Understand Compensation & Negotiation

In this class, we're gonna talk about understanding compensation and how to negotiate for what ultimately matters to you. Compensation is a very broad topic, and it's not just about your cash compensation. So we wanna make you aware of all the dimensions of the things you can ask. And then ultimately how you go about getting them.

So let me walk you through what we're gonna cover in this class. We're gonna start with our approach and how we think about compensation. Then we're gonna talk about what we call total compensation, which is more of a 360 view of all the things you can negotiate for researching what fair market value is for your role, how to prepare for the negotiation.

And then ultimately the negotiation cuz the intention of this class is for you to learn how to maximize your value by understanding what the compensation potential is in the role and then to help you achieve it. All right.

So with that, let's go ahead and jump into the class as always, we like to start with our approach and how we think about the particular topic that we're gonna be covering.

So let's go ahead and jump into that. We want you to internalize that if you don't ask you won't get it. Sure. There are some really wonderful companies that come out with the, an amazing first, best and final. That's awesome. If you get the career, if you hit the career lottery and you get one of those amazing, but more often than not.

And I would say, even if you get one of those, you should speak up and. Because if you don't ask, you definitely won't get it. And too many of us have an anxiety and a concern about the offer being revoked. If we ask for more money or if we ask for the things that matter for us, but really then those things become like sand in the career gears and they wear on you.

So get your value, ask more often than not companies expect you to do it. So we want you to know your value, speak up and ask for it, cuz otherwise no one else will. and it can actually have quite the cost to you. If you don't negotiate, there are articles linked in this PDF down at the bottom that it could say that, say it could cost you almost a million dollars over your lifetime, and you might think, wow, that's crazy a million dollars over my lifetime, but think you're gonna work anywhere between 30 and 50 years.

And if this is one of the jobs that you know, in maybe the first five to 10 years of your career, that income is compound. You put that money in an interest bearing account, and every year you go up from there, it can amount to a lot. And this might be a bit extreme, but again, if you don't ask you don't get it.

And obviously our jobs and our work are about far more than just money. About fulfillment and meaning and purpose, but we wanna make sure that we get our value and that we negotiate for it, cuz again, a lot of times companies are expecting it. So we want you to think about that and use whatever tools you need to give you that confidence to ask.

Here's a very simple little example. If you're going into a role and the initial offer is 85 K right there. There's a high likelihood that you can get that up to a hundred. Maybe it's 95, but let's say you get UN negotiate that up to a hundred. Now every year you get a 5% increase, which could be modest in some companies could be a little heavy in others.

And then. In year five, you get a promotion. This is, I would say is a very conservative estimate of what it could look like five years into your career. But look at that, just that difference by getting that raise at the beginning, when you negotiate, it's a $20,000 difference over the course of five years, right?

It's actually a $20,000 difference. In the fifth year, if you added up all the years, it amounts to much, much more. So you wanna be mindful of that. Remember that careers are compounding and so is compensation, right? Cuz we grow on a percentage basis unless you're doing a full on career pivot or something.

And you might need to take a bit of a compensation regression, but that's totally fine. And that's deliberate. But if you're following the career path that you've set. And you are hitting those increases on a yearly basis. Remember, they're relative to what your cost of living two to 3%. It's two to 3% based on what you negotiated.

So you wanna make sure that when you are in this moment of negotiating a new position, you wanna maximize your value and get every dollar that you possibly can. Ken, we've built a little tool for you to do some very simple projections. What the future could look like more often than not. We focus on our budgeting and what we need now.

And we're gonna talk about that in this class, but we wanna give you a tool to be able to project out what the future could look like. So let me walk you through how this little tool works. So you can see where your income potential could be. So this tool is the compensation projector. You can get to it by looking for the tools in the platform.

And what it wants you to do is put. Your compensation starting place. And then it wants you to put in how comfortable you would be changing jobs at a certain frequency. So in this case, we're modeling out 15 years and we're saying we would change jobs every five years. And when we change jobs, we'd get a 10% bump.

There's a report put out by ADP about when people change jobs. That's usually what they could expect is somewhere between a five and 15% increase. So what this is showing us that at an $85,000 starting salary, if we change jobs every five years with a base increase of 3% a year and 10%, when we switch, if we stayed at the same company, We'd be making 132,000 after 15 years.

If we switched every five years, we'd be at 161,000. So what this tool allows you to do is play with some scenarios, say you actually wanted to change jobs every three years. What would that do? Assuming a 10%, again, this is meant to be a sketch. Don't think of it as a actual hard fact, but in that 15th year, You are now making 183,000, as opposed to, again, that base case of 130, 2000.

So what that tells you is over the course of those 15 years, you'll have made 300,000 more dollars, right? And if you wanna get really aggressive and say, Hey, I'm gonna switch jobs every two years, then you can see where that's gonna go. Now, this is probably a bit extreme and not necessarily something we'd recommend.

If you look at some really successful executives on LinkedIn, you'll see that they do switch every two years because they're highly coveted. People come after them. They continue to be successful and they get recruited. So this is a possibility I wanna say it's a little more rare, but it can be done. And you could probably, if you're moving at that rate, maybe even get a bit more of an increase per jump on average, maybe when you get 10% when you get 20%, but it goes to show you that.

when you take control of your career and you think about these things and you think about that future, the potential is there for you to hit those earnings, but you've gotta be on top of it and not be reactive. You've gotta be proactive. So anyways, this tool is here for you to explore and play around with gives you a sense of what, earning potential could be.

You can just play with these variables and see what that could lead to. All right. So with that, we'll wrap up this section and go into the next.

in this section, we're gonna talk about total compensation. And what that means is what are all the things beyond just cash. A lot of us talk about our salary or our hourly rate, but what about all the other things that go into a full compensation package?

So that's what we're gonna cover in this section. And compensation is everything. A company is providing you in exchange for your work. If you think about yourself as a service provider, You are providing labor service value to a company and they pay you or they compensate you for all of that. And it's not just cash.

There are a lot of things that go into that compensation in how you get your value. And we want you to be aware. Of what all those variables are so that you can work with them. Cuz sometimes companies might be a little more willing to part with some of them than others. If they're concerned with cash and then maybe they can give equity, maybe they can give more vacation time.

And that's what we want you to know are all the dimensions of compensation, which we call total compensation. and compensation, like I said goes way beyond just base salary. There are lots of dimensions to how you can get compensated for the value you are bringing to a company we've categorized them into these five buckets.

Cash is the most obvious it carries zero risk for you. It is an agreed amount that you're gonna get, and you're gonna get that on, whatever increment or time increment that the company agrees weekly, biweekly, monthly quarter. That's for you guys to agree, but that's a cash. That's your salary.

Then there's variable compensation, which is dynamic. And it's usually you sharing risk with the company based on performance. We would put that at a mid risk form of compensation. Cause it's not guaranteed. Then there's equity compensation, which is when you take ownership in the company in various forms of structure.

And we'll go into that in a bit. That's obviously pretty high risk, but could be high. Then there's benefits are pretty low risk. There's a few little things you could do where you could maybe, put money in and not use it. And in, in forms of insurance things like that, but all in all very low risk benefit that it is a form of compensation and then terms.

These are employment agreements. There are terms that are actually mid risk. If you commit to certain things that prevent you from doing work in the future, those have value that is you giving up certain rights. So you wanna make sure that you get that value in different forms. So we'd put that at mid risk.

So let's talk through each of these. So cash compensation, the most common understood form of compensation, you can get it via a salary, which would typically be a w two. You can also get a signing bonus. Sometimes I used to think that this was just for athletes and actors, but. Absolutely in my time as an executive, I saw it happen.

And that is a cash guaranteed thing. You get up front. Sometimes it might have clauses. If you don't stay for six or 12 months, you lose it. But a sign on bonus is, would be cash compensation. It's not variable. It might have, again, some rules, but cash compensation, then there's hourly, based on an hourly rate, it could be a w two or a 10 99 could be full-time hourly or part-time or.

And then project based pay. That might be more if you're doing consulting or freelance work. If you're a salaried employee that would probably be less, but you agree to a fee and you get that fee, then there's variable compensation. And what that means is, like the language says it's can vary and it's usually based on performance and the work you do, cuz what the company is doing is asking you to share risk with them.

They don't know if you're gonna perform. So rather than give it to you in guaranteed cash that say, Hey, look, let's do a performance bonus. If you win, we win and it can lead to great outcomes or it can lead to poor outcomes. And what you need to be mindful of is how much control you have of the outcomes.

So one example might be time based, if if you stay here for six months or a year, you unlock something. That time comes, you get your bonus, then there's individual performance base. So if you hit a goal, if you hit certain numbers or metrics or you deliver on time, that could unlock money, right?

The risk is that you don't hit it. It doesn't happen. You don't get the money. And then there's company based company hits a profitability or they hit their goals. Then you're focused on the collective and if the collective is successful, you're successful. So all of those are forms of variable compensation and things you can negotiate for.

And then one that's probably more common in sales is commission. You get a percentage of your activity. If you sell a big contract, you get 1, 2, 3, 4% of the contract. So that might be another form of variable composition and what that was often too. Often do is motivate you to get a higher contract value because you benefit.

So these are variable form variable forms of compensation. Usually resulting in some form of cash could result in equity or other things, but typically it's cash. People might call these bonuses, but that's what we call variable compensation. Next is equity. And we've got a whole nother class that goes very deep on equity.

So we don't wanna get too specific here, but the idea. That you either get ownership of the company or you get a promise of ownership to the company and the distinction there is stock. You get actual stock in the company. Now, if it's a privately held company or a publicly traded company, that stock would be different, right?

Cuz one, if it's a publicly traded company, It, you can turn it into, liquidity, which is dollars into your bank account. If it's a privately traded company, you have the potential for upside or say privately held. So it's not traded. But you have the potential for upside, for the company to go public one day or to get sold or exit in some way.

And that you get a big return, but in the chances of that empirically are low. So this tends to be a fairly high risk, high reward form of compensation. You gotta be mindful of the tax implications around these things. When you get the equity, when the equity vests, we're not financial advisors. So we wanna be mindful of when you take equity, you wanna talk to somebody who's an expert in that.

And what we would encourage you to do is be very mindful of when you're giving up cash compensation for equity. Equity is great and we think it's awesome. When you get it, you wanna be very careful that you are not foregoing cash compensation in the place of equity. You're not gonna have an ability to get money out.

If the company does not go public and that's particularly risky when the company is private, if the company is public, then you wanna look at things like you're vesting and when you can do it and how long you need to hold it. There's a few different types of equity. There, there's obviously a ton, but things you terms you might hear that you wanna be mindful of is an ISO, which is an incentive stock option.

Options are gonna option to buy doesn't mean you actually got the equity and it's good for you and good for the company because it defers tax until when you exercise the option, which is mean when it actually becomes yours and you buy it, but it does have a strike price. So again, we have a full class on equity compensation, and you wanna watch that, but.

High level. Wanna give you some terminology to think about the next is NQO. So non-qualifying stock options. The difference here is that you pay tax the day you exercise versus ISOs. You pay tax the day that you exit. And then there's another one called RSU, which are restricted stock units. And they can be a lot of different things.

It can be Phantom stock and can be a promise for stock. It can be stock that you haven't gotten many of these things. Are really managing around tax and how you are taxed for an equity that you can't do something with. Those are the three terms. Again, we go deep in a different class, but things to think about.

And and there's a link in the PDF to a video of a version that we've done before. If you wanna go deeper on this topic, All right. Benefits. We've broken up benefits into two categories. This is something that teal did. This is not a formalized form of benefit language, but one is what we call level one, which are generally tricky to negotiate because they're done system-wide at the company level.

Not always the case. That's not to say you can't negotiate these as a one off. It's a little trickier. So something as an example, like 401k, if the company doesn't offer 401k companywide, it's gonna be pretty hard for you to get it as an individual can be done, but you want to pick your battles in a negotiation.

So things that are, definite level one are health insurance, the kind of care dental disability. There might be different levels that you can pick within there, if a company offers it or doesn't offer it, I'd say that's level one. That's across the board. and then another one is paid time off.

Companies try to be pretty systematic about that. Cause it doesn't, it's not a good look if some people get more vacation than others, but that said again, it can be negotiated in certain companies might be a bit more amenable to that, especially if you maybe forgo salary to be able to get.

Two months of vacation or something. Cause that's what works for you in your life. But those tend to be what we would call level one again, parental leave. If they have it as a policy or don't getting one offs are tricky, cuz then everybody sees it. It can be done, but these are a little harder. Then what we'd call level two benefits.

These tend to be fairly negotiable. Can you work from home or not? Now more and more companies are doing remote, but they're still the policies, but you can oftentimes negotiate to be able to do that. And so that's why we call it a level two things like a career development budget, being able to conferences and classes and pay for licenses.

Those are often negotiable. Childcare costs. If you need to incur those costs, the company may have a plan already, or that might be something you can negotiate for. Relocation, transit, parking, transportation costs. Those can be covered. Meals might be on premise. It's a little tricky to get those covered because then that's compensation.

You gotta get paid for it, but can be, lifestyle and other perks benefits at home like work from home. those things are benefits. And then cell phone, internet, all those things are things that could be benefits. Company could make one off exceptions. So want you to know about those then the last one is.

Terms, and you might think these don't have a value, but they absolutely do. And they are in the employment agreement and they are more often than not negotiable. It might be tricky, but you can do it. The job title that carries a value. Obviously there's a JD that you applied to, but you can negotiate, right?

If it's a manager, maybe you can make it a senior manager or maybe even take it as far as director, if you feel like you're more qualified, but they can't get you there on comp that title. We'll give you value when you go look for that next job and maybe the company doesn't, isn't too worried about giving out titles and especially if you're working at startups and early day stage startups, that's a very negotiable.

Who do you report to? If they're not clear on that, you wanna be mindful of it. That's something you want to know. What day are you starting? We wanna be careful with this one. If you push your start date out too far, they could hire someone else. You're not really employed until the day you start, but negotiable non-compete.

If a company is putting a very rigid non-compete on you and saying, Hey, you can't work in this category for three years after you work here. You should say, then. I need higher cash compensation, or I need something else. That's gonna cover up for that because you are limiting my career potentials.

Now non-competes are enforceable in a different way in different states. So you wanna be mindful of that. But if you're asked to sign one, that's something you wanna think about. severance. You can actually pre-negotiate severance. This is something that executives do a lot. And if you hire a lawyer to help you negotiate, the more often than not put this in there for you, you can pre-negotiate severance.

If you are let go, not for cause then you can say guaranteed three months, especially if you are relocating or you are leaving a position and you are incurring that risk. But if they don't, it doesn't work out in two months. You can give yourself that safety and you can negotiate for, I've seen as far as 12 months, severance prenegotiated in advance, that's gonna be more for a C title VP, but it can be done.

Two more to look out for intellectual property IP. If you are working on things on nights and weekends. some IP language in an employment agreement can be incredibly extreme. And so anything you're doing belongs to the company, if that's the case, you either wanna be paid for it or you wanna negotiate it out.

And then lastly is definition of, cause if you are terminated for cause which is usually something pretty egregious like stealing or breaking the law, many of your benefits will get wiped out, any kind of severance or vesting of. so you wanna be mindful and just take a look at the definition of cause.

And if it's extreme, you can negotiate it. And if they won't, then you may wanna be compensated for it in another way. Rarely do people get terminated for, cause again, you have to do something egregious, but be mindful. Look at it. All these terms have value and they're negotiable. All right. So that is a broad view of what we would call total compensation and the things that you can negotiate for.

We want you to be aware of all of these, cuz some companies may be more or less willing to negotiate these depending on the category. And if they're tight on cash, they might be very flexible on terms and benefits. But if they're really strict on those, they might be willing to go a little higher on cash or equity.

So we want you to know all the variables that you've got available to you. To ultimately get that package that gets you your maximum value. All right. So with that, we'll go to the next section

in this section, we're gonna talk about how to research your market value, right? Different occupations and different markets might command different salaries.

And the more equipped you are with understanding the market, the more information you'll have to be able to push for the salary that's right for you. So let's dive in and see how we do. So determining what you need is really important, right? Regardless of what the market says, your position can command.

You need to know what matters to you, cuz it's gonna be your decision to decide whether to take this role or not. What your walk away is, and there is far more to making a career decision than just compensation. Maybe you're gonna get exposure to the right people, maybe this company's gonna do really great.

And it's gonna have a long lasting, positive impression on your resume. So there's things that are way beyond just cash. So it's important that, what is your minimum that you need to make, whether it's emotional. So you feel valued, practical, so you can cover your rent, but you need to know that what is the number?

I need to be making, to feel good about this. So to do that, you want to calculate your current expenses, how much you wanna be saving, where do you wanna be? And then you wanna understand what's your runway and you wanna have a backup plan. You wanna make sure that you're saving. And then you're in a place where you can come from confidence and make career decisions in a confident, proactive way.

And a big way to do that is make sure that you are financially stable. So understand what you need is really important before you embark into the negotiation. To help you do that. We've built a simple little spreadsheet tool that helps you calculate your budget. Let me jump in and quickly show you how it works.

This is a very simple little budget calculating tool we built. It is not by any means, meant to be a financial planning tool. But what we want you to know is your runway. We want you to know how long could you go with the current money and income that you've got going? So I'll show you the example. If you go to budget, runway example, what you wanna do is put in your housing.

What are your utilities? Transportation, family costs, others loan payments. Again, you want a high level understanding of your monthly expenses. So here $5,100. Then you wanna understand your income and for how long, so maybe you intend to quit. Maybe could be something like unemployment who knows, but how many months do you expect this income to go for?

And then what do you have on savings? So based on that with these expenses, you've got seven months of runway. That means if you had zero income coming. , you would last for seven months. This, obviously we have this income here, but that means right now, based on your current situation, you can go for seven months.

So clearly we've gotta fix something. Now, if you are, employed and making this amount of money, this might be an unemployment amount or, who knows where that's coming in from, but say you're actually more along the lines of 8,000 a month. Now you can see that your run rate goes out 12.

and, your savings would probably start to grow. So again, this isn't meant to be a robust budgeting tool, but as you're thinking about making career decisions, and if you were even thinking about like quitting and going, so you could focus on your job search a hundred percent, this becomes really important.

So that would mean you've got zero income coming. And you're just gonna work off your savings. Okay. That's what that looks like. If you negotiate an exit package, that's gonna pay you two months of salary. And so let's say that's that 8,000 and you're gonna get it for two months. When now you can see what that does to your runway.

And then maybe you can lower your expenses. You say, okay, actually I'm gonna move into a less expensive apartment and that's part of the plan. So what does that do to my runway? So you can go ahead and play with these variables to give you a sense of where your runway's gonna go, the tools in the platform, just search for the budget calculator.

And, you can play with those different numbers. And then since it's a spreadsheet, you can customize it, modify it, do whatever you want, but it's it's one of the tools there for you as a premium. All right. So coming back to the presentation, now that you've understood your runway and what you need to make, right?

What is that amount that gets you to a place of comfort and is that bare minimum that you will go below. Now, you wanna understand your worth in the market, right? This is beyond what you need. This is what you deserve or what the market will pay. You. The way that comes about is by understanding your expertise, what are your abilities, and skills, or the currency of careers.

That's what you get paid for. And then what is the market willing to pay for those? And that is usually dictated by the location, the industry, the company, the stage of the company and the role itself, the occupation, right? Cause different skills in the same occupation would actually have a very different market value.

So let's talk through. the, your market. If you think of yourself as a service provider and you operate in a market and there is a value for that market. And like we just said, these are the five dimensions of what we think define your market and define that market rate the role itself. Product manager, marketing manager, social media manager, the location, geography is a really interesting and dynamic topic.

Given the growth of remote work in different companies, either paying locally or globally the stage of the company. Is it an early seed stage venture back company, or is it a. Publicly traded company, the industry that you're in, cuz the industry might have paid different amounts for different roles.

And then the company itself, it's got its own form of compensation and how it thinks about paying. So here's an example. If you take the role like product manager, And here are five very different scenarios on how a product manager could be compensated with pretty much the same level of experience. So take a product manager that works at penguin and pretty straightforward publishing company that focuses on books.

They're part of a conglomerate and in New York, the projected compensation, based on some research we did on Paysa and PayScale, it's around $90,000. If you go to Scholastic, which has a lot of digital tooling and they're building more and more apps, Hey, it goes up to one. If you go to an amazing startup in Atlanta, like Calendly right now, a PM makes one 30.

It's a tech company it's profitable doing well. Then if you look at a company like Airbnb and their Raiden goes up to one 60 and then Google is willing to pay 200 for a project manager, it's in mountain view, it's publicly traded, really exceptional company. And their expectations are probably higher.

So the same person that's gonna get a product management job at penguin may not get that same job at Google, but you can see it. The market value is different for that role. So these are the different dimensions you wanna think about when you're going. And that might be also the way that you grow. If you wanna break into product management, maybe you can do it at a place like penguin and then slowly leapfrog some of these and go get.

Really excellent job at something like Google. They're all excellent, but maybe you wanna be closer to tech. So you wanna see what are those dimensions that matter to you and what are the things that you wanna optimize for in the role to then get that compensation that you wanna get to.

So you want to understand how companies pay and there's different ways to get this information. There's you can ask people so you can ask people that work at the company. If I knew somebody that worked at Google, I'd say, Hey, do you know. Product managers make, if you know someone that used to work at Google, you can ask, Hey, did you know what product managers made?

You can talk to other product managers or you can talk to recruiters. Oftentimes they'll share that information with you. So that's, those are people you can ask. And then how do you ask. Be honest. Talk about your research that you're looking to learn. You wanna learn more about the role you wanna learn, how it's compensated.

Most people will share this with you. They may not share with you what they make, but when talked about in the abstract about the role and the market and the company, you'd be surprised how willing people are to share that information. And they'll oftentimes do it in ranges. Oh, they'll make you know, 1 50 31, 1 50.

They might give you the exact number, but that information will help inform your decision and how to ask for the value you want to get. Once you're at that stage in the.

All right. There are some other ways that you can also get the data out in the world. There are great platforms like Glassdoor, PayScale, salary.com, LinkedIn that have databases of compensation. And, they attach it usually to the role. Sometimes companies even have to post it when they post the job.

Then there's databases that are specifically for compensation levels.fyi does a really good job of showing the levels of the company and their comps, more focused on engineering and product management. They've added things like marketing and their everyday they're adding new things. Another great source of information is the H one B database.

When you apply for an H one B visa, the company has to declare what the income would be. So there's really. Accurate information in there. And then there's, fairy God boss, there's ladies get paid some really wonderful resources out there to help you learn what companies are paying for certain roles, which will then equip you with what you want to ask for.

All right. So with that, we'll wrap up the various ways that you can do research. Again, the more research you do here, and the more information you have, the better equipped, you'll be to be confident throughout this process and ask for the values that you deserve. All right. So with that, we'll wrap up and go to the next section.

Okay. In this section, we're gonna talk about preparing for that conversation that you're gonna have. And you wanna do this early in your job search process, because you never know when this is gonna happen. We present the process in a very linear way, but different companies might do it in different ways.

They might ask you what you wanna make when you apply. They may ask you right in your interview. Hey, what are your salary expectations? So you wanna do this. In advance and you wanna have a good sense of where you want to go, what your target is, what you wanna be making and what the market will is willing to pay for the role you're in.

So let's talk about how you're gonna go ahead and start doing. you wanna revisit what matters to you? Think about your values. If you took our values class or you did our values workshop, go back and revisit it. If you didn't do it, we recommend you do it, but, or just look at these topics and see what ultimately really matters to you.

The environment that you're in, the relationships that you can build at work, identity, role stature, income, work, life, balance, purpose, right? Cause what you don't want is for compensation to really overpower. All the components of. Meaningful and fulfilling work. Cause it's easy to get derailed by that.

But so as you are putting on your kind of decision making weights on the scale of what to choose, think about where income and compensation falls into all these things, because these are all things you can negotiate for. If you want that work life balance. If you want to be able to make sure you're working on the projects that are purposeful and meaningful to you now is the time to do it.

You have the most leverage at this part in the process. So it's important that you go back and revisit. And understand what matters to you most now, focusing on your number, what is that number you want? And we recommend that you have three numbers, you have your target salary. This is what you'd be very excited to make.

This is what you wanna make. Then you have a, Hey, this would be amazing if I got it, which, 10 to 15% above. And then your walk away that if we go below this. I just cannot take this job. It makes no sense to me. And that number might change depending on where you are. And that's why we really encourage that.

You use that little budget calculator to just get a sense of what that walkaway number is of what you really need to be making, to make sure you're covering your expenses and not dipping into savings, unless you are strategically choosing to do that. But this way you can be deliberate about it and have a plan for what you're gonna do next.

We've got another simple little tool that you can use to help determine your target range and to be able to document your walk away, your target and your above target. It's a really simple tool, so I'm not gonna walk through it. You can find it. In the tools, but it's really a place for you to document it, have it, and be able to go back to it as a reference unless determining what those numbers are.

You're really gonna do that from your budgeting and understanding where you need to be financially understanding the market. And this is a place for you to save it and make sure that you always go back to these numbers and you feel comfortable about what you're going after. So once you start to have that conversation, whether it's in the interview, in the application, or once you get an offer, you want to be prepared and you wanna be able to make your case for it.

And so you wanna make sure that you review your accomplishment, your unique skills, so that you can make that case for your value. You're gonna wanna focus on the employer. What they need. And then what does your value do for them to help them achieve it? So what knowledge and expertise do you have? What network and context do you bring?

Are you gonna help them with hiring? Are you gonna be able to grow the team faster? Are you gonna be able to save them money on recruiting fees? Because people are just gonna follow you into this company. Those are all things you want to think about. This is a commercial discussion. And so you wanna think about it that way.

It's easy for your emotions to take over, but the more you can treat it as a practical, logical discussion, the easier it will be to make these asks. Think about the leadership that you're gonna bring the management that you're gonna bring, how you're gonna help them team. Are you gonna bring a book of business?

Can you bring revenue growth? Are you gonna save them money again? Think about what your contribution will do to the bottom line of this business. Cuz the more you can make an empirical case, the easier it will be for you to get more value and what you are worth. All right. So with that, we've covered the components of preparing and getting yourself in the.

Mindset for that discussion and having those points right in your back pocket. So you can have that discussion when you need to. All right. So with that, we'll jump over to the next section, which is actually the negotiation

in this section. We're gonna talk about the negotiation itself and how you negotiate.

And some of the things to think about as you go through the process. so the goal is for both sides of the negotiation to feel like they have reached a positive outcome, both feel good. And oftentimes they'll say if both sides don't hurt a little, then you didn't push hard enough. So you want both sides to.

Feel good. They feel like the value was there. They didn't give up too much. They don't have too much remorse. You don't want the company to feel like they paid you too much. Cuz then they're gonna put you under a microscope to make sure that you're worth it. And you don't wanna feel like you left too much money on the table cuz then you're gonna resent them.

So you wanna make sure that's a positive on both sides and you're gonna feel that because if they give a little and you give a little and you get that outcome, then you know, you pushed it and you got that value. So you want to create a win-win situation, which is really what you want out of that negotiation.

Now you're gonna have to reset your mindset a little bit, acknowledge any discomfort you feel with negotiation. If this is something you've generally not had success with in the past, and it's something that makes you uncomfortable doing that. Self-advocacy, now's the time to take a beat, think about it and realize what you're after and the kind of outcome you want, understand your risk, evaluate the risk of not negotiating.

Think about what you would be leaving on the table. Some of the things we talked about at the beginning of the section, or at the beginning of the class, but if you don't get it now, it's gonna be hard for you to get it later. If you don't get that 10% bump now when you get those yearly increments, it's gonna be based off that lower number.

So you want to get it and think about what you're leaving on the table and then use leverage. The best case scenario is to have multiple offers, right? If you are currently employ. Trying to get them to extract you out of an existing job is gonna be hard. You've got leverage. If you've got multiple offers, that gives you leverage the FOMO is real.

So if you can show other people who want you, and that you're coveted, that is gonna give them a reason to up those offers and try to get you. So think about what leverage you can have in the process to be able to give you that confidence, to be able to walk away. A tool that we think that can help you with your negotiation is again, going to your work style, thinking about what are the things that cause you angst or stress, and what are the things that excites you?

Where are you naturally more capable and where things might take you a little bit more effort. So we're gonna run through each work style and some tips that you might want to think about as you go into the negotiation. If you're a primary one, You'll probably have a bit of an easier time negotiate stating your successes, right?

And speaking very directly about your accomplishments. Those things tend to come easy for primary ones. What might be a little harder is listening to the nuance of what the company's trying to solve for and reading the room in terms of what matters to them. Somethings to look out for, if you're a primary.

If you're a primary two, you're gonna have an easy time having the discussion. You're probably not gonna enjoy confrontation and uncomfortable discussion, but being able to talk and be fast on your feet is usually something that comes easy to a primary two. What might take you a little more effort is building that empirical case, organizing your thought, cuz you tend to jump around.

So that's gonna be a little bit of extra work that you might need to do as a primary two, as you go into the process. As a primary three, what's gonna be really easy for you is listening, understanding what matters to them, understanding what they're trying to solve for. You're gonna get excited about the role, what may take a little more effort is that self-advocacy because that primary three is usually a very supporting person and someone who wants to help and will oftentimes put themselves second.

So you might need to think. Others and how you negotiating for others. Be it, family, friends, whatever it is, but give yourself that confidence and that boost to go out and self advocate. Cause it's not as natural. And if you're a primary for you're gonna be really good at researching, you're gonna be able to get the data, make the case, understand your value in the market and what may take you a little more.

Is having that conversation with a little bit of fear on where it might go. You might have the offer revoked that the process might get derailed and then making the decision itself, drawing that line in the sand and saying, this is what I want. Might be a little tricky. So as a primary for you might want more data and more research.

So be mindful, catch yourself if that's where you're going and just get clear on where you want to go and don't let it go on for too. As you go through the process, be prepared to answer salary questions at any part in the process. It might be at the very beginning when you apply online, it might be when you first walk into an interview, it might be at the end of an interview.

It might be as a follow up to the interview. And so it can come anywhere or it might be when you get that offer. So be prepared. It's important that your numbers at the very beginning, as you embark on the journey, get clear on the kind of companies you wanna be at. What's exciting, but start to formulate an opinion on how much you wanna make and what you think your value is.

Cuz again, it can come. Any point in the process. It's non-linear we present it as a linear process, but it really is a non-linear process. And so you want to do this research, you wanna know what matters to you, and then it's gonna change per company that you apply to. So you wanna be good with your foundations and what matters to you.

So if it comes up in a verbal exchange, these are some things that can happen, right? They might say, what are your salary expectations? It might be right on the initial screening call. And you really wanna put off saying your number. Until the absolute end. Cause then you've watermarked to a number or you've benchmarked to a number.

So you really want to try to put it off. You can say things like I'd like to learn more about the position and the full compensation package. So you don't anchor to a number. They call that anchoring when you put a number out too early, another version could be, I'd like to know. Another version might be saying like that, you know what the average ranges are.

So I've done my research. I know that the average, the product manager in New York makes this amount of money roughly, generally keep it course, high nineties. Low hundreds, keep it broad. So you're not pinning yourself down to a number if you're forced into doing that.

And then if they really push you and you need to have that number, then, lean into your research show that you've done the work that you know, what the market can command for this role and show that what you deserve. Another situation might be that the company comes at you with a very low.

Much lower than you were expecting. And so you wanna be prepared to be able to counter to that. And if it's too far gone, what you wanna be prepared to do is say maybe this role's not at the right level. Cuz I was expecting it to be a senior manager, but really what. I'm more of a director and this compensation is more in the senior manager role.

So that might be a way to really take it to the next level, and in my mind, I think if you're going above a 20%, that's probably where you need to invoke that conversation, but that's where you can probably push it. If the number's really low up, I'd say 10 to 20%. And I think beyond that's probably a different role, but you can say, Hey, based on my specific skills and you list them out, I was expecting something higher and this is where I thought we could.

I definitely understand budgeting issues. I understand you, I'm trying to be flexible, but this is what I'm looking for, right? Or thank you for meeting to discuss, with my years of experience, thi how can we get closer to this number? So once the number's low, you can start to push it up and there's a lot of different ways you can do that.

And then this is also where all. Other parts of compensation can come in. If they just really can't get there with that number, then you can say how about equity? How aboutfor, how about benefits? How about a career development budget? How about covering my cell phone? And you can start to layer in those other things, but have scripts ready for if they come at you with low number.

All right. Once you get the offer, you wanna start to evaluate it and take the time you don't need to respond right away. A lot of people feel like, oh, they gave me a thing I need to respond right away. Take your time, slow it down. You get the advantage of slowing it down. You can even convey that you've got other offers.

You wanna show that you're thinking through different ideas. Now you don't want to take a week because oftentimes they'll try to pressure you and say, Hey, we need to know by Friday because we've got other people waiting in the wings to make the offer to look. If they're really excited about you and they made you the offer, that means they're pretty keen to get you in.

They have built consensus internally. They don't want to lose you the same way. You don't want it to go off the rails. They don't want it to go off the rails. So time is on your side and you can slow down the conversation, evaluate it. Don't feel rushed to respond. Now, review the whole package when they give it to you.

If they just give you just comp, we'll say can I get the benefits? Can I understand what else is included? I'd like to understand the vacation policy so I can see it all. And then you're gonna want to counter more often than. you can get 10% more, a company is expecting you to negotiate. They don't expect you to just take the offer.

They've usually put in some sort of cushion, unless they explicitly tell you we don't negotiate. We only make best in finals and that's it. And that's great. That's said you can then negotiate the role. Maybe we're off the wrong role. I'd like to understand your comping and your levels. And maybe there's another level I can go into.

You have to feel that out, but more often than not, they expect some level of negotiation. And so you can always come back with 10 to 15% more. And another thing that we see a lot is that, people are worried, oh, are they gonna take the offer off the table? If I negotiate. in the time that I've been doing this with thousands of people that we've seen go through our programs, no one has had an offer taken away.

Now, if you do something outlandish and crazy maybe they'll just say, Hey look we're not, we can't meet in the middle here, but if you make a reasonable counter back, they'll just tell you, Hey, look, we can't get there, but they don't revoke the offer. It hardly ever happens. So this is your chance to make that counter and make it.

We've built a tool to help you analyze the offers. You can start to put in the value of all the different things, the comp the benefits, the compensation and it's just a simple spreadsheet that you can play with. We won't run through it here. But it'll be linked to on the page if you want to go to the offer analysis tool.

So just open it up, make a copy for yourself, and you can start to put in the criteria for the different offers that you're getting and think about the total package and what matters to you most. All right. So with that, we'll wrap up the negotiation section. Again, you wanna take your time, you don't wanna feel rushed in the process.

You want to know your value. Once you get that offer, you're gonna wanna make that counter. You're gonna wanna think about how you want to do it in writing or iPhone, think about which medium is best for you to engage in that process, but advocate for yourself, have that confidence and go out and get your.

all right. So that wraps it up for the understanding compensation and negotiation class. The main things we want to make sure you walk away with are to understand what you need to make. What's your market value, how you're gonna back that up with research, prepare for the exchange to happen at. Any point in the process and then advocate for yourself, ask for it.

If you don't ask, I promise you, you won't get it. And if you ask there's a almost 0% chance that something bad can come of it. So ask, and you will be pleasantly surprised with the outcomes that you'll get. All right. So good luck with the process. And, hopefully at this point you'll have landed a job you're incredibly excited about with a value that you feel good about and to help you propel into your career growth at this new employer.