negotiation

BUSINESS 2465 ASSIGNMENT INFO: TEAM Assignment - Preparing for Negotiations!!

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Who you are:

• You are the founders, owners and leaders of Razer’s Edge, the most creative, innovative and talented

CGI software company to come along in years.

• You are quickly making a name for yourself with you stunning character creation and visual effects.

• Your technology is based on your creation of ground-breaking graphics and rendering software you

have called EdgeEffect that you have patented 100%.

• You have attracted the interest of a number of the world’s biggest studios (also known as the “property

owners”) including Disney, Marvel and DC. Conversations are ongoing with these studios, but nothing

concrete has happened yet.

However, as a reasonably new and young company, you have a number of challenges to overcome:

• You’re small. You currently don’t have the capacity to take on any major film project because of a

lack of software developers, motion designers, additional staff and the necessary computer hardware to

host and run EdgeEffect.

• You need to raise almost $10million and 12 months to fill the staffing and technology gaps above.

• You’re burning through cash at a tremendous rate - $500,000 per month. With your current staff and

expenses, you have enough money in the bank to keep Razer’s Edge running for only 4 months.

The Situation:

• You have been approached by Marvel to serve as the primary provider of all CGI effects for their next

project, The Eternals. You are in the phase of preparing for negotiations with Marvel on a major

contract for this film.

• You are uncertain as to the overall value of the contract for this film at this stage, however, one film is

likely to lead to many more. This industry is characterized by long relationships between studios (ie

Marvel) and production companies (ie Razer’s Edge).

• You have also had interesting and promising discussions with DC Comics, Amazon and Apple+, but

nothing specific so far – no mention of specific projects, movies or characters.

• For these negotiations, you can explore three possible options:

o Negotiate a single contract for a single film: The Eternals

o Attempt to negotiate a long-term deal where they would pay you for The Eternals but also

invest $$ in Razer’s Edge in exchange for your commitment to work ONLY with Marvel for

the next 5 years.

o Sell them your company outright and walk away from Razer’s Edge forever.

Your Assignment is to prepare for negotiations with Marvel:

1. Prepare a summary of your company – a one paragraph introduction based on the description above.

2. Prepare a summary of the strengths and weaknesses of your position heading into the negotiation.

3. Prepare an overall goal for the company – as the founders and owners, what do you want to achieve in

the long run for Razer’s Edge? For example, do you want to take a long term approach and grow it

into a huge company like Pixar or DreamWorks, or would you like to sell it as soon as possible and get

out with a nice tidy sum of $$? How much money do you want in each case and why?

4. Provide a summary of the experience your team had in preparing items #1 to #3:

• How did you communicate? Email, texts, FaceTime, phone calls, MS Teams, Skype, etc?

• How did you distribute the work? IE, who is doing which portion of the Assignment? A

complete list.

You will be marked on the following:

1. Summary /2 2. Strength and Weaknesses /4 3. Overall Company Goals /3 4. Negotiating Team Experience /4 5. Grammar, spelling and structure. /2

Submission:

• Please have *one team member submit the entire assignment on behalf of their team.

• Please include a title page

• Please submit in PDF file format, *not MS Word or anything else! If you do, I will not grade it until it is resubmitted in the correct format.