Playing Chicken with Yourself
Hi Friends!
As you may have seen, the marketing and public relations phases of Arizona Car Week both really officially began this week. This is generally where things surrounding major events get grinding and the hours become brutally long. Lots of graphic design, brand journalism types of activities, sending a lot of emails, photoshoots, attending gatherings and events thrown by other people, doing interviews, spreadsheets, spreadsheets, spreadsheets, spreadsheets, etc really start to pile up here. Although, not the worst thing, all of this does tend to start beating you down pretty bad (I’m currently writing this at about 3:30 in the morning on Friday. I started work this morning at 7:00 AM and I’m off again to multiple cars and coffee with flyers in hand in a few short hours to do it all over tomorrow. This is give or take/more or less about my 50th day in a row of running like this).
Call me crazy, but I tend to thrive in these kinds of situations and I actually genuinely enjoy that sort of standing at the foot of a mountain kind of feeling that I’m experiencing right now. One thing on the other hand, that I do not enjoy is indecisiveness which leads to failure. Without a doubt, there’s been the one reoccurring set of circumstances throughout this whole experience this year, that has been the most frustrating. It’s also something that somewhat mirrors a regularity that I actually see with collector car sales as well.
We tend to talk a lot about buying here, but not so much about selling. It’s definitely one of those things that I see sellers do and it puts them in a place where they almost can’t get out of their own way. This leads to failure, broken deals and general unhappiness on both sides and it’s really easily avoided.
The hill that so many people seem to have so much difficulty getting over in the initial phases of a negotiation honestly seems like kind of a no-brainer, but I think it’s something that people sort of universally fail to ask themselves more than they care to admit.
What do I actually want?
The situation(s) in question with Car Week, where this has become such an irritating stumbling point has been with venue owners and venue management companies and staff. I’ve now had to reschedule one event and I’ve outright lost two (hopefully both returning to the table in 2026 as they were both very cool ideas….) because of this issue. The conversations on all the above have all basically all worked out exactly the same way:
Me: Hi! I have an event that’s looking for a home. We think your venue is excellent and we would like to explore this further. What’s your day rate?
Them: I don’t know. What do you want to pay for it?
Me: I’d like to try to give you something that would be fair and mutually beneficial to everyone. As you are the owner of an event space, I would assume you do this every day. Can you give me a place to start?
Them: I don’t know. Somewhere between $1 and $100,000 a day?
Me: How’s $1,000 (knowing that’s obviously not a real number, but at least trying to get the ball moving…)
Them: THAT’S OUTRAGEOUS!!!! Call me when you get a clue!
End scene
Okay, I fully understand what’s going on here. What they’re ultimately trying to do is not put themselves in a position where they leave anything on the table. They want to see how deep my/my partners/my client’s pockets are before they commit to anything. The issue is, myself and my partners can’t take invisible numbers to corporate decision makers, banks, other partners, etc this way. We pretty much universally need at least a semi-solid number in order to be able to put together an event proposal or a business plan to try to make this work. By not getting this, it kills the event concept dead in its tracks (at least as far as that particular venue is concerned) and it potentially takes significant money off the table that they may not be getting elsewhere in the first place for that venue owner (one gentleman in particular, talked himself out of tens of thousands of dollars in what was essentially free money in the process of doing this with us).
I see this occur quite often with collector cars as well. I think with certain platforms it happens way more often than others. For example, I think we’ve all seen and experienced crazy, crazy things on eBay, Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, as well as I know that Consignment Specialists at auction houses deal with things like this pretty regularly also.
And before anybody says anything, obviously this is a clearly a game that people play fairly often. I think more times than not however, it’s actually not. This is anxiety caused by lack of information or anxiety caused by the desire to not have to figure out how to acquire that information, (let’s not talk about those who are not doing their homework because they may not actually want to sell in the first place) and a lack of willingness to try to communicate openly enough to get to a place that makes what you have sellable to begin with, while also getting you a number that you’re comfortable with.
What people sometimes overlook is it’s not a deal until it’s done and you can always walk away if the terms are unsatisfactory. When that’s visualized correctly, you avoid the frustration of a deal unwinding after the fact, when everyone actually thinks it’s closed or before you can even get out of the gates and start the sales process to begin with.
Ultimately, at the end of the day, every deal is basically conducted with the same set of parameters. It’s an intersection point between what someone wants for what they have, what someone else’s needs are and how far they’re willing to go in order to satisfy that. If the seller (who let’s define them as somebody who is out in the world openly offering something vs a potential buyer approaching you with interest on something that wasn’t previously considered to be for sale) refuses to provide a number for or refuses to answer the requests of the potential buyer to at least give a ballpark number to start the negotiation, there’s nowhere to begin. You’re ultimately playing chicken with yourself and wasting your and the other party’s time.
As a seller, your responsibility is to ask yourself at the beginning of the process, what do I actually want? In almost every situation, the buyer has their hands tied until that happens.
By at least knowing that for yourself, you put yourself a lot closer to actually getting it done fast, correctly and walking away happy, which should always be the end goal of every deal anyway.
That’s it for this week…
Darin Roberge