I work at a cosmetics and efficacy testing laboratory. Our current CEO bought the company fairly recently. He was a

1.  I work at a cosmetics and efficacy testing laboratory. Our current CEO bought the company fairly recently. He was a member of the management staff of the previous company and had the opportunity to acquire it and all of its assets. The SPF department has been operating successfully, and there have been effective systems put into place to allow this to be the case. When the new CEO acquired the company, he wanted to oversee every aspect of the company. Nothing was too big or too small. He would discuss ideas that he thought would allow systems and departments to run more smoothly. He planned to allow the sample submission department to release samples that were not yet paid to the SPF department. His reasoning was that if the SPF department was able to test the new samples right away, then the testing timeline could be expedited. As the Supervising Laboratory Technician, I knew that this plan would create a lot of chaos and confusion within the department. A few issues that this idea presents are that our clients could change their minds about the testing that they require, they could try not to pay for their testing. Results cannot be released to the client prior to payment remittance, to which the SPF department might have a hard time keeping track of which products are paid. After a few days of discussing this potential change, we came to an agreement that we would implement the change temporarily to see the outcomes. We also implemented a new system to keep track of the paid and unpaid products. After a few weeks, the CEO was able to observe that the implemented changes did not meet his expectations. Instead, the expected issues came to fruition. 

2.  In the nonprofit sector, a lot of negotiations take place. All is mostly about reaching an agreement on specific matters while avoiding argument and dispute.

I like to specifically talk about my organization’s role on a network committee that I served as a representation of my organization. The Network comprising of over 10 different national and community-based groups do undertake sometimes events and joint projects founded by bigger corporations. For example, during the heat of the Ebola crisis in Liberia, our network came together and wrote a proposal to carry out awareness, distribution of essential items, and also provide direct assistance to vulnerable families, including children who were orphaned by the pandemic.

Once a grant was approved, all organizations then needed to distribute tasks based on their capacity and/or area of work. Most often, this can be a difficult process because money is involved. Some partners wanted to take on the implementation of tasks base on the budget attached instead of whether they had the capacity to do so.

This process sometimes takes 1 to 2 days of negotiations before final conclusions are reached, tasks are dedicated, and budgets appropriated according.

3.  I really do wish I had more outside of the military experience. often times when we are told to do something its a simple as that and there is little to no bargaining involved. I can speak of one instance that a deal was made. I was working as the Current Operations Supervisor for my organization. A task came down that required me to provide 10 people to support an operation that was happening in another country that was going to last no less than three months. Including myself I only had 15 staff members. My sister organization that was built, designed and staffed just like us was not tasked to provide any support. I reached out to my counterpart and asked if they could provide 1/2 the manning I was tasked to provide and of course the answer was "no". I thought to go to my supervisor and request a "reclama" (a rebuttal stating that I can't support the task.) had teh reclama been approved the other organization would have more than likely been tasked. Instead I called my counterpart again and work out a deal  that went like this. I would provide all of the manning for the task. He would support me by sending five people to work in my office during the time that my staff was out of the country. This worked out because most of my people wanted the task as it was not only a free but paid trip to live in Europe for a few months but it got them out of the daily grind. His people didn't want to leave so they got to stay local and neither organization was completely crippled (however clearly overworked for a few months) due to lack of manpower.

4.   For a short period of time, I owned a construction company that specialized in rehabilitation work at Veterans Hospitals. I was in partnership with two others that had minority ownership in the company. One partner provided the financial accounting and resources. The other partner has his own construction company the subcontracted with us to provide the workforce capacity. I did the business development and government administration.

This arrangement worked for several years, and my company completed over twenty contracts in the $25K to $300K range. We were always trying to grow to larger jobs. We submitted proposals to a VA Hospital for two contracts that totaled over $6 Million. These would be our largest projects to date. Our proposals initially came in second in the bid process. Six months later, we were notified that the original awardees of the contracts were disqualified, and our bids were being considered for acceptance.

However, during that period, my partner’s construction firm filed bankruptcy and he shut down company. He also had to leave our company as a minority partner. Therefore, we did not have the workforce capacity to respond to accept the awards.

In order to move forward, I did the following:

1. I negotiated to hire my former partner as an employee, Director of Construction Services, to have his experience of management of our construction projects.
2. I negotiated partnership agreement with a large regional construction firm to subcontract on the two projects to provide the needed resources and capacity.

 We were able to accept the two awards. My company would provide the construction management, job superintendent and several subcontractors that we normally used. Our company provided all required government paperwork and completed the billing

The partnership agreement called for  our partner to provide the bulk of the workforce and resources for the job. This necessitated negotiating the profit return for the projects. Our company had to concede a larger portion of profits than originally projected. However, we were successful in getting and completing the two projects. These were our final large contracts.