I was lucky enough to hear Eddie Jordan tell this story to a friend of mine in Cape Town, in between playing a set if I remember correctly. He told it the way he did everything, at speed and with a glint in his eye. He died in March 2025, and this remains my favourite thing he ever did. In 2002 his Formula 1 team had two sponsors and one impossible problem. Benson & Hedges were already on board, and their deal required the cars to run in that famous Jordan yellow. Then DHL agreed to sponsor the team too, which was marvellous, right up until they explained what they wanted. DHL was white and red back then, and they wanted the car repainted to match. Eddie rang them and said he’d love to, but the car couldn’t go white. DHL’s answer was short. Then we won’t sponsor you. Most people file that under “lost deal”. Eddie asked for a meeting with the DHL board instead. The marketing director said no. So he had his secretary ring the board secretary. Every hour. On the hour. Day after day, until someone at DHL decided the cheapest way to make it stop was to give the man twenty minutes. He walked into that boardroom with pictures of every major shipping and logistics brand of the era. He laid them out. Nearly all of them were predominantly white. His pitch was not “please let me keep my yellow”. It was: if you want to be recognised anywhere on earth, you cannot look like the category. You need to own a colour, and here is the one you should own. And he handed them the exact yellow already sitting on his F1 car. He knew exactly what he was asking them to do, and said so. “Every marketing guru will tell you that you should never change the colours of your brand, but here you must bite the bullet and pay the expense for long-term gain.” DHL bought it. The sponsorship went ahead, DHL repainted its entire global identity, and more than twenty years later that yellow is on vans, planes and depots in over 220 countries and territories, across a group of roughly 584,000 people. Eddie, being Eddie, then drew a monthly royalty. Not for the idea. For the use of that specific yellow. There are three key negotiation tactics you can take from this: When they say no, check who said it. The marketing director’s no was not the company’s no. Eddie went and found the people whose no actually counted. Persistence is a strategy, not a personality trait. He didn’t out-argue anyone. He out-lasted them, politely, on the hour, until the meeting was easier than the ringing. Stop defending your constraint and start selling it. The yellow was the thing he couldn’t change. He turned it into the thing they couldn’t live without, and charged them rent on it forever. Most negotiations are lost by people who accept the first no from the first person who says it. Having the idea is one skill. Refusing to accept a no from someone who isn’t allowed to say yes is quite another. We teach the first in our Creative Thinking course and the second in our Leadership course. Sadly, neither comes with a royalty on a colour of your choosing but you will become smarter and wiser :)