Resolve conflict
Ivy jokes that if he and his partners don’t agree on something, then they resort to a duel. But in reality, resolving conflicts that could prevent your business from growing comes down to some good, old-fashioned communication.
“[It’s] tolerance, patience, try not to be quick to anger,” he says. “Typically, if
on
e partner wants to do something and the other four think the other partner is crazy, he probably is crazy. You have to compromise sometimes, and you just have to be tolerant of other people’s views and listen to what they have to say.”
Sometimes though they skip that listening part and just start talking.
“[It’s] basically being quiet, which is something that all of us can struggle with, myself included,” he says.
It’s especially hard if you have a lot of type-A personalities in the room together, but even if you’re a type-A yourself, you have to know when to fight and when to retreat.
“The one thing is that as you get older, you realize that not all of these decisions are the end of the world,” he says.
But knowing when to back off can often be hard, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience under your belt yet.
“There’s no magic template,” Ivy says. “Each of these discussions and subject matters, the variables are essentially endless. The most important decision that we make, and the overriding decision, is to protect the brand, and we don’t want to do anything to jeopardize that.”
By keeping that in mind and doing all of these things, Ivy has built a solid business and looks forward to the future.
“We’re a very aggressive company,” he says. “You don’t get to be a $700 million company by being passive, but at the same time, we want to be intelligent about it and build something substantive that will last, and we’re all on the same page on that.”
How to reach: Heritage Auctions Inc., (800) 872-6467 or www.ha.com