Salty Sky by Seth Coker Read Free Book Online Page A

boat had so many spaces that it was hard for Ashley to know what to call each one. She delivered the plates and sat with Joe to eat, while Tony dropped into a chair and picked up the
ESPN
college football preview issue.
    “Joe, how do you become a good negotiator?”
    She saw that the question caught Joe off guard.
    “Why do you think I’m a good negotiator? How could someone who owns this money pit be a good negotiator?”
    “Well, you’re successful. I don’t think you’re in the Mafia. So you must have negotiated a lot.”
    “I guess. Maybe I’m a good business negotiator but a bad personal negotiator. Do you want business or personal negotiating advice?”
    “Let’s start with business.”
    “Good, business is easy. The best way to negotiate is to
know
that you don’t care if you get what you’re negotiating for.”
    “But aren’t there times when I
will
care?”
    “Not really. You only
think
you care. Give me any business worry, and I can make you see you don’t care.”
    “Big picture,” she said. “I want to start a staffing company that provides nurses. It’s what I know, and hospitals always need good suppliers of contract nurses. But I want the nurses to work three ten-hour shifts in a hospital and one ten-hour shift in a shelter for homeless or abused women and children each week. A lot of nurses would love this. Helping people is why they became nurses to begin with, even if, somewhere along the way, they forgot that. But how do I negotiate with the hospitals to get them to pay for the shifts at the shelter? I have ten friends who’d join me tomorrow if we could get a contract!”
    “So what do you
think
your concern is?”
    “I need the hospitals to pay for the shift at the shelter. I’ve tried to sell them the idea by saying that they’d be helping the community and that they’d get good press from it. They said they couldn’t afford to pay for it. I showed them all the information about how when they see these patients in the ER, they lose more money than if they paid someone to treat them
before
they came to the ER. They still said they couldn’t afford it.”
    “Ashley, I think you got the focus of what you care about scrambled up. I don’t think what you care about is getting the hospital to pay for the shift at the shelter. I think what you care about is (a) getting nurses into more rewarding work without giving up money and (b) helping some people in trouble stop their small problems before they become big problems. A stitch in time saves nine. Right?”
    “That sounds right, but what’s the difference?”
    “So now you know you don’t care about getting the hospital to pay for the shift. Right?”
    “I guess.”
    “Once you
know
that, instead of ‘guess’ you do, then you don’t have to keep trying to sell them on paying for that shift. You can change your pitch and say the girls—and boys, sorry—will be happier, givebetter care, stay in their jobs longer, whatever argument you want to use if they get this day at the shelter. You can change it from one day a week to one week a month. Again, whatever argument you can use is great. But now that you know that you don’t care if the hospital pays for the shift, what you negotiate changes.”
    “I don’t see it.”
    “What you care about is the
outcome
, not how it’s paid for. Why not ask for 25 percent more per hour and use that to pay for it? Take less profit from running the company. Sell it to doctor offices instead of hospitals. I don’t know the answer, but I know if we noodle it around for an hour, day, week, or month, we’d come up with a lot of ways to swing it. It helps in a negotiation not to be pressured to make something happen.”
    “Maybe.”
    “There are a thousand ways to skin a cat. You think about it. I’ll think about it with my eyes closed for the next half hour.” He smiled, got up, and climbed the steps to the flybridge.
    Lesson over
, Ashley thought. She grabbed the magazine Tony