How do you negotiate with a teenager?

A few months ago, we shared a new, free training on High School Dispute Resolution Training. I met three young men: Minson Vo, Alex Nou, and Nathan Vu. They used the Covid-19 crisis to study negotiation with some of the greatest minds in conflict resolution that are writing and working today. The sons of Vietnamese and Cambodian immigrants, they are rising seniors at George Bush High School in Houston, Texas. This generation is poised and ready to lead the country in a powerful new direction. Below, Minson, founder and business partner at Courtier Consultations, tells the story of how they began their new business during the pandemic.

Minson Vo,

Founder and Business Partner, Courtier Consultation

It all started in January with Chris Voss’s infamous negotiation book, Never Split the Difference. Reading it was the closest thing to a spell book that I’d ever gotten my hands on. The tactics were quick, easy to use, and worked instantly. It felt like that I had gained more control over my life in just a few days.

So, because the book was so intriguing, I decided to show it to my friends, Alex and Nathan, and convince them to read it as well. Unsurprisingly, they were also instantly hooked. We then decided to start a private study group where we studied these techniques every night for 5-7 days a week.

Not only were we studying negotiation, but emotional intelligence and persuasion as well. The whole world is built on human interaction and relationships, so we quickly realized that learning these things gave us the ability to mold reality into what we want it to be. It could help us generate more profit in whatever we do and escape the toughest and scariest situations.

Around early April, in the midst of COVID pandemic, we had this bright idea of reaching out to negotiation professionals to expand our knowledge. In the course of about two months, we met on Zoom with experts from Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and the FBI to improve our skills. Still, being only 17 years old at the time, we realized that this is a major step in what was about to come because it usually costs a big sum to even see the people that we talked to.

The time came when we realized that the American educational system did not offer this crucial education to teens, which prompted us to take matters into our own hands. So, in late May, we decided to start an organization where the three of us would teach negotiation, emotional intelligence, and persuasion to help teens deal with the most difficult people in the world in their eyes – adults. Not only that, but we also aimed our services at parents who didn’t want to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars for negotiation training and, opposite to teens, probably see children as more difficult to deal with than any coworker, boss, or stranger.

Our organization would be named Courtier Consultations. We came up with this name because during the Renaissance, Courtiers were close enough to monarchs that they had enough secret information to make changes without being in the face of danger. This is important in today’s world because everyone wants to feel powerful and be in control of their interactions. So, the key to success in getting what you want is to take on the characteristics of a Courtier: let the other side feel as powerful as they need to and lurk in the shadows waiting to make your next move.

But how do we differ from the hundreds of professional, top-tier consulting firms out there?

The answer is that we are the people who are closest to the problem. The reason why we aimed our services at teens and parents is because we are still in high school, so we know the exact habits, tendencies, and secrets of a teenager. And when you know more information about yourself and your counterpart, you will have more control over the situation. This is especially important because the world changes constantly, and someone that was a teenager 20 years ago cannot tell you how kids act today. That is why even though the professional consultants out there are fantastic in dealing with adults, they still don’t know enough about today’s teenagers to be able to navigate those situations with full control. 

Our services provide our clients with the strategies that we’ve learned from the professionals and scholars at some of the most prestigious institutes in the world. Our consulting packages are tailored to the teen-parent, teen-teacher, teen-adult conflicts that we now know can be quickly resolved using the approaches we learned from the best negotiation programs in the land.

Take a look at our website where all of our services and manuals are on offer, at a price, might we modestly say, that’s a tiny percentage of the value delivered.