Don has assisted me to date on three critical negotiations. I credit him with making me tens of thousands of incremental dollars in each deal – money that would have been left on the table had I negotiated them alone – not to mention the mental and physical stress that these negotiations would have heaped on me without Don’s support. Don also did complete overhauls of my critical contracts and agreements that will prevent me from getting into the same messes I have gotten into in the past.

Don is entirely selfless in his motives. Your needs become his needs. He has a capacity for empathy and understanding of both sides in a dispute or negotiation. He is there to resolve conflicts and bring the parties together, not as a “hammer” to get his client’s way. Both sides sense this, and emotions evaporate in the most heated discussions. In fact, there seems to be no adversarial relationship at all when Don is in the middle. In my deals, all parties seemed to have come out with good feelings and a sense of win-wins.

Don understands the art and the science of negotiations and has dissected the discipline into its critical elements. He can both teach the skill of negotiations (I have learned tons from him) and do it for you. Most executives and business owners are deficient in this skill set, whether they admit it or not. None of us are born with the ability to negotiate, but many of us fool ourselves into thinking that we intuitively know how to do this. Negotiating is a skill, like anything else, that can be practiced and learned, and Don can teach us a lot.

– Joe Meissner, CEO, Executive Capital Partners