Beat the 'winner's curse' of auction-type negotiations for better freight rates

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Updated Feb 10, 2025


With this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, we pick up where longtime Overdrive contributor, former OTR owner and current business coach Gary Buchs left off on the Overdrive Extra blog last week.

There, as regular readers will know, he penned notes on the "fine art" of rates negotiation, with emphasis on ways to counterbalance the pressure so many owner-operators feel to move fast on load opportunities, given the speed at which loads come and go on the boards in particular. Compared to just a short time ago in history, freight "information's moving so much faster" in this day and age, Buchs said. "The speed ... interferes often with solid negotiation. When you speed that up, things get missed." 

Move too fast to just outright accept an offer, and you might neglect to consider fully that the good-sounding long-haul run to the West Coast starts out due well east of Atlanta, with a load pickup time of two in the afternoon. If you didn’t effectively build into your rate the added cost of traffic in Atlanta rush hour (or the time to wait it out, as it were), you’re behind the eight ball before you even get started on the run. 

[Related: Brokers' contract nickel-and-diming incentivizing speed, fatigue?]

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Buchs offered a different example of details you can miss if you don’t take the time to effectively negotiate. He heard this one several times: An owner "got to a shipper and ... they wanted cash for the lumper and they didn't have cash," Buchs said, asking "How does that get missed if you do a lot of reefer work?"

He advises owner-operators think about such scenarios: "What lessons do we learn when things don't go quite right? How do we apply the lesson we learn? Like when we overcommit or fail to anticipate travel times, drive times. ... Drivers and owner-operators feel the pressure of time squeezing them so much, and that interferes with our ability to tap that brake pedal, to pause for even just a moment. So we have to" be aware of that and "use our experience," he said.  

Today on the podcast, much more in the way of specific ideas built on Buchs’ wealth of personal experience in business and with owners operating in the freight world today. Getting better at negotiation in general certainly isn't easy. "If we're going to get better, we've got to stop thinking that everything is going to be easy," as Buchs put it. 

[Related: The fine art of rates negotiation in today's go-go-go freight markets]

But with some of these ideas, hopefully more owners can avoid "negotiations" that otherwise feel like auctions, where the “winner’s curse” is almost always to be paying more than what an item is really worth, research has shown. In the freight world, that’s the opposite. Win the load after race-to-the-bottom ping-ponging with the competition, or accepting a broker's lowball offer blindly, and you’ll certainly be getting compensated below the market value for the freight movement: 

Howes logoOverdrive Radio's sponsor is Howes, longtime provider of fuel treatments like its Howes Diesel Treat anti-gel and Lifeline rescue treatment to get you through the coldest temps, likewise its all-weather Diesel Defender and Howes Multipurpose penetrating oil, among other products.Also in the podcast, Buchs emphasizes the importance of cost analysis -- particularly fixed costs -- and recommends including your own fixed salary needs on the cost side of the ledger when it comes to profit analysis. It might help you in load-by-load profit analysis and negotiation, too. Overdrive’s Load Profit Analyzer, our fairly simple online calculator introduced late last year, is an assist to analyze individual and/or compare multiple loads. The calculator includes on its front end places to use the knowledge and analysis Buchs talks about to input not just cost per mile overall (though it can be used that way), but variable cost per mile, fixed cost per day worked, and, again considering it on the cost side, a salary-per-day-worked figure. 

Profit-potential results then show figures not only per-mile but per-day -- with salary added back in, too -- for better appreciation of the impact of time and fixed costs. The Load Profit Analyzer is free to use with site registration. 

[Related: Kick the tires of Overdrive's new Load Profit Analyzer]

Find more advice on a myriad of owner-operator business topics in the 2024 edition of the Overdrive/ATBS coproduction of the "Partners in Business" book. Download it here. 

 

Transcript

Gary Buchs: If we're going to get better, we got to stop thinking everything is going to be easy.

Todd Dills: Hey everybody, this is Todd Dills back with another edition of Overdrive radio where today we're going to pick up where longtime Overdrive contributor, former OTR owner and current business coach Gary Buchs left off on the Overdrive Extra blog last week. There his regular readers will know he penned and published notes on the fine art of rates negotiation with a special emphasis on ways to counterbalance the pressure so many owner operators feel to move fast on load opportunities given the speed at which loads come and go on the boards.

Gary Buchs: In particular, information is moving so much faster, that the speed of information interferes often with solid negotiation. When you speed up, things get missed.

Todd Dills: Move too fast to accept an offer and you might neglect to consider fully that the good looking long haul run to the west coast starts out do well east of Atlanta with a pickup appointment for 2 in the afternoon. If you didn't effectively build into your rate the added cost of traffic in Atlanta rush hour or the time to wait it out, for instance, you're behind eight ball before you even started. Gary Buchs offered a different example of one among many details he seen people miss if they don't take the time to effectively negotiate.

Gary Buchs: I read repeatedly on the social media posts, got to a shipper and they wanted, an example, was they wanted cash for the lumper and they didn't have cash. I'm just thinking to myself how does that get missed? If you do a lot of reeffer work and you know, and I'm not trying to belittle the person who put it down but try to share some ideas on well how do you avoid that the next time? What lessons do we learn when things don't go quite right and how do we apply, how do we apply the lessons we learn? things like you know when we overcommit or anticipate travel times, you know, drive times, you look at the data that the American Transportation Research has put out about delays, you know that the traffic and time lost in traffic and if you're an owner I think there's a couple of, that's just one area, that's a couple of areas where studying that to think about what times are you going to be to travel through certain areas and if you have to go through. Drivers and owner operators they feel the pressure of time squeezing them so much and that interferes with our ability to tap that brake pedal, pause just even a moment. So we have to use our experience.

Todd Dills: As Buchs mentioned in his story, too, on Overdrive Extra, use a quote unquote strategy of pre negotiation. If time pressure is such that you feel you only have that one chance to just accept a deal, there's no better time than before the call is placed to use that pre negotiation as he put it in story. You can find a link to that in the show notes for this Overdrive Radio edition where he elaborates. what he’s talking about there of course is advanced planning prior to making a call about any load. Get a feel for the average pricing for any given lane and whether that comes close to your own necessary rate. Consider loads days, weeks, even months in advance. Generally build more time in between an immediate need and starting your negotiation.

Today on the podcast, much more in the way of specific ideas built on Buchs wealth of personal experience in business with owners operating in the freight world today with these ideas, though, as he noted up top, none of this is particularly easy in the execution. Hopefully more can avoid participating in what might otherwise feel like an auction where the winner's curse is almost always to be paying more than an object is really worth. Research has shown in the freight world that's the opposite. Win the load after race to the bottom ping ponging with the competition and you'll certainly be getting compensated well below the market value for the freight boomer. Keep tuned for more after the break.

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Todd Dills: Find more information about the full line of Howes fuel treatments at Howesproducts.com. Here's Gary Buchs, who starts with some background on just what got him thinking about the topic negotiation. He's a guest on Road Dog Trucking Live on Sirius XM with host KC Phillips most Thursdays, and it was one of those shows last fall that in some ways kickstart started his focus back to the ever present need for skilled negotiation business.

Gary Buchs: When I do the show with KC and it's a great opportunity to just share, and take calls and just help people air out. But I have come to realize it's best if I propose a topic and if we agree on that that's timely and could help, you know, an audience. We were always open to anything. And I had proposed a few months. I think it was like October, I think possibly was the month. And I said let's because. And what brought me to think of that was as the end of the year approaches, people begin to behave differently. the way they look at loads with the holidays, the way they're looking at the weather, the way they are rationalizing their workdays, they're looking at the way they spend money, you know, are they trying to spend money to you know, get a tax deduction, so spending wisely through negotiations. U. and then I also brought up how, and this is something I'd like to encourage owner operators to think about is what is going to be the freight, the load opportunities in the first quarter. It's hard to think how it's going to change. Often we're looking so much at today and tomorrow. We're not thinking about the fact that they're going to need construction materials for these disaster areas, for example, they're going to need plants and fertilizer and supplies at home improvement centers come springtime. That is a really big thing. For example, the needs for moving, different food, you know, products. If you, if we look at for example the reefer, you know, holler, the segment of reefer and food haulers, you know, people that move food products. I get a report from the USDA that shows the amount of the rates and the number of loads and so on and so forth for transportation of reefer loads. And I watch how that moves to the different regions. And like right now there's a lot of product coming out of Mexico because we're in the middle of winter, for example, and you know, what's coming out of Florida, in the southern parts of Texas, what's coming out of you know, Cal, you know, maybe Southern California or so, on where they have irrigation and warmer weather. So, so thinking ahead and beginning to negotiate to get a hold of the customers and begin to say, you know, hey, what are we looking at for February? What are we looking at for March? What are we looking at? You know, whatever commodity you work with, what are we going to be looking at in say, you know, six weeks, eight weeks, four weeks, whatever number you want to Use and get yourself in that list and do what I call beat the broker board. It's not beat the broker up, but every broker agent I have ever had good relationships with told me they love when they do not have to post the load publicly. If they can, if they can book with a trusted owner, their best customers, their best loads, develop that relationship. It saves them from taking you know, possibly hundreds of phone calls or emails and saying no, it's gone, no it's not. And then having to vet out, you know, carriers and so on. It may sound unfair to the new carrier and so on, but the fact is everyone is an individual and a competitor and competition makes us stronger and we have to all learn to be better at what we do. Making that call, making that sales call. Like I said, make an appointment, go see these people. If you can't see them in person, do that zoom video. You know that visually there is something happens when we can look someone in the eye. I do believe that it's not easy. It takes time. What I learned and it took me a number of years to learn a lot of these things. It's never, it's a never ending process. But I made my profit through the management, not the driving, the free, I made it through the, the work I did ahead of time, the work I did, making the phone call or the email or researching I did. And I suggest to the people I coach, for example, you may need to look for the second load before you book the first load. Find the load you want and then figure out how to go get. It may be the best option or a better option. And that way you don't get caught with getting into an area where you give away any or all profit trying to get back out. Like the TV commercial about insurance. If you can bundle loads, if you can stack, you know, customer service, requirements together, that's going to help you really improve efficiency and improve time management.

Todd Dills: So a lot of that could fall under the notion of quote unquote, pre negotiation. Like negotiation is not. We'don't necessarily want to think about negotiation as just the phone conversation. So there's a lot's a lot, a lot of prep that just goes, a lot of prep that goes into a good outcome, a lot of work and planning.

Gary Buchs: When you talk with a lot of owners, and listen closely, you also find out the personal bias against things or for things, how much that influences like you don't want to get into a, ah, automatic I Won't do something if you begin to limit without getting the details. And I can give you examples of where people, you know, I did a lot of work in Chicago, for example, and people just automatically, well, I won't go there. It's too dangerous. It's, you know, too much traffic. You know what they were thinking was they're going to get $2amile to going to Chicago instead of the $10amile I. You and, and you price accordingly and you get the details. Now, were there a lot of risk? Yes, there were. But you price that in and you have to be prepared to understand it a simpler way maybe to think about some of this time. And this is how I came to help the evolution of my pricing. I took, for example, the average rate I was running my lows for, let's say I, you know, was averaging, $2.30amile and my average run was 400 miles. Well, if I found a load for 200 miles, I would say, okay, I need to double that rate per mile. It's fewer miles, but I'll double the rate. So instead of, you know, 230, it's going to be 460 would be my minimum for 200 miles and so on and so forth. And that was a very simple, beginning to how I changed, how I started evaluating loads and the value of loads. And so if an owner that listens to this, if they take their average rate, like I say, whatever that is, they take that average rate and then figure out the ratio of miles. So if the average, let say if you average 400 miles a day at two, dollars a mile, you see a load at 200 miles, then you need to be looking at that like $4amile and so on.

Todd Dills: It's going to eat up most of the day. Whatever you have whatever your average, length is, right?

Gary Buchs: The other thing is don't ever say never. Like a lot of people would say, well, I won't do a multiple stop load. And I think part of that is because their experience has been when they make a delivery, it takes eight hours to make a delivery. When you haul a multiple stop load, generally it's closer to a final mile delivery. The final, closer to the final customer. They want that product more than a big box warehouse. And I would average about 20 minutes of delivery. And I might have 10 stops on a trailer. It's not really an LTL, it's a multiple stop, like cabinetry or Tires or, you know, it could be anything. But you would go in and then be prepared to help un load. And that really pays you a lot better than driving actually, oftentimes. but part of that's in the negotiation too. Getting in, stop pay, assist pay if you're flat or platform work, getting, you know, TARP pay, negotiating for that, because your tarps aren't free if you damage a tarp. Think about the cost, the, risk. Every driver that I know that has gotten hurt real bad is been from flatbed work where they fell off or something fell on them. you have to really price that risk in and it will vary over time and the locations and the commodity and so on. It makes it more complicated. There isn't one single answer, unfortunately. It's developing those communication skills

Todd Dills: Absolutely paramount when you do make those calls about a load to a broker.

Gary Buchs: When you contact them. Try this. When they answer, you have a load in mind. Ask them, is such and such load available? The answer is yes, very politely and simply ask, would you please tell me everything you can about this contract, this load? And then don't ask anything else or give any more answers until they answer the question. And if they are confident in the customer in the load and they know the these, they will rattle off the basic details. Yeah, we, we pick up this every Tuesday. It's this, it's first come, first serve or it's appointment. you need five straps to secure the load and so on and so forth. You can have a lot of confidence in that, information when they give you detail. Now, I had 11 5, kind of comical to think about. I asked the question, what will you tell me everything about the load? And I'll quote, it was very simple. He said, it pays $500 and it weighs 45,000 pounds. What else would you need to know? You went like 120 miles or something. And that's all he said he knew. And I just politely said, you told me everything I need to know. And it tells me that's not the right load for me. Now, when you ask that question, you don't want to give them what you want to know. You don't want to say, well, is an appointment or first come, let them in, because they're going to give you the answer you want to hear. Often you don't want to lead them to what you want. You want them to give you what they know. That doesn't mean if it's not perfect, you don't have a response. You don't necessarily Cut them off and say, no, I'm not interested, or I'll never take that load. You never say that. Simply say to them, if something changes or you get something different, please contact me. But the way it is right now, the, the load, the way it's what you've described, it just can't work. I can't give the best service possible right now for that load. And then if they say, well, what would make it work? Then you go from there and you discuss, well, I need a little more flexibility on the load time or …

Todd Dills: Or I need to know what the load is in this cas. I need to know if I can actually fit this thing in my trailer.

Gary Buchs: I need to know how it's packaged. I need to know, you know, is there a chance it's got hazardous materials? can I call the customer? And that's another thing. Never be afraid to contact a customer before you go and move. I had a couple of times in my career where I would call the check on, you know, after I got the contract. It was supposed to be like, first come, first serve. And I would call it a double check. And a, couple of times the ship would say, no, you need an appointment. I said, well, can I make an appointment? No, you can't make the appointment. The broker makes me. I would call them back and say, you know, this. This load can't work. And they're like, what do you mean? I said, you need an appointment. You don't have one, so I'm going to have to give it back to you. Well, let me make an appointment. I go, it's already too lateus I already know the nearest, newest appointment can be like a day and a half out. They've already told me that. And so they didn't do their homework. But you help educ or help them, don't get mad. Say, you know, hey, I hope this helped you in the future be an asset article that we just had published. You are not the remote worker. As the owner, operator, as the driver. You actually are the center point. And everyone else is remote, you know, more than anyone else. So don't be afraid to, you know, use that asset that you're knowledgeable, that you be more than just nothing against drivers, but be more than just a driver. and if you'if. You're a company driver and you're, you know, hearing or reading this, you can do that with your own company. You can be more than just that driver. You can help your company be better. If you Pass on information that would help. for example, I would call a customer about arriving for pickup delivery and they might say, you know, had an 8:00 or 7:00 and I would ask is that the best time? And a couple of times I can remember in particular they would say, you know, if you would get here, could you get here 5:30 in the morning or 6, we'll get you out before the rush, that would be great, we'd love it. Or they'd say, would you mind waiting until about 10:30 instead of 8:00 because we can clear out and you'll get in and out of here in an hour because we're going to have so many people at 8:00. And that allowed me to manage my time better and I could use my split, you know, logs and so on pre plan that hours of service, which would make me so much more efficient as well. It took a lot of stress off.

Todd Dills: Stuffing the stress envelope for owner operppers and efforts to be that asset, to be proactive in all manner of day to day negotiations? Fixed costs, and as Gary notes here, in some cases inadequate awareness of just what they're costing you per day worked.

Gary Buchs: But what's putting the pressure on the time are the commitments I think people have made for fixed cost. The truck payments, the credit card that they have put the repair bill on, things like that. Fixed costs create more pressure, but they're often harder to track down in some ways because what we see is when we're trying to determine our cost, we've got all these puzzle pieces we're trying to fit together. So you've got for example a truck payment if you don't write a check or you don't do the debit out of your own account. Often we tend to start ignoring the cost of the payment of the truck. and you know, we look at fuel because we see the fuel right in front of us. So when we hear people talk about cost, most often I find they talk.

Todd Dills: About fuel, you're talking about fuel and then you just kind of, you never forget about the fact that you've got other cost, payments to make such as your insurance and stuff. But, but yeah, it's not top of mind. It's not. You don't have a, people don't have that like per day figure in their head when it comes to their fixed costs that they can just you know, bring to the front of mind when they're evaluating a load.

Gary Buchs: The owner operates the truck. They are the center of the business transaction. They see and know more than everyone, but they also carry the greatest, risk. the owner of the truck has the greatest risk of everyone involved because of the physical aspects of the customer service, the damage, the potential for an accident, regulation, compliance and so on and so forth. That is a very difficult thing to, you know, put a value on. now if you, if you haul a very high value load and you have to buy extra insurance, you'll recognize.

Todd Dills: It then and have it recognized by others. But yeah, it's like there's a fair amount of discounting of the value of all of that risk that goes on in, our freight world.

Gary Buchs: You know, there's a lot of evidence through research about how much stress interferes with our ability to make better decisions. I recently read some research where, people who are under financial stress. It was about farmers, okay. When farmers, before they get harvest and are able to sell crops, you know, their cash is dwindling down, they're under a lot of pressure. And it, the research showed when cash is shorter, incomes are short compared to what they owe, they begin making poor decisions about money, you know, less wise or hary did when they had, you know, better income. So when we're under stress for income, it causes us to take more unwise risk and you know, kind of gamble and do things that could really hurt us. And so we have to be careful with that. This is a marathon. This is not a sprint, folks. it's a long process. And when we go into negotiations, for example, list all the loads you hauled in the last 12 months, you know, 24 months, and count how many times you haul for the same people and start ranking those as far as the value of your customer and then try to replace the lower valued ones with more higher value ones. That's kind of a, you know, your own negotiation with yourself, you know, so that can really, you know, help. If you could replace, say, say you haul 100 loads in a year, two every week for 50 weeks, and you could move 10% of those from the lower end to the higher end. How much difference would that make in your business? It'll be more than what maybe the simple math shows in the long run because you'll begin to m relieve stress, you begin making better decisions, you'll be able to, ah, maintain your equipment better and so on and doing those things eliminate the lower end the other thing, learning how not to haul loads that do not generate some profit. Years and years ago I read a story about the man JB Hunt and he said, if I can make a dollar on every load, I know I'll never go broke. Now obviously the way they look at profit and we look at profit, you know, we need more than a dollar for every load. But I kind of got to thinking about and that's where I came up with the zero based budgeting for each load. If every load generates some profit, the odds of me not being profitable are really slim. So I mean it's, I mean something. Will it always meet my salary goal? It will if I build that into my cost.

Todd Dills: You have to think about it in those terms and yeah, you got to, got to build your pay into it and meet that. Otherwise you're not going to be happy with $1 per load.

Gary Buchs: After you pay yourself your salary that you've predetermined. Settting your own salary is a whole other negotiation with your self. What do you need for home? You know, we talk about budgets all the time, but unfortunately we really don't too much budgeting in reality we do it in our heads. We've got thousands of tools out here to help our business and we talk about them. We just have to learn how to apply what will help us best. We can't use them all. We got to pick the two or three that are going to be most useful and then as those habits begin to grow.

So back to that calculator.

Todd Dills: Gary’s making reference to Overdrive’s load profit analyzer. Our a fairly simple online calculator introduced late in 2024 and assist to analyze individual and or compare multiple loads. The calculator includes on its front end places to use the knowledge and analysis Gary is talking about to input not cost per mile overall, but variable costs mile fixed costs per day worked. And considering on the cost side of the ledger the salary per day worked Gary was talking about as well about the analyzer particularly he said.

Gary Buchs: When you first start out with that, it might seem a little awkward but you can compare loads. You know, should I haul the load to delivers today, picks up today, delivers tomorrow or should I take the two or three day low that grosses more and you can compare those for the income per day and the profit per day and so on and so forth. And what you'll probably end up doing is you'll use a mixture, you'll use you Know you'll end up hauling a shorter load, medium load, a longer load, but you won't fall into ah, automatic. I need to go. I need a load to goes 1000 miles foramp_le we tend to round numbers off a little too much. Like if you're negotiating and you make a call to an broker, figure out your cost and don't be afraid when they say, well, the load pace 2000 maybe what you need to be able to do is know your numbers. Say, you know, it's what I really need is $2,152.88. That's what we do. Cover this load.

Todd Dills: What rate would you put on the freight? Go in with the number of your own.

Gary Buchs: Go into it and use a more exact calculation, not just automatically. Why do we round numbers off so much? And miles. I mean they'll say it's 500 miles and every truck out here knows it's probably more like 500, 580 miles. It's about 15% difference and so on. So it's. But we use round numbers because they're easy and we're going to get better. We got to stop thinking everything is going to be easy. You know, we're anxious, we're in a hurry. We're And that's where keeping yourself booked a loadr2 a head helps take off that pressure for speed. If you're sitting the hardest load to book. I found the hardest load to decide on is when you're sitting at home and you don't have a load the world get you to leave the house. That is the hardest. That is the most difficult load to negotiate or decide on because we are comfortable where we're sitting. but when you're sitting out in a truck stop away from home, you'll make that decision faster, quicker, you know, will it always be the best will always be right? Yeah, you know, roll the dice a little bit. But but no, we get into, you know, we've been talking loads, lowads load, you know, that's the thing we do the most. But as we go into this year, the number of people that are going to be looking to get into a truck to buy a truck or lease a truck, you need to be prepared for that. That's a wholeher ballame, negotiation. You know, don't buy the color of the truck, you know. You know, they can get more money for a purple truck than any other color out there. They can have the same model truck side by side. And I've had salespeople tell me, man, if that white truck was purple, I could get $1,000 more 'n to do the same job. But it's purple. You turn to bounce things off of. Who's your mirror that bounes things back to you? Who's going to hold you accountable? you know, is it a spouse? Is it someone who knows the business? is it, you know, just a good friend? but we need to have, someone that we can, you know, periodically, bounce these things off of, talk to them. and, you know, just, you know, because it gets emotional. And when we get emotional, we can get irrational. And we get irrational, then we really, we will lie to ourselves, just get what we want. you know, so that's something we really have to be careful of. And it's a process of learning and, we're all in a different place. And so I don't want people to think that I'm trying to say it's easy, because it's not. And it takes time. It takes a lot of time. You know, like a lot of people are changing companies all of a sudden and understanding how much that's going to cost them. But before they change companies, how are they researching the company? Are they just talking to another driver? Are they looking at the, SAFPER score to make sure that it's a good, safe company, they won't ruin your, you know, cdl, because they have equipment issues or safety, other safety compliance issues that could, you know, prevent you from advancing in your own career. you know, so you really have to be careful with that. But one word of advice on independent contractor contracts. Think of them, think of them like this. You are buying something with that percentage you're paying. What are you buying? What are you paying for? You know, you can have one that pays 80%, but then you have to pay to use the trailer and you have to pay to repair the tires and you have to pay for the insurance. Then you might have one that only pays, you know, 70% and they cover all that. So for 10% of what you haul, they cover all those risks. And if you take the week off or you don't hol them, you don't pay those fixed costs. So it's. You really have to put pen, pen to paper and the calculator and figure it out. Because there's huge differences in how to figure out fixed costs in these things, and that affects that cost to haul that load, that we just talked about. When one person says, well, I can haul that load for A$50 cents a mile. The next person says, well there's no way you can do that. It cost me $2amile. You're comparing apples and oranges, at the starting line.

Todd Dills: Find that story I mentioned Up Topt by Gary Buchs, headlined the Fine Art of Negotiation, via a link posted in Show Notes for this Overdrive Radio edition or in the post that houses the podcast for February 4, 2025 at overdriveonline.com/overdriveradio. Here’s an invitation, too. Add your own voice to the mix when it comes to negotiation. What tactics and broader strategies have you developed through the years to better manage the time necessarily spend on effective negotiation? Drop a comment under the overdriveonline.com post or get in touch with me directly. Todd Dills that’s [email protected]. Love to hear from you. 

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