Entrepreneurs, whose job is to transform ideas into new products or services for which there is a market, pride themselves on creating disruption and driving innovation. But they often fumble key interactions because they don't know how to handle the negotiation challenges that almost always arise.

Entrepreneurship typically entails a series of interactions between founders, partners, potential partners, investors, and others at various stages of the entrepreneurial process – from the “seed” stage when the business is just an idea to the “exit” stage when the entrepreneur sells or departs. We have scrutinized the full range of entrepreneurial negotiations seeking to identify the most common negotiation mistakes that entrepreneurs make, and in this article we describe eight of them. We discuss how they can learn to prevent these mistakes – especially through proper preparation – and which strategies they can deploy to overcome the mistakes they do make.