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IBM. Let's create. And I think a lot of times people think the negotiation starts in the moment where you're asking for something or buying for something.
But the reality is it starts way, way, way before that.
And to me, being authentic is just being honest with yourself.
What are you great at?
What do you want? In this case, what does your company want from you?
I have a whole section in the book which really says the dumbest person at the company is not the idiot guy in accounting.
It's the person who doesn't know how the company makes money.
Whether you're closing a deal, managing a team, or navigating personal relationships, Negotiate Anything provides you with the tools you need to succeed.
Our conversations are real, relatable, and most importantly, rooted in practicality.
So if you're ready to transform your conversations and elevate your negotiation skills, join me on Negotiate Anything.
Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you love to listen.
Let's make every conversation a winning negotiation.
Erica, thanks for joining us today.
Thank you for having me.
It is our pleasure.
So how would you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Okay. I am the CEO of a company called Food52, which is a home and lifestyle and food company based in Brooklyn, New York and Portland, Oregon.
Prior to joining Food52, I've been at Food52 about a month.
And prior to that, I was the CEO of Barstool Sports for almost a decade and grew that business from 12 people and a couple million bucks in revenue to a pretty big cultural juggernaut in the U .S.
With about $300 million in revenue, we sold the company twice in the last year.
So it was kind of this wild, crazy run.
And I've spent most of my career in the internet and thinking about media, which is publishing and content, thinking about marketing and growing brands, and then being able to monetize both of those things in multiple ways, whether it's through commerce or through advertising or subscriptions or creating
products or you name it.
So that's the gist on what I do now.
Love this. And your background is so diverse and unique.
And now, also, we cannot forget that you're publicizing a book right now.
So tell us a little bit about the book.
Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that.
That's bad. The publishing people will not like that.
So I just wrote a book.
It's called Nobody Cares About Your Career.
And I wrote the book on the train into Barstool Sports.
I wrote it mostly talking to myself and recapping what was happening at work or what I was thinking about work every day.
And what my goal was with the book is I really believe a couple things.
One is I think you can be yourself and be successful.
I don't think you should have to wear anybody else's image of you or live anybody else's dream for you.
You should do what makes you happy and you should be definitive and defiant about going for that.
And then the second is when I started to look at business books or books about careers and work, they really came in two varieties.
One, well, all of them I felt were kind of boring.
And two, it was either I'm perfect.
Look at me and my great career.
I'm so successful. I'm the best, which I find kind of alienating and not approachable.
And then the second was wagging the finger at you of you should do this.
Like, you should do that.
Five habits to change your life, to be better, to be different.
And I wanted to write a book for people who care about their careers, whether you work at Google or you work in a gift shop or you work, you know, in a car wash or you pump gas or you're a waitress or you're a marketing executive or a salesperson, whatever that may be.
I wanted to write a book that was about making the most of your own career so that you can make the most of your own life and to write it in a way that was conversational and approachable and fairly casual.
And that's the book.
Incredible. And I am all for books that are not boring.
Yes. Boring books are the worst.
Yes. No, this is great.
And I think I'm homing in on an angle here because what you said first, being yourself and being successful, I think that is something that is really challenging for people nowadays to embrace their own authenticity and recognize that it does not need to be a threat to their career.
Of course, I know the listeners are saying, Kwame, can we get the negotiation stuff, please?
But we actually need to address this authenticity part, too, because I think if we don't, then we just have a lot of people who are inauthentic negotiators negotiating successfully for things that are not meant for them.
So let's talk about that authenticity piece.
What does authenticity mean for you?
Yeah, I completely agree with you.
I think that if you are not confident in who you are and what you represent and who you think you can be, and if you're not willing to put the work in to show that you are great, show that you are trustworthy or that you deliver with excellence, it becomes very difficult to negotiate.
And I think a lot of times people think the negotiation starts in the moment where you're asking for something or buying for something.
But the reality is it starts way, way, way before that.
And to me, being authentic is just being honest with yourself.
What are you great at?
What do you want? In this case, what does your company want from you?
I have a whole section in the book which really says the dumbest person at the company is not the idiot guy in accounting.
It's the person who doesn't know how the company makes money.
And one of the things in this world of negotiation and in your world is if you don't understand who's buttering, who's bread and why and how, your ask for whatever you want can land accidentally very great or more likely fairly bad.
And you can have a better chance of becoming who you want, getting what you want, doing what you want in the way you want.
If you approach everything with authenticity, which is earnestness, a desire to learn, a commitment to being who you are and being acknowledging of what your strengths and your weaknesses are, always striving to evolve them and grow them, grow your strengths, not your weaknesses.
And I think those things set you up for a far longer, bigger journey of success.
I agree 100%. And really a lot of times what it seems like is that either the world or your colleagues at work, your boss or something, they might be pushing you into a specific direction because they have a vision for you, your life and your career.
And a lot of times it's up to you to protect yourself and steer the ship in a way that's best for you.
Now, in your experience, what is it that makes doing that thing just so tough?
Yeah. I mean, that's why I wrote the book, which is Nobody Cares About Your Career, which is what a great thing that nobody really cares about your career but you.
I think it's incredibly freeing.
And I write a lot about this.
Your boss and your company are going to have a vision for you based on what they want for themselves.
And it's always really important to keep that in mind because a lot of times I think we can get lost in doing what the boss wants or being who the boss thinks we should be or looking the part the company is looking for.
And yes, that's important to understand all those things for what the company wants and how they want it.
But it's also really important that you're vying for what you want and how you want to be and what you are looking for.
And the great job, and I really believe everyone can have a great job, is when those two things intersect in a way that is very complementary.
But it takes some work to figure out how to make what the boss wants or your company wants intersect with what you want.
So essentially, we're trying to find that win -win.
But again, easier said than done.
Now, let's talk about with your career throughout the journey.
When you think about the tough conversations that allowed you to shape your career in an authentic way, what are some of the conversations that come to mind for you?
Oh, so many. And I've made so many mistakes.
You know, I think that's part of becoming a better negotiator and part of becoming a better human and a better, more convicted version of yourself is understanding where you've messed up along the way.
You know, early in my career when things got ugly or things got rough, honestly, instead of negotiating, I just would up and quit and go get a different job.
And that really isn't the right path.
I think the conversations where I really negotiated hard and well are the situations, whether I was negotiating for a new job, whether I was negotiating for better pay, whether I was negotiating for more responsibility or a bigger opportunity.
The best negotiations were what happened when I was very clear about the landscape.
I knew where I was coming from, why I was coming from that place and what the proof points were for why I felt I deserved what I was asking for.
The negotiations that didn't go well were when I only did that and I went off half cocked on, hey, I want this and I want this because of this and you should give me that because of that.
The most important piece, in my opinion, is sitting on the other side of the table and saying, where is that person coming from?
What do they want? What do they see?
And a lot of this book really talks about how do you have empathy and perspective and hindsight and foresight to be able to look on all sides of the table and to be able to understand how to create something that works for everybody.
It's a win, to your point, the win -win.
It's a win for you and it's a win for them.
You make it sound so easy.
It's not. It's a disaster.
Then you get what you want and you're like, this isn't what I wanted.
It's hard and you're never perfect at it.
I think people think it just happens once and you're done and you have what you wanted.
I just went to Rwanda and I was really struck in Rwanda.
In Rwanda, they're trying to grow tourism by promoting the gorillas.
But in order to promote gorillas and to get people to come to Rwanda, they've got to make it work for the farmers.
They want more land given to the gorillas so the gorilla population can increase.
Now, as it happens, the gorillas and all the wildlife are eating the crops of the farmers, which are just pissing the farmers off.
And the farmers are like, what the heck?
That's a month's worth of income.
That's a week's worth of pay.
And so what the government of Rwanda has done, which I found really smart and I took a lot of this into my own thinking about negotiation, is they make it work for the gorillas, which make it work for tourism, but they also make it work for the farmers and they make it work for the hotels.
And by really thinking through where can this go right and where can this go wrong and how do we make sure everybody has a lined incentive to do the right thing?
And how do we take care of people when things go right and when things go wrong?
That's a negotiation because a negotiation never happens in just one conversation.
It's an iterative set of conversations.
You get to an agreement and then something's going to go wrong.
Somebody eats your crops and you got to start it all over again.
So that's very long winded, but it really was very inspiring to me about how people are thinking about the ecosystem.
And I think you've got in your career and in your life, think about your ecosystem.
Oh, Erica, the last week we did landscaping.
And when I was driving up, I saw this bunny eating our flowers and I was saying, oh my gosh, my mom and my wife, they're going to be so pissed.
And now what I'm going to say next time I see that bunny is, thank God, it's not a gorilla.
My goodness. Can you imagine?
I know, like a gorilla comes in and eats your crop.
Like the elephants come in and eat your crops.
Like you're lucky to have a bunny.
They're cute and small.
Yeah. But I love this story because it's so indicative of what negotiation really is like.
Every solution comes with a problem attached.
There are always these trade offs.
And the reason I wanted to hear more about that story and not only that, but also your experience in negotiation is that you are an expert negotiator, savvy deal maker, leader of a massive multimillion dollar company and now CEO of another great company too.
And so from the outside, looking in, people are going to say, Erica's got it together.
Negotiation is easy for her.
But I love the fact that you're humanizing this because it's hard and challenging for everybody.
And it doesn't just take one conversation done.
Nice little bow. Look at this amazing deal that I have.
It's, hey, this is going to be, I'm going to try my best.
I'm going to try to understand myself, which is challenging.
I'm going to try to understand the other side, which is challenging.
And I'm going to have to adjust to every single inconvenience and surprise along the way.
But that's what's required to just keep on moving forward in our business deals, but also in navigating our career too.
Definitely. I think my biggest learning in negotiating is when something feels wrong and you feel very far apart and it feels inequitable or just doesn't sit right with you.
It's not right. And the biggest mistakes I've made in negotiations were going along with things, even when I was like, I'm not comfortable with this.
This is going too far.
I'm giving up too much.
I'm acquiescing to too much.
I'm getting too little in return.
I think a lot of times what happens when we get into negotiations, at least from my experience, is you get on this conveyor belt and the conveyor belt is moving to like, we're going to get something done.
We're going to get a deal done.
We're going to get a deal done.
And you get on the conveyor belt and you've already told people you're working on this deal.
You're going to get the deal done.
And the deal could be in your life or I'm just using that word loosely.
But when you get on it and you feel like the belt is tripping and it's maybe going a little bit too slow and you want to get off, but you don't know how, most people continue on the conveyor belt.
And I think that's the biggest mistake, which is no is an incredibly powerful answer in a negotiation.
You've got to be consistent.
You've got to be constant.
You have to be dependable.
But if you're making your way in a negotiation and it just doesn't feel right, one of the most powerful words in the universe is just, no, I'm not doing this.
And then you see things for what they really are.
The other party, the other person either comes back to the table with more of what you want or they say pound sand, we're out of here.
And both answers are okay because what you've decided for yourself is where this is going is not good for you.
And I wish more people felt the confidence to get off.
Hello, my friends. Before we get back to today's episode, I want to ask you a question.
Have you ever wondered how to elevate your team's negotiation game and how you can help the folks on your team have better, difficult conversations?
At the American Negotiation Institute, we offer transformative keynotes and workshops tailored to empower professionals with top tier negotiation and conflict resolution skills.
Whether it's a keynote for your next event or hands on training for your team, we've got you covered.
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Click the link in the description to find out more.
Elevate, negotiate and succeed.
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I think not just in negotiation, but in life.
I think our success and failure is going to be dictated by not just the yeses, but I think more so than with the nos that we have to say.
Because every yes has to be protected by hundreds, if not thousands of note, right?
Now, let's say somebody's listening to this and they're saying, all right, cool.
I find myself in a situation.
My gut is telling me things are not okay, but it's almost like the emperor has no clothes.
Everybody else is going in the same direction as if everything is okay.
How do you find the strength within yourself to say no when everybody else is saying yes?
Yeah, it's super hard.
I mean, it's middle school.
It's pure pressure.
I talked to this college kid the other day.
