re negotiating (although this is becoming easier with the amount of information accessible online). But you’ll nearly always be able to find tons of information about their company.

Among other things, try to determine what’s important to the other side and how far they might go to close the deal. You should also understand when something is important to the other side.

For example, if you need a new company logo for your business, you’ll try to find a freelancer, design company, or agency to help you create the logo. Before you hire someone, you will need to understand how much a logo design costs.

But knowing the answer to the cost of a company logo is only part of what you need to do. You also need to assess whether the person with whom you’re negotiating will pay attention at the prices you’re proposing. If you’re trying to get a branding agency to create a new logo for your business for $1,000, you’ll never succeed. Branding agencies charge tens of thousands of dollars for such work and no matter how much time you spend preparing, you won’t get anywhere.

So, be sure to align your needs with the needs of the person with whom you’re negotiating.

Finally – consider what will happen during the life of the agreement. Negotiate concessions on terms that protect you throughout the life of the agreement (such as early termination provisions without penalty).

3. Never Be Intimidated

Small business owners and young entrepreneurs often get intimidated when negotiating with larger companies. Larger companies know this – they tell you they have “form” agreements and their legal team won’t let them negotiate. Most of the time, that’s untrue. Once you allow yourself to be intimidated, you’ll have difficulty getting your needed concessions during the negotiation. Good preparation and a solid Plan B will help you start the negotiation on level ground – and your ability to negotiate as equals will help you obtain the necessary concessions to make a deal happen.

4. Pay Attention To Perception and Emotion

People are imperfect – we get emotional, have varied goals and interests, and tend to look at negotiations from our own point of view. We rarely take the time to consider the other side’s point of view.

How the other side perceives your negotiating positions and tactics – and your emotional responses – will strongly influence their participation and responses during the negotiation. Get to know the basic principles of psychology – they can help you to become a better negotiator.

Think about people with whom you regularly negotiate. You tend to know such people a little better – and you can more skillfully read their emotions (and control your own emotions when talking with them). You’re probably most comfortable with your own employees and team – and you probably already know that how they perform is influenced by their perception.

Get to know (as best as you can) the person with whom you’re negotiating. Even a few small details about them could help during the negotiation. If you can get past the misperceptions and emotional reactions that are common when two strangers negotiate something important to both, you can focus on the problems you need to solve during the negotiation rather than the personal “conflict” between you and the other person.

Most important – try not to show emotion. Don’t threaten, don’t shout and don’t slam the phone. Be calm, collected, thoughtful, and considerate. This is easier to do if you’ve followed the prior suggestions (including knowing your next best alternative).

Tip 1: When you encounter particularly challenging negotiation points, provide verbal cues that you want to work together with the other person to solve a common problem. “Let’s put our heads together on this problem and see how we can help you with your margins and help me with my budget restrictions.”

Tip 2: Evaluate the environmental factors over which you have control and change them to help with the negotiation. For example, if you’re negotiating in person, sit next to the other person, instead of across the table from them. Your body language will reinforce your non-confrontational message that you want to work together to solve some of the sticking points left in the negotiation.

5. Be Prepared To Walk

Although your goal in the negotiation is usually to obtain agreement on your key terms, there are times when you should walk away instead of negotiating further – if the other party isn’t yielding. I do this all the time when buying expensive goods like cars and real estate. And more often than not, the other party will contact you again – and make enough concessions to bring you back to the negotiating table.

Sometimes, I walk because that’s part of my strategy going in. If I’ve carefully researched the other side and know they’re bluffing about certain key terms that they can’t accept, I’ll plan to walk – in advance. At other times, the decision to walk is prompted by what happens during the negotiation. but I always – ALWAYS – know my next best alternative (see point 1).

6. Clearly Articulate Your Interests

Never presume that the other side understands your interests or that you understand their interests.

Some people successfully create “fake” important interests so that they could bargain them away during the negotiation and make the other side feel like they’ve obtained serious concessions. This tactic can work but I’ve used it very rarely because it can often be distracting and sometimes, devolves the negotiation into a collateral dispute that could compromise the actual deal.

The best way to collaboratively find ways to resolve problems and differences that occur in a negotiation is for both parties to understand the interests of the other party.

7. Listen

Successful negotiators are nearly always exceptional listeners who patiently allow the other side to articulate their arguments, deal points, and reactions. Do your best not to interrupt and when you can, encourage the other side to talk first.

8. Create Multiple Possible Solutions

One mistake commonly made during a negotiation is to limit the possible solutions available to resolve a sticking point. When you limit possible solutions to one or two, you’re limiting opportunities for meaningful discussion. Instead of limiting possible solutions, look for ways to generate a list of all possible solutions so that you can better assess ones that can work and those that cannot. Often, by looking at many alternatives, the parties can find one – or a combination of many – that works for them.

Think of this practice as a form of brainstorming. Rather than argue on a deal point that it MUST be A or that it must be A or B, work with the other side to identify various possibilities (without judging any of the suggested ideas until you have a list of ideas that you can discuss).

Whenever you can, find ways to make the other party’s decisions easier. For example, if a number of different options are acceptable to you – let the other side know and invite them to pick one that works best for them. This builds trust and will help you on other deal points (and during other negotiations with the same person).

9. Make Strategic Concessions

Negotiation is a competitive activity and people generally like to win when they compete. That’s why it’s rare for one party to come out of a negotiation with the perfect deal – they must make concessions along the way.

Listen carefully when you discuss deal terms and get a feel for what’s most important and less important to the other side. Although some people argue that you should try not to make any concessions because doing so will only seem weak – I disagree. You should look for areas that are unimportant to you – but important to the other side – and make concessions on those points. Don’t just give up those points outright before you begin – but do take note of them and concede them as you negotiate.

Example: I often will push hard on one-sided provisions in a contract that seem unreasonable. At some point, I might suggest that we make such provisions reciprocal (so that they would apply to both sides). I don’t always care about all of these provisions. Some are absolutely irrelevant to the deal and are there only because the other side’s attorney or advisor said that those provisions must be included. in such cases, I’ll find ways to concede on the provisions the other side thinks are important (but that are not important to me), and in exchange, will ask for concessions on the provision that I truly care about.

10. Confirm Points Of Agreement and Disagreement

After each negotiation meeting – even if you didn’t reach a deal and need to continue negotiating – verbally review the points covered and all areas of agreement and remaining areas of disagreement. Make sure that one party follows-up with a written summary so that you don’t leave loose ends that will require you to revisit issues you’ve already resolved.

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