Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Can You Do a Great Deal With Bad People? 5-20-25
Tue, 20 May 2025
In this episode, Scott Becker examines the challenges of doing business with people who are either overly difficult or lack honesty.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. Today's discussion is, can you do a great deal with bad people? And again, I have to broadly define and distract what is bad people versus good people. There are plenty of difficult people to do business with that are very good people that I still wouldn't want to be a business with.
Chapter 2: How do difficult people affect business deals?
So you have people, I am by nature not wired to go for every last nickel or last penny. I'm one who's a believer. You build businesses, you get wealthy, others get wealthy. We all do well in that it doesn't work well when you're back and forth fighting on every little piece of everything. It's bad karma for business that doesn't work out well.
Chapter 3: What are the challenges of working with penny-pinching partners?
I once had a partner that we used to joke, if he ever flew over New York, Because he flew over New York once, he had ownership of any client that was ever out of New York. And that was obviously hyperbole, but it was that kind of feeling that a dollar for me was less important than a penny or a half penny for him. But just very difficult to do business like that in the long run. Temporarily, yes.
In the long run, no. So there's some people that are difficult. They just feel like they are just, you know, they're out for every nickel. They are very feisty. You can't really communicate and talk with them normally. And I'll talk about those people first, because even those people are honest people. And you know what you're getting.
I find that a very hard way to live one's life and to do business. And so that's sort of one set of things. The other thing with all these business relationships, business relationships are exactly that. Over the long run, they're a business relationship.
Chapter 4: How can you build strong business relationships?
And it's almost like when you're working with a partner, a staff member, an employee of yours, a vendor of yours, whoever you're working with, one of the tests of great relationships is those people periodically make a mistake. And you have to decide at that point, how are you treating those people? Good partners treat those people well when they make mistakes and realize it's a mistake.
Chapter 5: What role do mistakes play in partnerships?
It's not part of the entire ecosystem. Similarly, when somebody thoughts they were getting paid something and they might have misunderstood, so they're getting paid a little bit less, if they've been doing a great job and they are great performers and great employees or great partners, you try and make sure that they're made whole one way or another.
And you certainly get that comfort in certain partnerships that that is how people are going to behave and you'll be able to to work with them, and I think that is, at the end of the day, the kinds of people you want to do business with, and for a variety of reasons.
Chapter 6: How important is trust in business relationships?
You could have the very best lawyers and spend incredible amounts of dollars on lawyers, but those lawyers, you can't legislate every situation that happens. You just can't do it. And so what you really want is people that, through good or bad, that you could work with because you're never going to be able to legislate or regulate or write down a contract every single thing that happens.
Chapter 7: Why are contracts not the only solution in business?
In the best of businesses, the contracts go away and you're only looking at them every once in a great, great while. I always remember when a client says, we need to look at that provision. This is always a bad sign. That means that somebody's having a tiff with somebody or some conflict over something. Never a good sign. And it's similar.
You're far better off doing business with people that you can trust, that you like versus that you can't because even with the best lawyers, it's going to be a constant evolution of what you're doing and what's happening. So to take it a step further. So one set of category is people that are just difficult, tough, smart people that
that just you might choose not to work with, no matter how smart and talented they are. The second type of people are people that are slightly dishonest or that are dishonest, that tell you one thing and are telling principals the other thing, or telling you, oh, I don't want to do this, but I'm told I have to do this. I need to find out that's not the case.
And this happens in business so often that I can't even tell you. And again, The first core category of people, people that want an ad, they're difficult, that are sort of buy the book when the book goes in their favor, might not be when the book's not going in their favor. You can find ways to do business with them. You might not prefer it, but you can find ways to do it.
The second time of people – and I go back to 100 years ago. I was working side by side with a consulting firm on a huge project for years, and the consulting firm always said – We always have to wait on our bills. We're all waiting on our bills, not just you, the law firm, but us, the consulting firm, too.
And when that consulting firm finally got terminated from that client, what I found was that the law firm, me, we were nine months behind on our bills. The consulting firm, regardless of what they had told me, was getting paid every week and guaranteed that they got paid every week. This would be closer to the set of not really honest dealing versus you just can't contract around it.
When I look at this, I'm at the end of the day, again, and one of the great steps in my business career was the period of time when I had enough clients that I didn't have to take on any clients regardless of how they behaved. That's a great sort of point in anybody's professional career in development. Similarly, as you're looking at doing deals, you have different types of people.
You have people that just are really good people. And one of the reasons back in the day, we ended up with one of the partners that I have is because a close, close colleague had worked really closely with them and vouched for them as being straightforward, good people. And at the end of the day, Very smart people.
They may not be the smartest, the toughest, the this, the that, but they're honest, good people to deal with. And so when you go through your different differences over the years, you work through them.
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