29d • General discussion
The Dinner That Saved The Deal
By the sixth week of negotiations, a deal that had started with genuine enthusiasm felt like it was slowly coming apart. The buyer and seller had barely spoken directly in days. Instead, attorneys exchanged redlines, advisors forwarded concerns, and emails grew longer as both sides tried to protect themselves from what they believed the other side might do.
Nothing was technically wrong with the transaction, yet almost everything felt wrong with the relationship. A request for additional protection was interpreted as distrust. A delayed response looked like hesitation. Changes in legal language that might have been routine began to feel like attempts to renegotiate issues everyone thought had already been settled.
The seller finally called the buyer and suggested something neither advisory team had proposed. They should have dinner.
No attorneys. No spreadsheets. No purchase agreement sitting between them.
For two hours, they barely discussed specific deal terms. The seller talked about why he was concerned about what would happen to longtime employees and whether customers would experience the transition differently. The buyer explained why several diligence findings had made his lenders more cautious and why certain protections weren't attempts to take advantage of the seller.
For the first time in weeks, each understood the motivations behind the other's behavior.
The buyer realized that several positions he had interpreted as stubbornness were really about the seller's fear of losing control over something he had spent decades building. The seller discovered that provisions he considered unnecessarily aggressive weren't necessarily coming from the buyer at all. Some were simply responses to financing requirements and risks uncovered during diligence.
They didn't negotiate a single major term over dinner, and neither walked away with a concession. What they gained was more valuable: context.
When negotiations resumed, the documents hadn't changed, but the way they read them had. Instead of assuming bad intent, they picked up the phone when something didn't make sense. Issues that previously generated long email chains were resolved in short conversations, and the transaction began moving again.
Deals rarely collapse because buyers and sellers suddenly forget how to do math. They often become difficult because communication gets replaced by interpretation, and interpretation without context has a way of turning ordinary disagreements into questions of trust.
Sometimes the meeting that saves a transaction isn't the one where the parties finally agree on the numbers. It's the one where they finally understand the person sitting across the table.
If these are the kinds of acquisition conversations that interest you, we'd love to have you join us.
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The Dinner That Saved The Deal
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