The podcast by project managers for project managers. How do successful project managers turn tough project negotiations into win-win outcomes? Discover a practical seven-step approach to managing claims, negotiating with customers, and closing negotiations effectively, offering a competitive edge for project managers handling complex projects.
Stay in touch and give Rick some feedback on this podcast here: https://talk.ac/rickc?code=VELOCITEACH
Table of Contents
02:34 … Meet Rick
04:03 … Hiring Tips
05:56 … Defining a Claim
06:53 … Best Practices and Negotiation
08:26 … No Knee-Jerk Project Negotiating
10:15 … The Seven Step Approach to Managing Claims
13:56 … Rehearse What you’re Saying
15:14 … Leveraging Schedule or Payment
17:07 … Connect with the Customer
18:53 … Look for the Root Causes
22:25 … Kevin and Kyle
23:12 … Clarifying your Claim
26:08 … Check the Numbers
29:24 … Finding Leverage
33:42 … Prioritizing Problem Areas
34:35 … Successfully Closing a Negotiation
36:13 … Contact Rick
37:51 … Closing
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: When you’re a project manager, your most critical project, the thing that is on your critical path as a PM is a distressed project. If there’s a problem, that is your priority. You have to get on that right away. Because what you’re trying to do here is, if you know you or your company has done wrong, you want to put out the small fire before it blows up into an inferno. That’s a common PM trap is, oh, man, this is a hard situation. I’m going to leave it till the afternoon.
WENDY GROUNDS: Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers. I’m Wendy Grounds, and in the studio with me is Bill Yates. We just want to remind you that if you’re looking for opportunities to acquire PDUs, your professional development units, toward recertifications, you can still claim your PDUs for all our podcast episodes. Listen up at the end of the show for information on how you could claim your PDUs.
Today’s guest is Rick Czaplewski and he’s a seasoned expert in project management, especially in the art of negotiation. He teaches negotiation and leadership skills to executives and professionals. Today he’s going to share some invaluable insights from his journey and the critical aspects of negotiation within project management.
BILL YATES: Wendy, negotiating, dealing with claims, dealing with disputes, that’s a part of project management life that is not very appealing to most of us. There may be a few out there who just love it. But there’s a lot of fear and trepidation when it comes to that disagreement with your customer. Rick is going to provide us with a seven-step process for how to go about facing those claims and some tips on how to negotiate your way through.
Now, a couple things about Rick. He is a unique combination of CPA and PMP. Also, a little background. Rick and I first met, I don’t know, at least 10 years or so ago. He started his career with HP, and then he was working with Siemens. He was working with Siemens Light Rail in Sacramento when I had the privilege of teaching a PMP prep class in Sacramento for Siemens. Rick was my point of contact there and participated in the class, earned his PMP on his first try and gave me the most exciting tour of their facility so I could see how they take raw materials and build light rail systems out of them. So, we are delighted to have him as our guest today.
WENDY GROUNDS: Hi, Rick. Welcome to Manage This. Thank you for joining us.
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: Hi, thank you for having me.
Meet Rick
WENDY GROUNDS: We are looking forward to this topic. We’ve talked a bit about negotiation before, but you have something else. You have a whole lot of different experience in negotiation. So, we want to hear more about that and definitely get your advice. But before we go there, can you tell us about how you got into project management, and a little bit about your career?
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: Yes, thank you for having me. I started my project management career with Hewlett-Packard. I was a project manager for small new product introductions of wireless equipment. Then I took a position with Siemens Mobility, and I was a commercial project manager for the light rail vehicles of the Denver light rail system. And I transferred from Siemens Mobility to Siemens Water, where I became a project manager in the water industry. That’s where I’ve been roughly the last 15 years. And at a few different companies, I progressed from project manager to senior project manager to manager of project management and eventually into senior director of field operations. So, at my largest, my staff was roughly 20 people, and we managed 500 projects, North America, project value roughly a quarter billion dollars.
And today I’m the CEO and founder of a company called No One Walks Alone. I work with project managers, engineers, and executives who want to get the best financial performance they can out of their projects by teaching them negotiation skills. So, I’m really excited to be with you guys here today.
Hiring Tips
WENDY GROUNDS: Rick, as a former director of project management, what tips do you have for hiring project managers? Is there a secret sauce you can tell us about?
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: My favorite question to ask candidates is what is your secret sauce to managing projects? And I think this gets to two points. First point is, has the project manager candidate considered what their personal philosophy is for managed projects? And number two, if they have, how do they ensure that their projects go well? What do they do to make sure that happens? Is this intentional?
My favorite answer is a derivative of what I think are the top three components. And those are communication, organization, and take action. Communication with customers, responsiveness, relationship building, all of that is critical to be a good project manager. Staying organized on top of schedules, milestones, budgets, also critical. And finally, the most important is take action. Project management is an offensive position. You have the ball. You are there to drive projects forward. Taking action is critical to make sure that your projects stay on track. And those, I think, are the three main components.
BILL YATES: Rick, those are fantastic. I love that. And it’s so interesting how frequently in our training, in our classes, we refer to project management, that role, as being proactive. You know, those that are really successful are proactive. They’re not reactive. So that “take action” resonates. Also, the communication piece, 90% of our jobs as project managers involves communication. That’s so important. And organization, yeah, you’ve got to have your act together. If you don’t, people lose confidence in you. Your team, your stakeholders, your customer, they’re like, “You’re managing my project? I don’t think so.”
So, thank you so much for letting us ask you that question. You have had so much experience in hiring and looking for what sets people apart.
Defining a Claim
We’re going to shift gears a little bit, Rick, and focus on negotiation. And let’s talk about claims first. Let’s sort of set a definition. So, when I think of a claim, I think of, all right, if I’m the performing organization, I’m leading the project team. And then the customer, you know, those who are going to receive the deliverable, they come to me with a claim. To me, I think of that claim as you’re not doing exactly what we thought you would do. There’s something about the way you’re delivering the service or the way this deliverable is functioning that doesn’t quite fit my expectations. So here is a claim. Is that a right way to think of it before we get into how we negotiate on that claim?
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: Yeah, I think it’s a common thing for project managers, certainly in those industries that I mentioned earlier, where your customer comes back to you later in the project with a list of back charges, a claim – these are all the same type of thing – where they’re looking to be enhanced somehow, and they’re trying to tie that back to your performance.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: So that’s a good starting point.
Best Practices and Negotiation
BILL YATES: Okay. So, let’s talk about, you have this idea that negotiation starts with project management best practices. Tell us more about that.
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: Yeah, it starts with a partnership approach. I believe I’ve created a negotiation content model, and 40% of negotiation is your negotiating environment. And that starts before there is a claim. It starts before there’s any disputes, before you even exchange deliverables. Are you talking with your customer? Are you listening to their needs? And are you able to get in alignment with their schedule and their milestones? Upfront listening and building that relationship is building the environment.
And while you build that relationship and listen, you’re starting to understand what their background drivers are. So, you may find out future leverage points in a claim negotiation in your introductory meeting. You know, “Hey, I’ve got an owner who’s not going to pay me until I get deliverables.” That’s a huge aha moment before you even start really working into your project. And so, it all starts with the partnership approach and working well with your customers.
And my other component of this philosophy is, at the end of a project, if your customer is trying to enhance their margin or meet some targets because something went sideways on their end, it’s a lot tougher to come back to somebody who’s really done a great job for you and ask them for more. I’ve seen that dozens of times where creating that partnership approach creates a good financial outcome later in the project.
No Knee-Jerk Project Negotiating
BILL YATES: Hmm, that’s good. You also make a fundamental point, which I think project managers need to be reminded of, which is, when that claim hits your inbox, or let’s say it’s really formal and it’s a letter. So, you get that, you open it up, and it’s like, okay, this is written out. This is a claim. So, you know, your point is don’t put that in the bottom of your pile. You need to deal with that immediately. You know, it is an urgent item. Many times, even the contract would specify how many days you have to reply to something like that. So that’s a point of emphasis that you’ve made that I definitely want to bring up as a reminder to project managers.
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: Yeah, that – every project manager who’s gotten that letter, I think their blood pressure and their heart rate…
BILL YATES: Yeah.
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: …just increased hearing that; right? Mine did.
BILL YATES: Yup.
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: That’s a difficult and jarring experience. Now, there’s a few things that – there’s a few best practices to follow right out of the gate. Number one, no knee-jerk negotiating. You know, if you get a heated letter, turning around an email 45 minutes after you got it, and you’re mad, that’s a bad practice. What you want to try to do is read the content of that letter and then go back to your customer and have a discussion and listen and just document what happened. That step alone can make some of these claims substantially reduce or go away altogether.
That letter might be a scare tactic to get you moving on something; right? “Oh, hey, I didn’t realize you needed those manuals right away. Let me make sure we FedEx those to you in the next 48 hours.” Suddenly the claim disappears. Those letters sometimes are used by customers as leverage points for action, not necessarily tied to a monetary situation. If it’s tied to something monetary, that’s what we’re going to get into here.
The Seven Step Approach to Managing Claims
BILL YATES: So, let’s get into that. You have a seven-step approach to managing claims and talking through this negotiation methodology. Can you just – I know we’re going to go deeper into some of these. Can you just lay out those seven for us?
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: Yeah, no problem, Bill. So, the first step is you want to obtain the claim details and connect with the customer. That’s exactly the step we just spoke through. So, you, okay, you get that letter. You want to get as much backup information as you can and then call your customer and have them walk you through everything and listen to that. The next thing you want to do is review the claim for legitimacy. When you hear what the customer has to say and what’s caused that, what have you done to contribute to that problem? There’s a number of stories where there’s an issue, and they’re trying to, quote unquote, “spread the wealth,” which is to recapture money from any party that was somehow involved in the project. Might not be your thing.
Now the CPA in me – I’m both a PMP and a CPA. The CPA in me is like step number three, which is to detail review the numbers. Every cost claim has three major components: materials, labor, and overhead. All of those components can be traced back to source documents. Example, materials. As part of my claim, I bought 500 bags of cement, and I’m going to charge you $100,000 for that. Okay. Show me the receipt for 500 bags of cement. Oh, it’s closer to $10,000. You know, that’s – you want to be able to make sure that the numbers coming back are legit, and they can be supported.
BILL YATES: So, Rick, I get that. I’m not a CPA, but I get that one. That’s a great example. Thank you.
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: Yeah. I call that CPA-level preparation, and it’s a step that a lot of our technical project managers skip, or maybe they haven’t considered. As a former auditor, those were the steps that we would take in validating financial statements is we’re building back those financials based on the actual source documents, what happened. And you could do that for materials, labor, and overhead the same. So, as you’re doing this, you want to certify the claim. You continue to ask for follow-up information, backup documents. Now what you’re doing is you’re vetting the claim. And if somebody just sends you an email and says, “You owe me 50,000,” well, you break it down. Show me how that’s built. When you make people go back and start to build their case, suddenly that number starts coming down.
So, at this point you want to start putting together your rationale. And I call this the data-driven method. Your rationale is, okay, there is an error, or there’s some type of a claim you’re making on an account. Like let’s say my shipment that was supposed to arrive on Friday arrived on a Tuesday. Somehow that backed up your schedule 45 days: right? That doesn’t pass the sniff test. These are the kinds of things you’re going to start going back to your customer with. So, it’s not an emotional, strong back and forth. Your preparation is linking your performance to what actually happened in the field.
If it’s a large claim – and this is part of my role as a manager. If this is a large claim, start to take it up to your management chain and let them know because this might have an impact there. And then finally, when you put your story together, right, when you do the detail review, rehearse it. You know, rehearse what you’re saying. You know, find a partner, sit down with your manager and say, “All right, here’s what I saw. I’d like to just talk through these steps with you.” And you’re not just going in ice cold. You’re going in like, “All right, well, here’s maybe something that they would say.” It builds confidence when you talk to a customer.
Rehearse What you’re Saying
BILL YATES: Yeah, that’s a great point. I’m so glad you bring that up because that’s a – it’s such a practical step, that last step to rehearse it. Andy Crow is a big fan of that. He and I, you know, we’ve worked together for, gosh, two decades now. And many times, over the life of Velociteach, we’ve had things that’ll come up. And he says, “Okay, let’s think about how this conversation may go.” You know, maybe it’s a partnership that we have. Could be one that we’re pursuing. You know, could be something that we’re sending a proposal out on. And now we’ve been asked to, “Okay, let’s get into the details.”
Or it could be a claim issue that we’ve had with a vendor. And he’s a big fan of doing that. “Let’s talk it over. I’ll be the bad guy. I’m going to be the one that you’re trying to convince. Go ahead and start asking your questions. Let’s see where this goes.” It’s really helpful.
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: Yeah, big time. And as you’re speaking, you’re going to find what the leverage points are. And you want to uncover as you listen, especially in step one where you’re uncovering, you know, different details. Even before step one, this goes back to your environment, what are the leverage points for your counterpart to get to the conclusion of that project? So let me give you an example. I’ll ask you guys this question. What has more leverage, schedule or payment?
Leveraging Schedule or Payment
BILL YATES: Yes. I don’t know. It depends; right? Sometimes it’s, you know, it might be there’s a must-deliver-by date. There may be something tied to it, a conference; or, you know, we’ve already told the public we’re going to go live with something. Other times it is – it’s the budget. So yeah, I think it kind of depends.
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: Yeah. And that’s what I’ve seen with claims. A very common scenario is you get towards the end of a project. As a project delivering team, you’ve done a good job. And a customer holds money on you and says, “Here’s a list of transgressions that took place during the project. You owe me X.” The best project management technique ties your cash flow to your workflow. In other words, you continue to work as you continue to get paid.
But if like, for example, it’s very common in construction or water or engineer products that an engineering submittal package, all the blueprints and the drawings upfront, that has a payment link to it. So, if you’re supposed to be paid five or 10% of your contract value when you submit that, and you’ve not been paid, and you’re delivering equipment later in the project, there’s a problem. So, you want to make sure that your customer is paying you for the work you’ve done. It’s a red flag if they haven’t. If you get to the end of the project and they’re holding all of that money on you, that’s a considerable amount of leverage. So that’s one way to cut that off.
The other way to address that is to understand what that customer in terms of payment is up against with like the owner or their customer. Maybe they can’t get paid until you do something. That then becomes your piece of leverage where their schedule is now your leverage point. So, it depends on which side of the fence you’re on in this equation because we have project managers, you know, who are buying; and we have project managers who are selling. It depends on which side you’re on and those are the major leverage points that you’re looking at.
Connect with the Customer
WENDY GROUNDS: Rick, I want to go back to step one. You said, “Obtain claim details and connect with a customer.” How can a project manager connect with their customer when they need to get that first discussion going? What’s some good advice that you can give for that?
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: Okay, let’s go back to Bill’s scenario where you’ve got a letter that’s very daunting, and it’s got legal wording, and you’re, you know, you’re kind of a now, oh boy. First thing you’d want to do is let that settle. No knee-jerk negotiating. In terms of connecting with the customer, what you want to do is set up a formal meeting with them. Don’t just call them out of the blue where they might be in the field or, you know, they’re coming out of three meetings. Set up time with them so they’re in a good headspace to have a discussion with you, and you do the same.
Then, when you do, listen to them. “Hey, walk me through what happened here. This is a surprise. I think we were on track.” Or maybe you’d say something like, “I know we had some issues, but we put them to rest.” This is called “connecting with the customer.”
A lot of times in certain industries, like in the water industry, in construction, what you would hear is somebody on the other line venting. You know, they’re aggressive. They’re angry. At this point, what you want to do is just listen and write stuff down. Responding in kind to anger or frustration is not the way to settle it. Let them get that out. What you’re trying to do is get them to come back down into a calmer space. Some of the techniques that you hear some of the more prolific negotiators, like Chris Voss in his book talks about mirroring and labeling. Mirroring is just repeating the last few lines that the counterpart is saying. And what you’re consciously doing is listening to them and getting them into a better headspace.
Look for the Root Causes
And then, finally, once you get them into that space, you want to look for the main underlying root causes or issues that they have. Continue to listen. These are those leverage points. You never know what you’re going to find out when somebody is just continuing to talk like that. That’s your goal. As you’re going through, the next thing you want to do is, as you’ve written things down, is to summarize what they’ve told you. So, you said that my company was two weeks late in shipping; and our site electrician did this wrong; or we didn’t commission this properly; we installed this backwards. You’re just listing this. You’re not confirming it. Yeah, that’s what happened. Yes, yes. Right?
And so now you’re taking their case, and you’re building your own set of steps that you’re going to review yourself. So, if they tell you, “Well, you installed this backwards,” okay, I went back to my field service technician. We have a photograph exactly of that. It was installed properly. You know, so now what you’re able to do is start to piece together your response to what they have just by listening. And what you want to do is be in control of the summary.
I always feel like, you know, it’s like if you have a contract on your paper versus someone else. If you’re in charge of the summary, it’s your understanding of the situation, and you send it to them. They have to then edit that and say, “No, this is wrong.” But a lot of times the folks will say, “Yeah, it looks pretty good. This is right.” If that happens, you can refer back to that as a precedent where you say, “Well, hey, I wrote down everything you said, and I confirmed it with you. I mean, now you’re changing your story.” So that’s what this step one is, it’s really a discovery process and understanding what happened, and you’re starting to break down those steps into pieces where you can refute them later.
BILL YATES: Rick, there’s so much great stuff there. I appreciate that you begin with, “All right, first let’s let the dust settle.” So, you don’t do that immediate email response. You don’t immediately call the person. You give it some space. And you give it some time. And then you listen, listen, listen, ask a lot of follow-up questions and listen. You and I talked beforehand just about this book by Chris Voss, “Never Split the Difference.” Great resource. One of the things I tagged in that book was on some of the pages he had a number of questions that he likes to ask to try to get to the essence of what is it that is at the heart or the root cause of this claim.
But there’s so much wisdom in what you said about, “Let them vent at first.” There’s a whole lot of emotion that’s probably behind that letter or that email that they sent; and then they had to edit, edit, edit to send you what they did. So, it’s very likely that in that face-to-face meeting, all that stuff, all that emotion that was behind the letter is going to come out. So don’t be surprised by that. Don’t be defensive at that point. You’re just listening. You’re gathering information.
And I agree with you. It makes so much sense to me to be in control of that response, that summary, because it is. It’s like, okay, I’m asking you deeper questions. I want to understand this. I’m taking notes in the meeting, and my follow-up item is to summarize those notes, send them to you, and make sure we’re on the same page. That’s a great way to start.
It’s interesting, a recent podcast was with Jeff Wetzler, and he’s written a book, it’s just been released, called “Ask.” And it’s all about asking good questions. So, it ties right in with this. It’s like, the better we can get at asking the right questions, the better we can get at listening, then the more success we’re going to have when claims come up, and we have to walk our team through negotiating those claims. Great first step.
Kevin and Kyle
KYLE CROWE: Hey Kevin, have you heard about the course “Behaviors to Master When Dealing with Your Leaders” by Neal Whitten?
KEVIN RONEY: Yeah, I have, seems like it could be really helpful. Engaging with leaders is crucial, but it can be challenging when their expectations aren’t clear, right?
KYLE CROWE: Definitely. It’s like trying to navigate a maze blindfolded. You never know if you’re heading in the right direction.
KEVIN RONEY: That’s true, that’s why this course caught my attention. It’s all about understanding those important behaviors that leaders expect from us.
KYLE CROWE: Spot on. The more we understand what’s expected of us, the better we can focus on honing those skills and improving our performance. Plus, when we make our leaders look good, it makes us look good, too!
KEVIN RONEY: It’s a win-win situation. Listeners, why don’t you join me in this Velociteach course: BEHAVIORS TO MASTER WHEN DEALING WITH YOUR LEADER by Neal Whitten and learn how to navigate the complexities of dealing with your leaders.
Clarifying your Claim
WENDY GROUNDS: Rick, can we go to step four. Clarifying your claim. As a CPA, tell us how you would approach this?
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: What this starts to do is you’re examining the claim from the financial standpoint and from its legitimacy standpoint. Does the punishment fit the crime? Does it pass the common-sense test? Going back to those earlier points, labor, materials, and overhead. What you want your customer to do is to be able to support every number in their spreadsheet. So, a lot of claims will come across, and my team would come up to me with a spreadsheet, and it’s got multipliers and adders and different things. And as part of my business, this is one of my favorite case studies is to show a claim like this and have participants look at the different lines, and is this in or is this out? Does this make sense or not?
So, going back to our earlier example, your shipment was due on Friday. It didn’t show up till Tuesday. This created a 45-day delay in my project. That doesn’t make sense; right? It might’ve been Memorial Day weekend. The trucker was late. There was traffic in New Jersey. Something happened; right? A few days off like that is frustrating, but it’s not a month-and-a-half show-stopping situation.
Before you even get into the numbers, what you want to anchor in is the actual data. Does what they’re saying make sense? Did the work that you did or didn’t do equate to the amount of time spent; right? Because if you have a 45-day delay on a project, that’s a lot of time to accumulate a lot of different costs. If you have a two- or three-day delay, obviously the amount of labor, materials, and overhead that you’d accumulate in that period is far less. So right off the bat, you can throw out a good portion of claims.
We talked about materials. If you have a receipt for materials, and you trace that back, that’s another way to review legitimacy. A big question that I would get is, “Well, how do I review labor? What do I do with that?” So, in different industries, you’ve got some options. Number one is you can review employee records like timecards, pay stubs, and that sort of thing. So, if you see a bricklayer making $250 an hour…
BILL YATES: I want to be that guy.
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: When I – that’s what I would say. When I see stuff like that, I’d say, “Where do I submit my résumé?” But if it’s close, let’s say that bricklayer makes $125 an hour. And with prevailing wages, which is a way to equate labor costs on projects to avoid underbidding, you can actually online, by county, review prevailing wages. You can go online, for example, in Cook County, Illinois, and see what a bricklayer would make per hour. You can look that up. And if the dollars per hour on that website are $125, but the customer is claiming $250, you can say, “This doesn’t make any sense.” There’s always a way to third-party validate that.
Check the Numbers
Another gotcha moment on reviewing claims for legitimacy, if you’ve still got the CPA hat on with me, is multipliers and adders. There might be a line in your claim that says contract damages, liquidated damages, consequential damages, $125,000 – just an unsupported big number. And then there also could be at the end of it overhead percentage, profit percentage, materials and tools, you know, all sorts of things like that.
I want to tell you a story that is related and really highlights this point. When I was with my first project management job with Hewlett Packard, I did a lot of work in China. I would go, and one of my favorite things to do was to buy counterfeit watches.
BILL YATES: Okay.
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: They were kind of a novelty. So, I went to this one vendor, and I had some of the local people that I was working with say they have decent quality. And I picked out a watch from her case, and she handed me a calculator with the number 1,000 on it.
And it meant 1,000 USD. No, there’s no way I’m going to pay $1,000 for a fake watch. That’s ridiculous. So, we went back and forth, and I’d type in a number. She would type in a number. We’d go back and forth. And finally, we settled on $50. And I walked out of there with that watch. It started at 1,000. I paid 50. I felt great.
So, the next day I showed off my watch, and I said to the folks, “I paid 50 for this.” And they were like, you got ripped off.
BILL YATES: Really?
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: They were laughing. That’s a bad price. So, I felt really bad. I’m like, well, that stinks. So, they said, “You should have only paid 30 for that.”
BILL YATES: Okay.
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: Okay. So, what just happened here? One is I went through the process. I felt good about my result. I did it without any data. A few months later, I came across another Rolex online. And I thought, wow, this would be a cool watch to have. So, I printed it off. I went back to the same booth, and I handed them the printout, and I said, “Do you have this watch?” They said, “Yes, we can get this for you, but it’s in the back,” which means they had to go God knows where, but it took about a half an hour for them to track it down and get it.
So, I was standing around. I was standing at their booth when another tourist group came up, did the exact same thing I did. They pointed into the case, they got a watch, they liked it. The calculator came out. It started at 1,000. They went back and forth, and that group walked out of there with a $500 fake watch. That’s what, in my opinion, a lot of claims can be. It’s a negotiation designed to start at a high point, but meet somewhere in the middle, where the seller who sold me a watch for $50 sold the same watch for $500.
So, to finish this story, they came back with the watch. It was the one that I’d asked for. I typed in the number 25 in the calculator, and they kept going back and forth, and I would only type in 25. I walked away. “No, no, come back, come back.” We went back and forth, and I walked out of there that day with a $25 watch. And the next day I went in to see my coworkers, and I said, “Guess how much I paid for this?” And they said, “30.” I said, “25.”
Finding Leverage
BILL YATES: Hey, Chris Voss would have been proud of you. That’s awesome. Such a great story that leads into my next question. Rick, you found a leverage point because then you had data. The first time you walked in, you actually came out really, really well, only spending $50. I’m, like, giving you high fives all day for $50, and then those other folks are saying, “Oh, you should have got it for $30. You got ripped off.” I don’t necessarily agree with that. But anyway, your point is then you had a data point. Then you had a reference that you can learn through that experience and from the feedback from those other folks who could advise you on that. What are some other ways to find leverage in these complicated situations?
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: I’m going to use a business story now, not a personal story like that. With one of my companies, we had a massive claim, we’re talking a seven-figure claim, because a product we had supplied was incorrectly installed. And long story short, cement got into our product and flooded our product, it had to be completely removed and redone. We’re talking 5,000 square feet of our product had to be removed and replaced. So, an extensive, very large repair.
So, what happened was we specified the type of cement they should use. They decided to use a different type of cement. But when we were there, we supervised the installation. There was a small gap that happened on the side of the product where the cement infiltrated the product. If they would have used the correct cement, it would not have been as viscous, and it wouldn’t have gone as extensively. And no one stopped it. You know, once you were using probably, you know, five, 10 times the amount of product, nobody thought to stop; right? It just kept going.
Now, the situation I’ve described to you is pretty nebulous. Number one, we were onsite supervising this. But number two, the usage of the material, which was not up to us, was done by them. So, who’s at fault here? As we diagnosed the situation, this was not just one project manager involved with this. This was a very large team and technical people. If you have technical staff, here’s another way you find leverage. We sent somebody out to the site. The only thing they were to do there was to investigate. And everybody knew why they were there.
On a site that you’ve got a number of different people, including a concrete inspector, the concrete inspector let us know that the pump, the mixer, is like a combination like a mixer/pump piece of equipment that would mix the cement and then inject it into the product. They changed it out of nowhere. That was kind of a red flag, like, well, why would you change that piece of equipment? So, a little bit of investigation, we found that the prior model overmixes if it’s not run properly, and you get air bubbles in the concrete, which makes it flow faster. So, what they did by changing that was they changed the methodology that they were going to use to install the equipment.
We went further. We had our technical person – you know, again, this goes back to relationships and that point number one. This is, “Hey, I’m here to listen. I want to know.” He wrote down what this person said. He summarized it. This third party came back and said, “Yes, this is exactly what this piece of equipment does and why I wouldn’t suggest it.” That became our piece of leverage, that you used the wrong equipment to overmix the concrete. And at that point, that company still was in denial. “No, that’s not it. This isn’t it.” We had a third party validate it. They, you know, it’s still your person’s fault.
At this point, it went up to the owner; right? Now, this is somebody who needs this construction project finished. And they’re looking at two companies bickering. Sit down with all the evidence. We showed them, “Hey, look, we had no idea that they were overmixing this. This was not part of our scope. This is what this concrete inspector you hired said.” That owner said, “You’re right.” And it came down to, okay, construction company, you guys messed this up. This is on your nickel. They made that call. We settled a several million dollar claim for basically zero. And that’s what you’re looking for out there are those root causes, those things in your projects that have created the problem.
Prioritizing Problem Areas
Now the other side of this coin, Bill and Wendy, is when you’re a project manager, your most critical project, the thing that is on your critical path as a PM is a distressed project. If there’s a problem, that is your priority. You have to get on that right away. Because what you’re trying to do here is, if you know you or your company has done wrong, you want to put out the small fire before it blows up into an inferno. That’s a common PM trap is, oh, man, this is a hard situation. I’m going to leave it till the afternoon.
Well, by doing that, it’s going to be a lot harder to do. But if you get on it right away, you put it out, customer sees you’re jumping through hoops to do that. Hey, you know what? I’ve heard this line before. You know what? I was going to charge you for that. But, you know, you got on it right away. It wasn’t so bad. I thought it was going to be a lot worse. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen this really be a problem for some of your competitors, but you guys did a good job. We’re just going to move on.
BILL YATES: That’s a great example.
Successfully Closing a Negotiation
WENDY GROUNDS: Now, if you’re the PM, and you’ve been negotiating, and you need to wrap it up, do you have some good advice on how to really close that negotiation successfully?
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: Yeah. So, in this case, when a negotiation is coming to a close, when you’ve set the environment, you’ve prepared, you’ve had the discussion, you’ve reached agreement, again, go back to summarize, get a written confirmation that it comes back, and get it onto paper as soon as you can. In other words, okay, we agree to this settlement amount. Here’s the remaining work. These are going to be the next steps. Get it signed. You’ve now put it behind you. Failing to do this step leaves it open. So, you might have an agreement on Monday, but then Wednesday their vice president comes into town and, oh, yeah, I thought about this again. And you undo it. You want to keep the momentum going by getting it into paper. That’s definitely the best way to do it.
If there’s one other piece of advice, when you look at finance and project management and settling claims, and I’m just going to throw out one final best practice here because it’s worth mentioning, understand your budgets and your funding sources. Example, if you have a small argument to settle, but your warranty budget will cover that, or if you have a late shipment due to a vendor, like a trucking company or a drop ship, and that vendor will cover it, and it’s a zero-dollar issue to yourself, it’s a great throwaway negotiable to get somebody else to pay for that as a flow-through into your customer. Those are some other best practices to think about.
Contact Rick
WENDY GROUNDS: If our audience wants to get in touch with you, if they want to find out more about the work you do, where should they go?
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: My website is noonewalksalone.biz. You can find me there and send me an email. I’m also on LinkedIn. My phone number is on there if you want to give me a call. Happy to have a discussion with anyone if you’re interested in talking more about negotiation or a seminar that I can help you with. (Stay in touch and give Rick some feedback on this podcast here: https://talk.ac/rickc?code=VELOCITEACH)
BILL YATES: Rick, this information is so helpful, and the seven-step approach that you’ve described is just – it’s a great framework for project managers to keep in mind, really anybody who’s going to face a claim or face some kind of disagreement between parties. And again, having the perspective of somebody who has, I’m going to just say, six specific letters after their name. You’re a PMP. You’re also a CPA. That brings together a nice perspective which is super helpful for us to think through these steps and have the right perspective on that. Really appreciate you sharing that with us and giving this advice to project managers.
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: My pleasure.
BILL YATES: We’ve known each other for, gosh, I don’t know, like 15 years now.
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: Bill, it’s been great. I’ll never forget the PMP prep class you taught in Siemens Sacramento with the pictures and the colored pens and the strategy of how to pass the PMP exam the first time.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: And thanks to your efforts, that happened. And I would encourage anybody who’s thinking about becoming a project manager or wants to become a PMP, Velociteach is the place to get that done. So…
BILL YATES: Our customers are our most powerful salespeople. So, thank you very much.
RICK CZAPLEWSKI: You’re welcome.
Closing
WENDY GROUNDS: That’s it for us at Manage This. You can visit us at Velociteach.com where you can subscribe to this podcast and see a complete transcript of the show. You’ve also earned your free PDUs by listening to this podcast. To claim them, go to Velociteach.com, choose Manage This podcast from the top of the page. Click the button that says Claim PDUs and click through the steps. And until next time, remember to stay curious, stay inspired, and keep tuning in to Manage This.
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