Today we’d like to introduce you to Derrick Chevalier.
Derrick, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
After careers in sales, real estate finance and higher education, H-C became affiliated with Karrass International, the largest and most prolific negotiation seminar company worldwide. That association lasted for over fourteen years during which I traveled throughout the U.S., Canada, Mexico and elsewhere facilitating public programs and tailoring in-house programs for companies from virtually every sector of the economy.
Along the way, I began writing a series of books entitled: Beyond Negotiating with the first book titled From Fear to Fearless. That book was followed by Influence – Rapport – Results. Both of these books focused on areas that most would consider outside the realm of negotiation but I eventually discovered that these seemingly tangential areas are in fact the lifeblood of negotiation strategy and effectiveness.
Then in 2008 H-C decided to sever its ties with the Karrass organization because we felt that while the Karrass Effective Negotiating framework remains vital for some types of negotiation, its age and its origins preclude it from really being the cutting edge framework for the 21st Century.
For three years I did the exhaustive reading, study and reflection in the area of negotiation as well as in many related areas such as neurology, psychology, economics, political science, history and other subjects, looking for synergy between these areas as far as how they connected to and might enhance negotiation theory and science.
H-C also began to realize that seminars alone are just not effective for most, there must be other ongoing elements such as consulting, support, monitoring, interaction, debrief and preparation for a company to obtain the highest and best results possible. At that point, H-C became a negotiation consultancy that offers training and support, rather than a negotiation seminar company.
The fruit of all of that time, attention, study, travel, contemplation and investment led to the development of the Comprehensive Negotiating Strategies (CNS) negotiation framework. CNS is the only universally applicable negotiation framework specifically designed to evolve, reflect and succeed in the EIGE (Emerging Integrated Global Economy) of the 21st Century,
Today H-C offers a wide range of consulting and training services tailored for specific sectors and companies including sales, procurement, engineering, government, education, medicine and more, yielding measurable high ROI for the companies and individuals with whom we work.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Struggle, difficulty and perseverance have been a huge part of H-C, without them the company would not be in business today. 9/11 caused a total upheaval in the global economy and changed the economic landscape for many of our clients and for us.
The impact of the recession that became evident in 2007 had another devastating impact on the economy and thus on the need for consulting and training. The workforce for many of our strongest sectors such as automotive, real estate, financial services, utilities were virtually wiped out and/or forever altered.
Suddenly our client list of over 5,000 was reduced to a few dozen as companies closed, industries disappeared and even companies who desired our services could not afford to commit the resources to us regardless of the ROI.
Credit lines were virtually cut off or closed overnight with no warning, business capital was either too expensive or non-existent. And to top it all off we were offering a brand new negotiation framework, prospective clients were afraid to take a chance on anything they were not already familiar with and that proved to be a huge challenge.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Harrison-Chevalier story. Tell us more about the business.
H-C is a full-service negotiation consulting & training company offering customized solutions and extremely high ROI to our clients. We partner with our clients, we become part of their DNA which means that we limit or exclude interaction with companies that are direct competitors to our best clients.
Virtually no other negotiation consultancy makes that claim or is willing to make that commitment because they aren’t willing to make the sacrifices or assume the risk to profits that comes with our approach.
The first universally adaptable negotiation framework, we are enormously proud of the way that CNS not only adds cutting-edge proprietary content to the body of knowledge in negotiation, it has enhanced key elements of other frameworks such as Karrass and The Harvard Negotiation Project, that when combined create something brand new and evolutionary.
ROI, ROI, ROI our services more often than not create a huge ROI for our clients both tangibly and intangibly, that is what we are most proud of and most known for.
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
Luck is a matter of perception, one person’s luck in another person’s serendipity. One person’s serendipity is another person’s nightmare, so who is to say? I like to think of what the legendary golfer Ben Hogan said; “The more I practice, the luckier I get”.
If you couple that with the wise words of Theodore Roosevelt “Do what we can, where we are, with what we have”, you end up a solid platform for all kinds of success.
And H-C measures success in two ways, the first is to realize that “Riches” are the things we can buy, the challenges that can be solved with dollars, or skill, or bars of gold.
But “Wealth” is a measure of what one cannot buy no matter how rich they are, the beauty of a sunrise, the flight of an eagle, the crashing of the waves of a beach, the sight of a full moon or the light in eyes of a happy child.
If you have riches and miss the wealth, you are but an empty vessel, H-C strives for both and we use the one (Riches) to enhance our opportunities to experience more of the other (Wealth), but if we must make a choice we know which one to choose…
Contact Info:
- Address: 1800 Century Park East,
Suite 600, Los Angeles, 90067 - Website: http://h-c.com
- Phone: 818 242-8005
- Email: [email protected]
- Twitter: @dchevalier1
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derrick-chevalier-6323272/
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