When you've got minutes before a negotiation and zero preparation, you need a minimum viable approach. The 5-Minute Prep (5MP) is that approach.
You see an email from your client, customer, supplier, or grand poobah. They want to talk about your pending deal. Urgently. Like in 15 minutes, kind of urgently.
And you haven't prepared.
His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy... Apologies to Eminem, but if you've worked in any commercial role for more than a year, you've been in this scenario. We all have.
When (not if) you find yourself here, you've got three choices. One: hop into your time machine, rewind six months, and get your act together on proper preparation for your negotiation. Two: adopt the ready-fire-aim methodology and wing it. Three: run through the 5-Minute Prep.
You've likely heard some version of "preparation is key to negotiation success." At Arete Advisors, we're big proponents of this. We're also realists, and we recognize that not everyone always has the time required to truly prepare for commercial negotiations.
In tech, there's the concept of an MVP: Minimum Viable Product. The smallest thing you can build that still delivers value. The analog in negotiation is Minimum Viable Preparation: the smallest set of things you can think through in a compressed timeframe that still meaningfully improves your outcome versus walking in blind.
That's what the 5-Minute Prep (5MP) is built for. A floor beneath which you should never fall.
We'll get into the individual steps in future posts. For now, think of it this way: in five minutes, you can get clarity on the three or four things that most often go wrong when people wing it.
Your walk-away point, for starters. Not the target, not the number someone in finance handed down. The actual point where walking out costs less than staying in. Most people can't answer this cleanly under pressure, and the default is usually a number driven by internal politics rather than commercial reality.
Then there's the person across the table. Are you about to negotiate with a human being or with whatever cultural stereotype your team briefed you on? Five minutes thinking about who's actually in the room can save you from running a playbook designed for someone who isn't.
And who's delivering your message, and why them? Most teams treat this as an afterthought, then wonder why the same words land differently depending on who said them.
The 5MP won't replace serious preparation. But it keeps you above the floor where bad decisions get made on autopilot.
We work with commercial teams on exactly these kinds of problems.