How to get paid.
September 23, 2014
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.