Let's Make a Deal
Allan Stark says everything is negotiable (but it helps to havehim
on your side).
. Photograph by Kiko
Ricote.
Talk to
Allan Stark once, and you're adopted.
It doesn't matter that you're just another bargain hunter who wants
to save a few bucks on an immense plasma TV or a state-of-the-art
refrigerator or a hybrid Lexus SUV. Allan adopts your aims as his
own. He'll negotiate the deal for you and split the savings with
you fifty-fifty.
He may end up caring more about your goals, you'll discover, than
you do.
He'll call to tell you trivial yet useful information.
He'll definitely call to tell you a joke.
His enthusiasm for negotiating is so contagious that, by the time
you have your new flat-screen TV or refrigerator or Lexus, you'll
be thinking of other big-ticket items you want to buy. You'll check
your cell phone for contacts who might be in the market. When
you're out shopping, you'll ask the salesperson whether he can get
you a discount.
When you pick your children up at
soccer practice, you'll tell them
Allan's jokes (provided they're clean). And the kids will laugh -
harder than they do at your jokes. They'd probably laugh even more
if Allan told them the jokes himself.
BY THE END of my first conversation with Allan, he is inviting me
to visit him in
Boca Raton,
Florida, offering to pick me up at the
airport, and planning where we'll have lunch and dinner. "I tell
you, you'll like it here," he says. "It's a garden spot. And I'm a
good guy. I'll take you on a tour of the town. It'll be just like
visiting your uncle Allan."
After a few conversations, I lose the ability to refer to him as
Stark, the way by-the-book journalists do in their stories. I can
call him only Allan.
Soon after the few conversations, he offers to introduce me to his
daughters.
He adds me to his e-mail list.
He memorizes my phone numbers.
He even offers to negotiate a sweet deal for a new BMW. This is
while we are chatting with Ted Levine, a sales guy at Lauderdale
BMW in Pembroke Pines, Florida, a huge dealership carpeted with
shiny new luxury cars, each sparkling hood reflecting the Florida
palms and blue sky overhead. Lauderdale moves more BMWs a year than
any other dealership in the
United States. Since Allan started
Negotiate4U in October 2005, he's put two clients into Lauderdale's
BMWs, both through Levine.
Levine explains why he likes dealing with Allan more than selling a
car directly to a Josephine Consumer like me. "When I deal with
Allan, I don't have to worry about a customer running store to
store," he says. "I don't have to spend time explaining. I don't
get annoyed because he won't take no for an answer -"
"Once Ted says to me, 'That's it,' that's all I have to hear,"
Allan says. "He'll never hear me say, 'Oh, come on, Ted!'?"
"Exactly. Customers never give up," says Levine. "They want
something below cost. Even below cost isn't enough."
Then Allan suggests that perhaps I need a new BMW. I demur. "Not on
a writer's salary."
"I can get you into a brand-new one for as low as $529 a month,"
Levine says.
"How about $519 a month?" Allan says.
I promise them both that, when I want to buy a BMW, I'll give them
a call. "But I do live in Texas," I remind them.
"People come out here to buy cars all the time," Levine says.
"They do," Allan swears. "They absolutely do."
Next, Allan introduces me to Steve Brown, the owner of a
furniture-and-interior-design studio in South Florida who's
outfitted the model units of a bevy of high-rise condo buildings.
He doesn't usually sell at retail, but he'll sell to Allan's
clients at the trade discount usually offered to interior
designers. "Steve knows when I call he won't make a fat profit, but
these customers come back again and again," Allan says. "I'll call
up and say, 'Here's the brand name; here's what the customer wants.
Can you make a buck off it?' And he'll tell me right off the bat,
yes or no."
"Somebody like Allan who comes to you all the time with business -
we can afford to work a little shorter with him than we do with our
regular clients," Brown says.
"And Brown is a high-end line," Allan puts in. "He's been open
since the 1970s. All these big condos that go up in Florida, they
have model everything, and Steve does them all."
"See, consumers today have a lot more power than they did years
ago, because they have more choices," Brown says. "Allan's helping
them take advantage of that power, and it's been working for him.
It works for us, too, because it's another sale for us."
It is halfway through this conversation that I recognize Allan's
gift. He's able to schmooze two people at the same time, even when
those two people are on the opposite ends of a negotiating table.
He schmoozes them both so well that they each walk away from the
table grinning. He's not so much a negotiator but a mediator. A
matchmaker, even. I wonder whether he's ever considered negotiating
divorce settlements.
"I've been asked to, but I had to say no; you have to be a lawyer
for that," he says. "I'd love to do it, but I'd probably land in
jail."
ALLAN STARK WASN'T always a jolly Negotiate4U ambassador, plying
the auto dealerships and appliance showrooms and design studios of
sunny southern Florida. He began his professional life in
Baltimore, where he took the reins of the family office-supply
business, which was founded by his father, who started out by
selling pencils on a street corner during the Depression.
Allan managed 65 employees and three locations, posting sales of $8
million a year. Business was good. He made a good living. He was
content - but not really happy. "My happiest times were when I
negotiated purchasing for the store," he says. "I'd tell our
purchasing agents, 'Get your best price, and then let me call.' A
hundred percent of the time I got a better price. They'd say, 'Of
course you get a better price; you're the Stark in Stark Office
Supply.' So I'd use a fake name and still do it. I wanted to show
them they could do that."
Too bad he didn't realize at the time that he had a business in the
making. He eventually sold Stark Office Supply, moved to Boca
Raton, and tried a couple of other careers - selling life insurance
and brokering mortgages - before it hit him: All the negotiating
he'd done on behalf of friends and family over the years, he could
now do for others for a fee. "Now I'm as happy as a lark," says
Allan, who's 62 and has two grown daughters. "I wake up in the
morning raring to go. I get a call from someone who wants me to
make a deal, and I go crazy. I get on two telephones. I'm a
maniac!"
About once a week, he speaks to civic organizations about
negotiating. One story he usually tells goes like this: He went to
a big-name electronics superstore (which shall, for the purposes of
this story, remain nameless) to buy a 60-inch flat-screen TV. He'd
checked Consumer Reports; he'd settled on the model he wanted. He
asked the price.
"$2,595," the salesperson said.
"I can't afford it," Allan replied.
The salesperson offered him the TV for $2,495. Allan said no. The
salesperson went to a nearby computer station, keyed in a few
commands, and returned with a price of $2,395. Allan asked for the
sales manager - who offered it for $2,195. Allan said he'd think
about it.
Allan went to Sears. He told the salesperson there he'd found the
model he wanted for $2,195.
"I can let you have it for $1,995," the Sears guy said.
"You're getting close," said Allan, "but it's still more than I
wanted to spend."
"Okay, how about $1,795?" said the Sears guy.
(By this point in the story, Allan says, his audiences are looking
at him skeptically. "But may God strike me dead!" he says. "It's
true!")
Allan told the Sears guy, "Hmmm."
The salesperson said, "This weekend, we're taking 10 percent off
everything in the store. If you buy it now, I'll write it up for
Saturday, and it'll cost you $1,540. And I'll give you this DVD
player for free."
Just because he could, Allan then took his sales invoice from Sears
back to the superstore. The sales manager swore the price Allan got
was below the superstore's cost.
The moral of this story is you can negotiate anything, Allan says.
"People have no idea you can go into these stores and negotiate. I
tell people they can do it themselves. But most people are afraid
to do it."
So Allan does it for them. His customer negotiates the best price
on something, say a car (but it also might be a mortgage, health
insurance, or anything that amounts to more than $1,000). Then the
customer calls Allan and asks him to beat that price. If Allan
does, he gets half the savings. Recently, he made a deal for Morton
Mindell, who'd been shopping around
Baltimore for a lease on a 2007
Lexus ES 350. The best Mindell could do was $559 a month for 36
months. He'd seen an article in the
Baltimore Sun about Allan, so
he called Negotiate4U. "I thought the price was high, but I got
what, for me, was the best deal I could," Mindell says. "I figured
I'd give Allan a try, but how was he going to do any better?"
Allan called around in Baltimore, but he ended up at the same Lexus
dealership - with a price of $489 a month for 36 months, a savings
of $70 a month, or $2,520 over the life of the lease.
"I did a pretty decent job of wheeling and dealing," Mindell says,
"so I was surprised when Allan came back with that price. I paid
Allan half the savings - and I was happy to do it."
So how does Allan do it? Is it the joking? The beyond-all-reason
enthusiasm for negotiating? The competitive spirit that led him to
one-up the Stark Office Supply purchasing agents? The two-way,
schmoozefest? I ask Allan, and he says anyone can do it, "but most
people are more afraid of negotiating than they are of a root
canal."
A simple matter of chutzpah, then? But if that's the case, Levine
wouldn't roll his eyes at the car buyers who keep asking for more,
more, more.
By now, I know that Allan's daughters have made big money in sales.
One of them, Julie Stark, has already told me she learned
everything she needed to know at her father's knee. So I go back to
her with a list of questions. "I can't give away all his little
tricks," she says tantalizingly, "but I'll tell you this: He takes
an interest in people."
Julie says her dad has a way of making others feel good, of making
them comfortable. All right, that I know from personal experience.
She says he's always respectful of other people's time (asking, "Is
this a good time to talk?" or saying, "I'm sure you're very busy,
so I won't keep you; I just wanted to ask …"). She says he's
incredibly persuasive. Indeed.
Then I appeal to
Amy Stark. How does your dad do it? "People
negotiate every day of their lives," she says sagely. "The
difference between most people and my father is that he does it
with heart."
She says he reads people extremely well. He cares about helping
people get the best solution they can. He loves to make people
laugh.
And, she adds, he's creative and strategic. But so am I, and Sears
has never handed me a TV the size of a Lichtenstein at $1,000 below
retail.
So I go back to Allan himself. I ask again why he's so good at
negotiating. He talks about loving his job, enjoying people, and so
on.
Then he says, "There's a fine line between persevering and being a
pain in the butt."
Allan believes he has a built-in sensor for the perseverance-pain
line. He knows, intuitively, when he's just one step away - and
that's where he stops. So people like Levine and Brown take his
calls willingly, and, knowing he'll call again, bringing them more
business, they'll give him a deal.
Sounds easy. Maybe easier than it is. But Julie says watching her
dad in action is a short course in efficient deal making. Even some
of his clients have written to say they've negotiated better
because of him. "He lives to get those e-mails," she says.
Does he? Or does he live to get the call from someone like Mindell,
who thinks he's negotiated the best possible price but is
contacting Allan just to issue a dare: I don't believe you can, but
go ahead, make my deal.
“I love it!” Allan says. “I guess it’s a bit of the devil in me.”
He laughs. Then he says, “Did you know that, on your car’s fuel gauge, next to the little picture of the gas tank, there’s an arrow? It points to the side of the car your tank is on. You’ll never have to get out of a rental car to check again.”
That’s Allan, spreading good cheer again. Now if he can only negotiate to get his daughters to stop calling him before 10 a.m. on weekends, he’ll be a really happy man.
Get What You WantHow does Allan Stark work his negotiating magic? By knowing and adhering to these five tenets.
1. Know Your opponent.
Know with whom you’re negotiating — his or her weak points as well as strong points.
2. Know Your Subject.
As the saying goes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
3. Lighten Up.
Most likely, the future of humankind is not in the balance.
4. Know When to Stop.
Enough is enough. There comes a point when more gets you less. Your paths may cross again, and you don’t want an opponent who is wary of you.
5. Everybody Wins.
If the seller feels as if he or she has not lost, you’ve been successful.