Category: Corporate Games

You’re a super salesperson.
Your contact information file
needs its own memory stick.
You close deals quickly.
You can sell anything
and everything.

A prospective new employer
offers you a choice
between a higher base salary
and a lower commission base
OR
a lower base salary
and a MUCH higher commission base.

Which one do you choose?

If you need the money
to live on,
in 8 out of 10 situations,
you should choose
the higher base salary.

Why?

Because base salary is set.
A superb salesperson buddy of mine
has worked for a Fortune 500 company
for two years.
This company has fiddled with
the commission calculation
three times,
each adjustment resulting
in him receiving LESS commission
for the same sales.

Because bonuses
and other calculations
are based on base salary.

Because the company
often determines your patch.
They decide who you sell to
and what you sell to them.
Companies tend to give
the salespeople
with the highest commission rates
the suckiest patches.
(Your manager will likely
say something like,
‘We want to challenge you.’
Don’t fall for that bullsh*t.
What they want
is to reduce
the costs of employing you.)

Because if you’re laid off
(which happens to salespeople
more often
than other employees),
your unemployment benefits
are often based
on your base salary.

Because the next employer
will ask you
what your base salary
was
and use that
to determine how important
you were to the previous employer.

And there are many
other reasons.

Negotiate for as high
of a base salary
as possible.

Whenever we share that
one of our business building goals
is financial security and independent,
some idiot is likely to reply,
“Money can’t buy happiness.”

Yeah, that’s bullsh*t.

Money CAN buy happiness,
especially in the USA.

I grew up dirt poor
in North America.
We didn’t eat every day.
We were homeless at times
and constantly worried
about losing our home
at other times.
Fights about money
were regular events.

Hunger pains
and the constant fear
of being homeless
REALLY impact happiness levels.

In the USA,
money can decide
whether you live or die,
whether your loved ones
live or die.

It is the difference
between getting immediate treatment
for cancer
or delaying it until you have the funds.

Money decides
if you take the weekend off
and spend it with your family
or you ask for that extra shift
at the job you hate
to pay the rent.

Money decides
if you buy your daughter
the coding book she really wants,
the coding book
that might change her life
forever.

There are hundreds
of ways
money can impact happiness.

Money CAN buy happiness.
It might not be right
but it is today’s reality.

A buddy wants to switch careers.
She has been taking evening courses
to prepare for this.

This semester,
she didn’t have the funds
to pay for these courses.

She told me
she’d take the semester off
and do other things.

None of these ‘other things’
have anything to do
with the career
she’s hoping
to, one day,
enjoy.

Which is a HUGE sign
that it is likely
NOT the career
she should be
going into.

Someone truly excited
about a field
would be using their spare time
to take free online courses
or do volunteer work
in that field
or mirror experts
in the field
or do a gazillion other things
that would make her the best
in that field.

If you wouldn’t allocate
at least a portion
of your spare time
to a task.
you might not want
to make that task
your core job.

I’m fortunate to be part of
several support groups
consisting of female writers
in the Romance Novel Industry.

We’re all business builders.
We are all in the same industry.
We are competitors
but we’re also partners.
We share advice and tips,
support each other,
and often help promote each other.

This has been
EXTREMELY effective.

Jocelyn Greenky,
CEO of Sider Road,
shares

“There’s a new girls’ club
that we didn’t have before,
because the workplace
was largely male dominated.

Now that so many more women
are entering the workplace,
we’re finding our voice.

We’re also building
circles of trust with one another
because we may be
experiencing similar hurdles,
and have each other’s backs.”

Consider reaching out
to other women in your industry.

That could help
move you and your business
to the next level.

A friend posted
that she wanted
a $4/hour raise.
She asked
if that large of a raise
was possible.

Many of her friends
posted that it wasn’t.
The increase was too large.
No employer would agree
to it.

Which I found distressing.
They were discouraging her
from even ASKING
for that size of a raise,
telling her not to bother
even trying.

I told her
if she has increased sales
or decreased expenses
by $20/hour,
almost any employer
would seriously consider
her $4/hour wage increase.

(Which prompted a
‘whoa’ from her
and a thread of
‘that’s not possible’
comments
from the friends
who don’t believe
a pay increase of that size
was EVER possible.)

Always ask for a raise
during every
performance review.

But definitely
ask for a raise
if you’ve increased
the company’s sales
or decreased
their expenses.

(If you haven’t done this,
make figuring out
a way
to do this
a priority.)

One of the common complaints
I hear from
business building women
is their husbands/partners
don’t take the initiative
with the household chores.
They wait to be told
what to do.
It is a task for them
and a project for us.

As
Seth Godin
shares

“Your job might be
a series of tasks.
Tasks are work
where money is traded
for time and effort.
You put in a fixed amount of time,
expending effort along the way,
and you get paid.
In the end,
tasks are completed and
it’s up to the boss
to weave those tasks together
into something useful.”

In the case of chores,
the woman becomes
the unpaid boss.
She’s placed
in the role of project manager
and we all know
how much additional work
THAT is.

This sucks time and energy
from business building
and it hampers our success.

How to avoid this?

Consider treating the household tasks
as a small business
and your spouse/partner
TRULY as your partner.
He/she should be assigned
half of the responsibility
for the tasks
relating to the home’s upkeep.

Each task has a budget.
Each task has a project manager.
You can have monthly meetings
about the tasks
but the responsibility for the tasks
belong to that task’s project manager.

Delegate ALL of the responsibility
for some household tasks.
You can’t do everything
AND build an awesome business.

When I was in university
long, long ago,
(grins)
a professor told us
to plan on
not working full time
after the age of 50.

He said
if we kept our skills current,
we MIGHT work contract
after that age
but we were unlikely
to have full time employment.

That prediction came true
for almost all of my 50 plus buddies.
And it is even MORE likely
to come true
for anyone younger.

This isn’t gloom and doom.
It is merely a new reality
we can plan for
and benefit from.

I worked like a demon
when I was younger,
holding a full time job
and some part time jobs,
keeping my expenses low
and my skills current.

Then I switched into contract work,
gaining experience
in a wide variety of industries.
I took high paying extra gigs
like crafting business plans.
AND I started businesses.

Once one of those businesses
took off,
was semi-successful,
I switched to operating it
full time.

Now I’m earning more
than I ever did
at the full time jobs.

And that was all thanks
to my professor’s prediction.

You likely won’t have
a full time job
after the age of 50.
Embrace that.
Plan for it.
Use that knowledge
to increase your probability
of success.

The WSJ has an article
about how
the most powerful women
in business
wear dresses,
not suits.

No.
No, they don’t.

They might wear dresses
to press conferences
and to galas
but even then,
I suspect
they have pants/slacks
in their car
or a nearby hotel room.

Why?

Because a big part of
being an exec,
being a leader,
being in charge,
means responding to emergencies.

Would you respond
to a fire in one of your locations
in a skirt and heels?
Of course, you wouldn’t.

If you were wearing a skirt
during this emergency
and a male coworker was in pants,
the male coworker would be sent
to deal with the situation.

Everyone knows
the female CEO has pants and sensible shoes
stored in her office.
They don’t know you have pants and shoes
at the ready
also.

So your male co-worker
would be asked to tackle
that high risk and high profile situation
and HE would be the considered
for the next promotion,
not you.

Don’t wear clothing
that limits you.

Note:
I’m NOT saying
to dress like a man.
There are some wonderfully feminine
pant suits
and blazers.
Merely wear something
you can tackle all of your tasks,
normal or otherwise,
in.

I organized a dinner yesterday.
It went well.

After it was over,
I sent thank you messages
to all of the attendees.

Why?

Because thank you messages
make people feel appreciated.
It signals that the event
was important to me,
that their time and involvement
was also important to me.

People LOVE being valued
yet it is rare that
we have an opportunity
to express our appreciation.

That makes
thank you messages
very powerful.

They can be the difference,
for example,
between landing a job
and receiving a rejection letter.

Michael Tomaszewski
shares

“According to a recent study,
1 in 5 recruiters and hiring managers
will automatically dismiss a candidate
if they haven’t sent
an interview thank you email.”

If you have an opportunity
to send a thank you message,
DO IT.