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Fees are your top line – and given the largely-fixed cost base, your bottom line too. Fees deserve focus!
There are huge differences in fees charged even for similar projects – they are highly negotiable.
Fee negotiation skills and tactics are highly trainable and implementable: practical planning tools; simple forms of words to shift the balance of power in your favour; counters to clients’ objections, etc.
Our toolkit and training applies across a spectrum of deal competitiveness: from “we know we are the only advisor they can use” to “we want the business badly and they told us another advisor was cheaper”. It will be tailored to your specific needs: winning new business vs. repricing annual contracts vs. making sure you charge for over-runs/out of scope work; you are the quality leader or have to fight on price; and more.
This is not remedial training or ‘negotiation for dummies’. It takes your experienced fee negotiators to an elite level: using a realistic negotiation exercise or two with video feedback to identify areas for improvement; equipping you with our toolkit; and sharing your own best practices among your Partners/MDs.
HBNC has distilled an Advanced Fee Negotiation Workshop from its >30 years as the City of London’s top negotiation consultant and run and honed it with great success at a global bulge bracket investment bank who said it “moved the needle” on their fees. A similar programme added several percentage points to margins at a leading financial advisory firm. The tutor has Private Equity and wider financial experience, and advises on M&A deals and legal disputes as well as running courses for banks, PE houses, corporate M&A teams, and more.
The payback on the cost (£15,000 + VAT if in UK) and day spent is immense.
The Advanced Fee Negotiation Workshop typically covers the following content, subject to tailoring to the client’s specific situations.
In an interactive, engaging workshop featuring one or two simulated fee negotiations, Q&A, and instruction – with no ‘torture by PowerPoint’. Materials include The Pocket Negotiator and bespoke handouts on fees.
The course can be run in one day if the fees negotiated are reasonably simple (e.g. not extensive use of success-based fee structures) and if the client does not want to cover too many different kinds of fee situation. Even in this case, there are few opportunities to practice the new tools during the day, and limited individual feedback.
For clients with more complex fees, and those who also negotiate for or alongside clients, we recommend a longer course, either 2 days or the 3-day Masterclass which would then be tailored to fees and the negotiations for clients.
We will contact you ASAP
The Monkey is one of the vivid images we use in our training to make a key concept memorable. This image in particular has become a totem for our firm: a toy monkey attends every course, and the BBC made a documentary about us titled The Monkey Man.
A “monkey on your back” is a problem you have – in negotiation terms, that makes you want a deal even on bad terms. E.g. you’re under time pressure / you don’t have any other offers / you think the quality of the other offers is poor.
Monkeys lead most negotiators to underestimate their own relative power and so negotiate too ‘chicken’. And there is a structural reason for this error. – When you look at your own situation you are only too aware of your own monkeys. But the other party may not be aware of these factors.• At the same time, the other guy has problems too – and he isn’t going to tell you about the monkeys on his back as this would only weaken his position. • So you have a distorted view of the power balance. It’s distorted because you have taken account of all your monkeys, but have not allowed for the monkeys he almost certainly has on his back – because you don’t know about those. And the distortion is always in the same direction: it always leads you to underestimate your own power.
