Negotiating Services for Anywhere Around the Globe.

About Mark Willhoft

Chief Negotiator

Mark has negotiated the high-tech industrial globe for more than 35 years. His career spans from humble beginnings in the rainforests of the Southwest Coast of Oregon, then on to Silicon Valley Sales in the late ‘80s and then morphing to high-tech international sales in Taipei in the early ‘90s, at the height of Taiwan’s industrial revolution.

After being exposed to the Asian way of business, Mark immersed himself in Taiwan’s high-tech society, growing his skills in all aspects of product creation, manufacturing, and sales, from cradle to grave, as they call it. Mark has had some impact on shipping literally millions of units over his career over dozens of high-tech products, ranging from monitors, tables, scanners, laptops, keyboards, mice, GPS devices, audio, game devices, and servers to street lights.

Mark knew, when he saw the industrial might of Taiwan, there was nothing like it anywhere in the Western World. He knew he needed to stay there to learn and know what no other Westerner would know.

Mark was formally educated at the University of Oregon with a B.S. in Economics. Money has always been on his mind after watching the timber industry crumble in the late ‘70s and five lumber mills shutting down on the Coos River within two years because of the passing of the law to protect the spotted owl. Everyone’s dad lost their jobs, and the town is still stuck in 1980 today.

When the deal becomes too large or complex, call High-Stakes Negotiators.

Mark worked in enterprise accounting software as well as computer hardware technologies, then moved to Next software and Apple imaging technologies before heading to the Far East, where he sold BIOS software to the roughly dozen laptop OEM brand names of the time in Taipei. He ended up staying in Taipei for a decade and building a family there.

During his time in Taiwan, Mark furthered his business skills in product development and subsequent manufacturing of dozens of devices, shipping millions of units such as monitors, scanners, GPS, power, audio, industrial, and portable systems to various consumer electronic devices for more than 30 years.

He also worked with key supply manufacturers, always negotiating the best quality, cost, and delivery metrics. Negotiating global market-rate pricing and delivery required haggling skills that Mark pulled from his sales experience but also his natural couth learned in the Woods of Coos Bay.

There is nowhere to learn to haggle or negotiate in America. We simply don’t get many chances to exercise such skills, and like any skill, it takes repetition to become proficient.

When it comes to actually negotiating, in the daily Asian factory trenches, where every unit sold is critical to our success, often in very difficult markets, Mark has done the work on-site in East Asia where so few can ever say they can match the “personal-investment” to become a global negotiator. It’s what no Law/MBA School can ever teach.

Mark developed haggling skills in the Taipei night markets. Couth was the key to survival in the rainforest of a logging/fishing community, and once, during a Narcos stop in Southwest Juarez, the most dangerous spot in all the Americas. Mark was forced to negotiate his way out of eight masked narcos machine guns in 2022. His “couth” saved their lives.

But then, there are the extraordinary political negotiation skills that set Mark apart from the pack – to know how to map the stakeholders and their agendas, to be able to work with any culture or personality, and to draw alignments necessary to bring a complicated negotiation theater to an acceptable close. Very few people have such skills, and few have read the very specific books and years of work-study that must be known to own these artful skills. Political navigation is not an innate skill. It takes decades to master because you must sit in these political theaters to understand what it is like. It takes practice, just like everything else.

While living in Taipei, Mark worked on high-value projects across East Asia. He recalls a time riding a bus out of South China, where there were more than 30 miles of semi-trucks backed up, trying to get the product out before Chinese New Year. He started counting the stamps in his passport, and it had more than 300 stamps. That’s a lot.

At this point, Mark realized he’d crossed more ground than anyone he knew at the time. This investment in the real business of getting products built and produced, as well as the Asian haggling culture, turned Mark into a businessman with unique skills. All suppliers who work with Mark know him to be transparent and focused on solving the gaps, and his couth brings collaboration and rapid problem-solving.

Mark moved back to the USA in late 2003 for his children’s schooling, but his work in Asia, development, and manufacturing did not stop. He continued being a key role player in electromechanical device manufacturing and eventually arrived in global supply chain management, which is where he spends his time today.

Mark projects a welcoming presence and then earns trust through his honor. Not everyone has these skills. It takes time to earn such “trusts” at this level because of the critical nature to ensure continuity of the mission-critical items.