Mastering negotiation in the Greater Bay Area with Evolution-U’s Neil Orvay

In negotiations between companies of opposing sizes, most people automatically assume the leverage is with the bigger enterprise, as they naturally wield greater resources and capital. This is a common misconception, says Neil Orvay, a Hong Kong and Dubai-based communication and negotiation consultant who is also the CEO of Hong Kong day spa operator, Sense of Touch.

Using his award-winning spa business as an example, Orvay says he has been able to negotiate improved terms with much larger multi-billion-dollar real estate companies. His approach is to offer them genuine value in product, brand and quality. All this, he says, was part of “the discovery process” of finding a client that prioritises the value or branding of a smaller business over pricing. 

Before entering the spa and consultancy sectors, Orvay worked as an investment banker in London, Sydney and Singapore before finally settling in Hong Kong in 2001. After leaving banking at the end of 2003, Orvay began to diversify his interests. The former financier took an active part in his spa business, which he was initially involved in as a silent investor while working as a banker. 

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Orvay remembers Sense of Touch as playing a key role in developing his negotiation skills. “The process wasn’t a 10 or 20 second phone call, as it was in a banking dealing room,” he says. “It was weeks and months of discussion and terms and relationship building.” 

Post-banking, Orvay also made the decision to improve his communication skills by studying communication psychology and negotiation. The result was a flurry of people and banks approaching him for training, leading to the establishment of his corporate training firm Evolution-U in 2009. 

His first book, Communication Advantage, was released on 5 October 2026. It details the negotiation techniques he has been teaching to business leaders and major firms over the past two or so decades. For a region as diverse and business-oriented as the Greater Bay Area (GBA), these skills are invaluable, allowing people to communicate clearly and effectively in various contexts such as negotiations and difficult conversations. 

Orvay spoke to The Bay about his spa business, negotiation strategies and his new book from his current home base of Dubai. 

Note: The Bay has edited this interview for brevity and clarity 

Has the trend of Hongkongers shopping in Shenzhen impacted your spa business? 

It’s definitely become more of an issue since Covid because Shenzhen is amazing. It’s a third of the price of Hong Kong. It’s 15 minutes to get there, so it’s not just Hongkongers that are going to Shenzhen for the weekend. It’s foreigners as well. 

Yes, it does affect the business. However, we’ve been going for 24 years next month, so we’re fortunate enough to have a good brand. We are doing okay. 

Do we lose business to Shenzhen? I think everybody does in consumer retail. However, there’s still enough people that are in Hong Kong and don’t want to go to Shenzhen, so there’s still business.

When you’re conducting a business negotiation, what are you watching for in the first five minutes?

One of the things I look for is: are they just going straight to business or are they trying to build a little bit of rapport? I’m looking at body language. I’m looking at the eye contact. These are important things. 

When someone has a closed-off body language and isn’t looking you in the eyes, as a rule of thumb, you don’t want to be negotiating because this person is going to be very resistant to anything you suggest. 

I would prefer to try and spend a bit of time on discovery, asking questions, getting to know them, sharing a bit of information, getting them to open up and be a little bit more comfortable before going into the negotiation. 

On eye contact, do you think that might also be influenced by culture?

Of course, there are cultural variations. However, what you’re looking for is the baseline. How is this person normally and do they change that behaviour as they warm up to you? It’s not that I’m saying somebody has to always look me straight in the eye. However, how were they in the first couple of minutes? How are they after 10 minutes? How are they after 30 minutes? What’s the shift? That relative shift is something you can watch or observe for anybody, irrespective of culture.

When should you walk out of a negotiation? What are the signs a deal is not going to happen?

I think you shouldn’t be assessing whether to walk away from the negotiation on one deal only. You should be assessing whether this is a counterparty you want to build a long-term relationship with, because it’s perfectly possible that somebody starts off being very difficult, but they open up with time. 

One of the things is that you shouldn’t walk away too early. You should keep the discussions going. There’s been many, many negotiations that would have failed if people had stopped talking. A classic one that I talk about as a case study is when Microsoft bought Nokia’s mobile business. That negotiation failed initially. All of the top executives stopped talking to each other, but they kept a channel of communication going. Without that channel that was still going, the senior executives wouldn’t have got back together three to four months later and closed the deal. Keeping communication going is important because you never know if something changes. 

But if the counterparty really isn’t being collaborative, is being difficult and shows no signs of moving, you’re probably going to have to walk away at least in the short term.

The GBA has many different languages. Do you think it’s better for a person to negotiate in their counterparty’s native tongue?

If those are the options, without a shadow of a doubt, speaking in the native language. There’s not even a discussion here because going through an interpreter, you can never build the relationship, understand the exact meaning, pick up nuances or get to know the person. 

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You’re missing a very, very important area here, which is the middle ground. English is the common language and people speak in that language even if their native language is Cantonese or Mandarin. That’s what happens most of the time. In my 25 years living in Asia, I never had a problem doing business in China or Hong Kong because people speak to me in English. I think the key thing is that you can look each other in the eye and speak to each other face-to-face and build a relationship.

In Hong Kong, the business negotiation style can be very direct compared to mainland China, where consensus is key. What can be done to bridge the gap? 

You’re absolutely correct in saying that Hong Kong Chinese are more direct than mainland Chinese. I would go a little further. I would say that Hong Kong Chinese are the most direct communicators of all Chinese ethnicity speakers within Asia. However, mainland Chinese are more direct than Japanese, so it’s all relative. 

If we are communicating with somebody that has a higher context language [that requires more reading between the lines] than us – for example, someone from Hong Kong communicating with a mainlander – they [people from Hong Kong] need to understand that directness may be interpreted as rudeness or as a lack of respect. 

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Spend a bit more time on building the relationships, on letting the other person talk, on getting to know them. I don’t think this is a difficult thing culturally for people in Hong Kong because, at the end of the day, we’re talking about people who are ethnically Chinese and relationships are important in Chinese culture. Period. It doesn’t matter where you are from. If you’re ethnically Chinese, relationships are important. 

There are differences between Hong Kong and the mainland. I don’t think they’re insurmountable. These are just small tweaks that we just need to make when we’re dealing with people who tend to be a little bit more relationship-driven, long-term and less abrasive.

Is there anything that GBA firms tend to get wrong when negotiating with people in the Middle East? 

I lived in Asia for 25 years. I moved to the Middle East five years ago [due to the Covid-19 travel and quarantine restrictions in Hong Kong] and I always thought that Asia was the place where relationships were the most important dynamic. 

In my opinion, in Arab culture, relationships are even more important than in Asian culture. Arab culture is very honour-driven. It’s very respect-driven. One piece of advice I was given by people that lived here when I moved [to the Middle East] was never raise your voice. If you want to get business done here, you don’t start raising your voice at people. Whereas in Asia, many people raise their voice, and it can often work. 

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That won’t work here. You have to be polite. You have to stay calm. The lesson I would say is that coming from China or the GBA and doing business in the Middle East, it is a long game. You really have to commit to building the relationship. I’m not talking about six months or a year. I’m talking about five years minimum. It takes time to build relationships and you can’t just turn up once, go away and think something’s going to happen. 

The Middle East, until obviously six months ago when the Iran War kicked off, was probably the hottest region in the world for people looking to access capital and for growth potential locally. A lot of people were coming over here. That will come back, but I don’t know when.

If I was in the shoes of the locals, I’d be thinking, “Okay, you’re here today, but are you committed?” “How often am I going to see you?” “What’s your presence in the region?” “What’s your presence in my country?” I think you’ve got to show that commitment and you have to be regularly here because with so many people knocking on the door, it’s the ones that show their commitment to the region that are likely to win.

Can you share one negotiation skill from your new book? 

The use of tone of voice is one of the most powerful single tools we have to control the direction of a conversation.

How often in your family does somebody raise their voice and start shouting or start getting agitated or anxious about something? If you respond in the same way, it becomes a shouting match. However, if in that moment you’re able to keep your voice controlled, and you say to the other person, “Just control your tone of voice.” 

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In a family context, you can do that and if you stick with that, people do calm down. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it absolutely calms people down. Now in a business context, you can’t tell somebody to control the tone of voice, but what you’ll find is if you go into a negotiation and you speak in a very controlled, respectful way when you’re challenged, you remain controlled and respectful. What tends to happen is the other person mirrors that back. 

This concept of mirroring – it’s something that happens at a body language level. It’s something that happens at a tonality level. It happens on many levels. It’s one of the most powerful techniques you can learn. The things you want to be listening for are the pitch of the voice, the speed at which somebody speaks and pauses.

You’ve taken part in ultra marathons like the Marathon des Sables and the Gobi March. What have these competitions taught you?

I learned so much from them, but it’s not so much about negotiation. It’s about personal resilience and belief. By completing those races, I gave myself an incredibly strong internal reference point and that reference point is, if I put my mind to it, I can do anything. That’s the message I want to share with everybody. Whether it’s five kilometres, whether it’s losing five kilos or writing a book, we can do it if we put our mind to it and if we commit.

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That’s not something that is directly related to negotiation theory. Does it translate into a useful mindset in a negotiation room? Absolutely, because you need to be resilient. However, I think it’s much bigger than purely negotiation. It’s really about your personal power and your concept of self. Without those, we really can’t operate at a higher level.