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How This Book Came To Be

“85% of your financial success is due to your personality and ability to communicate, negotiate and lead. Shockingly, only 15% is due to technical knowledge.”

–Carnegie Institute of Technology

In 2012 I attended a business seminar in Las Vegas, Nevada where a famous lawyer, George Ross of the Donald Trump organization was speaking. George Ross was in his eighties at the time, and was retired from his legal career but had lived a prolific career as a real estate lawyer. Early in his career, George was hired by the legendary New York real estate investor Sol Goldman and negotiated and transacted hundreds of large commercial real estate deals in New York City. Later in his career, George was hired by young Donald Trump at the age of twenty-seven to negotiate and put together some complex and sizable real estate deals in New York City. As George Ross took the stage he said something I would never forget: “Most entrepreneurs fail because they fail at two major things: time management and negotiation.”

George then proceeded to lecture the audience on the fundamentals of negotiation, and of course he had written a book on the subject and had taught at many universities over his lifetime. George was a pioneer teaching at many of these universities because until fairly recently, negotiation was not considered to be a real subject of study.

As a budding entrepreneur myself, I had never considered negotiation to be a study or a skill. As a matter of fact, I considered myself to be a good negotiator at the time and later learned when I began to study negotiation that I was in fact a horrible negotiator. I went on to study negotiation and apply the principles and techniques to my own real estate investment business and achieved great success. Throughout my real estate career, I began to coach and mentor others on their own real estate investment businesses, and I learned that nearly every student under my mentorship was a poor or inadequate negotiator! Unfortunately, in real estate all profit is either found through negotiation or built through construction. As I review the profit and loss statement of my own real estate business,