How to get paid.

By Gonzalo López Martí @LopezMartiMiami

• Anyone who’s read a business magazine in America in the last 15 years has seen it.
• He’s been running direct response ads for decades now.
• Gary Karrass, the art of negotiation.
• Or something like it.
• You’ve bumped into his his neatly combed over coif & his smirky mug looking at you from the page.
• Dude is a lecturer or some such.
• He sells courses on-line and on tape about the aforementioned art.
• His headline slash call2action slash clincher is simply great:
• “In business as in life you don’t get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate.”
• A ginormous truth.
• Clap clap, you nailed it Gary.
• Negotiating, however, is not a friendly chat.
• You can be the best at what you do.
• You can be charming and eloquent.
• Still, unfortunately, you’ll need some sort of coercion to put pressure on the other party and ultimately get proper payment.
• It’s the only way to protect your interests & your cash flow.
• It might feel like mild blackmail.
• It might make you feel a bit guilty.
• Guilt: the key word in all of this.
• We Latinos are mostly Catholic, and as such we have a guilt-ridden, traumatic relationship with money & profit.
• As opposed to, say, Protestants and Jews.
• For us, money is dirty, money is sinful.
• We love it and we hate it in equal parts.
• We have a repressed conception of the thing.
• We earn it, we borrow it and we spend it in spurts and binges.
• We go from flush to broke and back with mindless abandon.
• Maybe that’s why we Latins can be equal parts ostentatious, profligate and inexplicably stingy.
• Penny wisdom and pound foolishness is in our DNA.
• Money burns our pockets and our purses, we just want to put it away or part ways with it.
• Our priorities are all over the place.
• We will burn six months’ salary on a quinceañera bash and skimp on healthcare coverage.
• The rims on our cars can be more expensive than the car itself.
• We’ll spend thousands on boob and butt jobs while saving nothing for our kids’ college education.
• We hate to admit the fact that money is important and it should be dealt with rationally.
• We want to believe it comes and goes and we have no control over it.
• Because money is evil.
• Profit is shameful.
• Lucre is filth.
• It’s usury.
• There’s a particularly stifling place in hell for those who fall for this sin.
• And so on and so forth.
• Hence, when it’s time to discuss a price tag for our services, we start stuttering.
• We tiptoe around the subject or just avoid the topic altogether.
• Our negotiations are vague and muted.
• Eye contact becomes elusive.
• We go in too high or too low.
• We either apply “go fish” tactics that irritate the other party.
• Or go so low as to plant too-good-to-be-true distrust in the mind of the potential payee.
• Ultimately, obtaining proper compensation for our services ends up riddled with misunderstandings and friction.
• Adding insult to injury and ensuring our relationship with the notion of money becomes even more traumatic.
• A vicious circle.
• In our line of business -advertising- negotiating proper compensation and getting paid -collecting, that is- can be a nightmare.
• We sell the ultimate abstraction: ideas measured by man hours.
• We just put the noose around our own neck when we caved in to the split-up of media planning & buying from the other disciplines in the business.
• Back in the day strategy and creativity were pretty much a freebie.
• Media planning was a virtual freebie too.
• The big strategic, creative and media planning ideas were thrown in as a bonus.
• Media subsidized all the other departments.
• We made our money with the good old 17.65% commission on the purchase and allocation of media.
• Media outlets & agencies were all in the same boat, having one another’s backs.
• Pay up or your ad will not see the light of primetime.
• That was then.
• This is now.
• Agencies do not exist anymore.
• Or let me rephrase: there are only a handful of agencies left on this planet.
• They are called WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, IPG, Havas, etc.
• All the companies under their fold are just consultants, boutiques, running like hamsters in a treadmill, selling man hours under the law of diminishing returns.
• Jumping through hoops to get paid less and less.
• I apologize for using the term “man hours”.
• Woman hours are increasingly critical in our biz.
• Which are cheaper, by the way.
• Because as we all know, equal pay for equal work is a myth.
• Apples to apples, the hourly rate for women and ethnic minorities is lower.
• Remember: you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.
• Particularly come bonus season.
• Speak clearly and conclusively, take time to lay out in detail the consequences of a failure to deliver by either party on a business transaction.
• Speak softly and carry a big stick.
• America the beautiful has been doing this for centuries now.
• We are the land of the free, democracy, tolerance, free trade, free enterprise & drive-thru wedding chapels.
• But if you don’t sell us oil at market prices we will stage a coup to topple your government and bomb the s**t out of you.
• Thank you for your business.
• You don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.
• Contracts -either written or in the form of a handshake- are worth nothing if you do not have the power to enforce them.
• Handshake agreements aren’t worth the paper they are not signed in.
• Even when there’s a written contract, a ruthless, cold blooded or hard up payee has countless ways to give you the runaround, withhold payment & make your life miserable
• Promises are just that, promises.
• Don’t do favors or give discounts.
• You’ll do a half-assed job and discredit yourself.
• The good old line “help me out this time around and I will hire you in the future when the budget is higher” 99% of the times is pure, unadulterated manure.
• Never deliver the final product until the agreed upon amount of cash changes hands.
• Even if at some point if feels like blackmail, swallow your guilt and DO NOT DO IT.
• Wait until the check has cleared.
• I know.
• Easier said than done.
• I break these very rules pretty much every week.
• I want to believe there still is hope.
• And I keep getting burned.