program. Hello, I'm Aisha Bayless, the webinar coordinator for NAPFA Genesis. Welcome to this NAPFA Genesis webinar sponsored by LLIS in Tampa, Florida. LLIS is the exclusive sponsor of NAPFA Genesis, bringing you these webinars, national conference scholarships, social events at NAPFA national conferences, plus two Genesis webinars per year on the latest in insurance and risk management. I'd like to welcome our presenter today, Sean Tablaska. Sean is the founder and CEO of Ballast Point Financial Planning. He earned his BA from UCLA in 2004 and began working in the broader financial services industry. Wanting to make a direct impact on people's lives, he studied for and earned the CFP marks in 2010. He began his financial planning career working for a high net worth firm in San Diego, where the account minimum was 2 million in assets. In order to serve clients that were more in his peer group with a new service model, Sean decided to pursue his MBA from the University of Michigan, Ross School of Business, and ultimately launched Ballast Point in 2016. He's also a co-founder of the BLX Internship Program. So thank you, Sean, for joining us today. Yeah, you're welcome. I'm really excited to present, and this is one of my favorite topics, so hopefully I'll share some tips to help everyone become a more confident negotiator. Go ahead and start sharing my slides. Can you see everything okay? All right. Thanks for going over my background. A lot of these tools I learned when I was getting my MBA. I took a negotiations course, and then I've also helped my clients negotiate a lot of job offers. So this will be kind of, there's a dual purpose for this. It's to, if you want to add an additional service line to your firm to help your clients negotiate opportunities, or for yourself to navigate your own career. This is kind of the framework we'll go through. So gathering the information, preparing, there's a lot of definitions. I'm going to introduce a framework to use, some key takeaways, and some resources. I think kind of one of the things I want to impart is that negotiations don't have to be scary. They don't have to be something that brings anxiety. If you do things in a respectful way, and you're prepared, it can go really well for you and your clients. So in terms of gathering information, I think when people think about negotiating their salary, their job offers, they're like, what's a competitive salary? I wish I had a book I could share with you, and say this is where you go for every single opportunity that's out there, where you are in your career, this is the line, and that's that. So you do have to do some homework. These are some good resources for you, Glassdoor, Angel.co. We don't talk about money as a culture, so it's kind of a little bit hard to get information. But a lot of our clients, they have friends at similar companies, or you might have friends at similar companies, and you can you can ask them what their compensation is like. A mentor, or a former manager, or a teacher, you could ask them what an appropriate salary should be for this position. A lot of times our clients, it's their former manager moves on to a new company, and they're trying to take them with them after a couple of years. So then the manager is someone that you could rely on to say, hey, what's the salary band for this position, and kind of get some information about what a reasonable salary would be. There are benchmarking studies that are out there. One that I was mentioning, I wish there was some type of a magic book. There's this Radford study. I don't have access to it personally, but things like that could be a good resource for the financial planning industry. There's the CFE benchmarking study. Kitsis puts out benchmarking studies. Caleb hasn't done this as often, but sometimes he has like podcasts where he goes over. We filled five positions. One was on the west coast, one was on the east coast. This was the base. This was the bonus, just to kind of get a sense of the market that's out there. And when you're gathering additional information, this is for when you're having a conversation with your clients. You want to kind of know what their current compensation is. Like if they have vesting stock. I'm in the Bay Area, so there's a lot of clients with company stock that's vesting. We kind of want to look at what's vesting over the next 12 to 18 months, because if you are looking at taking a new opportunity, a lot of people are worried about losing the value of their stock. They're like, I can't leave. I've got these golden handcuffs. Well, your next employer will give you a batch of stock to make you whole. And so you want to kind of know what they're walking away from. Typically stock vests over four years. So they'll typically make you whole for like the next 12 to 18 months, because at your next review, you typically get another batch and then another batch at your follow-on annual reviews. You want to know like there are other perks, like the 401k match. You know, if they're getting HSA contributions. I put a screen grab here of this white paper that I wrote. It goes into a lot more detail about the questions that you want to ask your clients and just how to prepare for yourself. So that might've been dropped in the chat here. So that's where you can go to download that. And I'm also going to share a Excel template for how to prepare for the negotiation. And we'll go over that in a little bit. So these are some questions you want to ask your client when they're saying, hey, I've got this job offer. What do you think? So I like to ask, like, is this a lateral move? Is it like, are you progressing in your career? A really good question is to ask who's your manager? You know, do you like them? Will you learn a lot? Because that's the person you're going to be interacting with a lot and who's going to be the kind of advocate for your career. To kind of get a sense of if they're going to take the job or not, you know, I like to ask, like, what is your spouse or significant other think of this opportunity? That kind of has like a good indication of like, whether they're, you know, leaning to take it or not. I like to kind of find out, you know, kind of in your broader career, like, is this like a step up? Or is it more about like kind of learning a new skill acquisition? And yeah, I kind of like asked, like, which way are you leaning? I think one worry I had initially when I was helping clients with negotiations was, is it my job to tell them to take the job or not? Or, you know, I think you should do it or not. And I think our job is really to kind of understand where they're at, understand what this new opportunity is. Kind of like what we do with our other financial planning advice is help them make an informed decision and kind of be a thinking partner and help them be able to advocate for themselves. I rarely say, I think you should go for it. Like, you should leave this job. It's definitely like the best thing for you. Usually the clients are, I'm thinking about taking it. And typically when we get involved in the negotiation is once someone already has an offer. So they, a lot of times our clients will come to us and say, hey, I got this offer for this much base, this much bonus. Like, what do you think? And that's when we can kind of get involved and say, okay, that's great. Like, this is what I think you should go back and ask for. So these are some just like definitional terms that are good to know. So BATNA is the best alternative to negotiated agreement. So this is kind of like, if you don't take this job, what is your backup plan? A lot of times people feel like they don't have, like they don't have a backup plan. What is your backup plan? A lot of times people feel like they don't have a backup plan if they, if maybe they're not working right now or you're between jobs. There's been a lot of layoffs recently. You always have an option. Like, I don't want, like, I want people to feel like they're not like trapped or like they don't have any leverage. If you don't take a role or an opportunity that's presented and say you only have one offer on the table, you always have the opportunity to start your own business or take a sabbatical or, you know, like you always have an alternative. So I don't want you to feel like, I don't want people to feel like they're ever trapped or don't have any power in negotiation. ZOPA, that's the Zone of Possible Agreements. So there's a range at which the employer is thinking about for this new role. They have a salary band in mind. You probably have a salary band in mind. And where those overlap, that's the Zone of Possible Agreements. The Grounded Aspiration. This is, I think, this is where I think a lot of people don't feel comfortable is what can I realistically ask for? So when I was mentioning preparing for the negotiation, a good way to phrase it is something like this. When you're kind of coming to the table of trying to ask for more salary or bonus or whatever it is, you can say, based on my research, I've talked to my colleagues and peers. I've also done research on Glassdoor. Would you consider X as a salary? So you're not just asking for more without a justification. So the Grounded Aspiration is what amount do you want? And what's kind of your rationale behind it? So you want to have some data points or some backup there. Brickolage. This means kind of getting creative or taking something that might not seem part of the negotiation and bringing it into the negotiation. And I'll give some ideas about that in just a minute. I think that's one of my favorite parts is kind of the creativity part. The Reservation Price. This is the price where you're indifferent. So say you're being paid like $50,000, and someone's offering you $50,000 at a new job. It's like, I don't know if I really want to take it. I mean, I'm already making $50,000. So maybe it's $55,000 is your reservation price because you have to start over at a new company. You have to build relationships. So it's kind of knowing what's kind of your bottom price that you'd be willing to accept is the way to think about reservation price. Your target price, that's where you're kind of aiming for. Concessions. You're not always going to get what you want for every single point. And in a negotiation, it's good to be able to kind of have a give and take. So even if something's not really that meaningful to you, the fact that you kind of concede on something, maybe it's like your start date. You concede on that, that makes the other party feel good that they've kind of won a point or kind of got a concession from you. There's something called the winner's curse. So if you enter a negotiation and someone says, I'll offer you $60,000 to take this job and you say yes, like right away, then that person that just offered you the job is going to be like, oh man, did I offer this person too much? They said yes really quickly. Maybe I could have gotten them for like $55,000. So I think that's something to keep in mind. Respect. The point here is you want to be respectful of the person that you're talking with, the company that you're interviewing with or negotiating with. You also want to respect yourself too. So hopefully what you get out of this is how to advocate for yourself in a respectful way that it's not like I want it more, more, more. This is what I believe I'm worth. This is the value that I'm bringing to the organization. And this is the compensation that I'm asking for. Sometimes you'll ask for something and then the employer will be like, it's not up to me, I got to ask the compensation committee. And then you're like, then the move is like, okay, great. Like go ask them and come back to me. Sometimes, like I was mentioning, there's like salary bans. And if you're asking for more outside of that ban, they have to get approval for it. Sometimes they only have authority to work around a certain number. All right, I can pause there for a second. I'm going to blast them through a lot of terms and ideas. So feel free to jump in with questions. Yeah, to kind of make it a little interactive, like in the chat box, what do you guys think is negotiable when you're negotiating a job offer? Like, obviously, there's like kind of the base and bonus, but I just wanted to see what ideas people had. That's kind of that bricolage of like, what else could you bring into the discussion? What else could you bring into the discussion? Just some thought starters. Yeah, you're starting salary. Well, as people are thinking, one thing is equity. A lot of our clients are like, my company's private, this equity is not worth anything. That's typically one that companies are more willing to budge on. Because if you're asking for more cash compensation, that affects their burn rate and how much cash they have in the bank. But if you're asking for more equity, that's something that's easier for them to provide. Daniel mentioned cash in lieu of benefits you won't use. Yeah, so say maybe you don't need health insurance. If your spouse has health insurance, you can say, would you mind just give me a cash stipend since I'm not going to be using health dental. Some other things are like the signing bonus. Yeah, I'll get into some other ideas. The start date, the employers are always going to want you to start sooner. That might not be something that you care about. That could be something that's one of the concessions that you give. You could do a deferred bonus. You can say something like, I was really looking for 60,000 in my next role. I'll take 55,000. If I'm meeting expectations at six months, would you consider giving me a $5,000 bonus at that time? You're getting to that $60,000 number, but they're not committing to it through salary. You can negotiate the title. Potentially, you could ask for a higher title to help with your career progression. This used to be a bigger thing that you could negotiate for. I only want to work in the office a couple of days, but now everyone's able to work remotely, or most everyone is. For some of our clients, they have rounds of funding, and if they raise another round of capital, can we review my compensation at that point when there's more resources? Relocation package, and yes, someone said vacation days. Yeah, working from home is common now, so it's not really something that you're going to really need to have to ask for. But these are all maybe things that you might not consider initially when you're thinking about negotiating that you can bring into the discussion. This doesn't apply as much to financial planning that it does to maybe a bigger organization. There's typically tracks for different roles. There might be a support track, there might be a knowledge leader, and then there's a people leader. You might have heard of like, oh, that person's a level 10 or that person's a level 12. That's what this is referring to. You might hear something like, well, at this level, that's the highest compensation or that's the salary band for this role. Each one of these positions has a different salary band for some of these larger employers with thousands of employees. This was just something I wanted you to be aware of, that this is how some companies work. Then this is the model I was talking about. If we start with a job seeker, the reservation price for this job seeker is 120,000. Maybe they're already at 120,000 right now, so they wouldn't really want to move unless they got something higher than that. Their grounded aspiration is 140,000. I want to go from 120,000 to 140,000 to keep progressing in my career. This is what they're trying to get, something higher. Then the employer, their band is going to be lower. The zone of possible agreement is in here. The reservation price for the job seeker is right here. The reservation price for the employer, they're not going to budge over this number. This is where we're entertaining. This is where we have to work with. I haven't done this personally, but one of our clients, whenever he is looking for a job, and they ask him what he's looking for, what are you looking for in your next role for compensation? He doesn't answer that, and instead he says, would you mind sharing what the salary band is for this role? He puts it back on them to ask what the compensation amount is for what he's interviewing for. I've never tried that, but he's had success with it, and employers have given him numbers. Then he says, okay, thank you. That would be something I would be interested in, and let me think about it with my wife, or something like that. This is the model that I was mentioning in Excel, if you download that file. What I like to do is to think about all the different facets of the negotiation. Obviously, you're going to have salary, you're going to have your bonus, you're going to have maybe stock or start date. You want to write down all the different things, and I like to just focus one item at a time. This is really helpful for you to think about, what am I looking for? What's my grounded aspiration? You can rank these of how important it is, and each one of these has a pop-out comment for how to think about each column. The other thing that's really useful for you to do is to think about it from the other person's perspective. Put yourself in the shoes of the employer and say, okay, based on salary, we don't want to have a really high overhead, so we're really going to try to keep their compensation down from a salary perspective, but bonuses or performance bonuses or things like that, we'd be open to maybe more flexible there. It really helps to put yourself in someone else's shoes, just so you can start thinking of the points that they might be raising. Any questions on this? This is really helpful as you prepare for any negotiation to take some time, print it out, or fill it out on your computer. Okay, so the ask. So, you know, so say, say you're over here and you got like the job offer for 120 and you're like okay I probably would accept it, but I'm not like super thrilled about it or super happy about it. Like I was mentioning trying to ask for things in a respectful way. I like the wording. Would you consider. So, saying something like, based on my research. I have talked to colleagues in the profession. I'm really looking for for $130,000 in my next opportunity. Would you consider a starting salary of 130,000. That way you're not coming off as confrontational. You also want to express your excitement to join the organization and the, the value that you're going to be bringing to the table and kind of just, that's kind of going back to that respect bullet point of your, your sharing your gratitude and gratefulness for the opportunity. And, but you're also kind of like asking for more essentially. And the words, would you consider are pretty non threatening. Going back to kind of the winter, winter's curse employers expect you to negotiate and they actually respect you for advocating for yourself. I think there's a fear that if you go back and ask for anything more, they'll take the job offer off the table, it's like this person's being greedy. Like, the job is not available anymore that that doesn't happen. I've never had a job like taken away because you asked for more compensation. If possible, there's something called anchoring. If you know what your value is in the marketplace. It's based, it's best to ask for that and make kind of like the opening offer. Studies have shown that whoever makes that first offer the negotiation tends to focus around that that initial number. So if you're informed, it's always best to really know the true value and this is like for negotiating for anything like If you don't know the true value of something, then then you kind of let the other party make the first move because you don't want to throw out a number that's like way higher than than what they would initially offer. Say like you're trying to buy something like like I always think about like if you're on vacation and trying to buy a souvenir, and you don't really know what the, the prices like you don't want to just go and offer a number without first asking okay well what is this cost. If there's no price on it. You would expect like a 10% raise to to move companies, even for a lateral move. And so if you think about that. As you work throughout the year. You're kind of accruing like you know you're kind of earning like a raise essentially so you're kind of stepping away from the raise that you would have gotten at, if you would have stayed at the same company. So most companies kind of will will at least give you a 10% bump. Companies will make you hold for the stock or the bonus that you're walking away from so if you have a bonus that's going to be hitting next month or in a few months, you can say hey I'm, I've got a bonus in two months. Would you mind, like, would you be able to have a sign on bonus so that way you know I'm not missing out on that bonus that I've earned. And the I already mentioned kind of how to prepare and and kind of focus on one facet at a time. These are some resources for financial planners. This is a career track that we built at our firm, and kind of the expectations to for to move up to different roles. So when you're navigating your own financial planning career it's important to know what does it take to get to that next level, and to have clarity on. Yeah, kind of like, what does it take to move from from one spot on the net to the next. So this is, this is based on Angie Herbers and we worked with Herbers and Company to build this out so if you're, you start a financial planning resident. Once you pass the CFP, and you're able to give advice on investments you can you can, that's kind of like when you're able to become an associate. Once you are the lead on about 30 clients you're eligible to be promoted to a lead planner. And then once you're managing about 60 to 80 clients and you're eligible to be a senior planner and a team lead and then from there there's opportunities to become a partner. So that's how we do it at our firm. It's good to know what the expectations are for your company. This is a little bit dated information yeah it's very dated so it's like from 2017 so I guess it's six years old but just to give a sense of what compensation is for different roles and different functions that you might be that you'll be performing. So this was a KIDSIS benchmarking study. This is from Simply Paraplanner. So for an associate advisor eight plus years of experience 95k and I think that kind of ties in here with KIDSIS maybe that's where they got their numbers from. This is from Abacus Wealth. This is kind of their some of their tracks like if you're kind of back office doing CSA work, these are the things that you're typically doing and the compensation. And then if you're kind of moving to the associate role it's 55,000 to start and then within a couple of years you get up to the $90,000 range. This is also from Abacus. It's this one's kind of interesting because it kind of shows that you know when you're eligible to be promoted is based off like the amount of revenue that you're servicing. And you can kind of see like okay 100 to 150 if you're servicing 400 to 600 of revenue. So these are just other I guess data points when you're navigating your career. Okay, I blasted through everything. I think one other thing I wanted to mention like when you are like talking about negotiating. Sometimes you get an offer and you don't really know what to do with it if it's good or not. You can always say, thank you for this offer like I'm really excited. This is a big decision for me and my family. Can I think about it over the weekend and get back to you. That'll buy you some more time to kind of do some research and see what if this is a good offer or not or what you should be countering with. I'll link to the resources that I shared. I have a question while some people are waiting on it, or while they're thinking of some questions. But when you mentioned the winner's curse and how you know companies get they get that if, if you get excited too excited about a job offer. How do you kind of prevent that from happening. I mean, do you just not sound too excited to immediately accept the job offer. I think even if you're happy with the offer. I think it's still good to go back and say, and like just like I said like buy some time and say, I need some time to think about it I'm very excited like this is, this is really great I think it's okay to show your excitement and enthusiasm they want you to be excited and enthusiastic. But I think I would still encourage everyone to ask for a little bit more than the initial offer that they lay down. And I did the same thing like my first job offer out of college I was like, Oh yeah, this is more money I've ever had in my life, for sure take it and I've always regretted not like asking for a little bit more, just because that kind of like really sets you up for the rest of your career. So, I mean, if it's already happened it's already happened but like I think in the future I think it's great to show enthusiasm, and I think I would still encourage you to ask for a little bit more and kind of advocate for yourself more, they're kind of expecting you to do it as well. All right. Daniel asked, what's your experience with asking to negotiate compensation at a current employer. My experience is employers are not expecting that, whereas they might be with a new hire. Yeah, that's a really good question. I think that, I think that each employer should be reviewing your compensation at least annually as just part of their development program for you as a team member. And if there's not like a consistent feedback mechanism, I think that would probably be something that you'd want to advocate for and kind of say, you know, getting feedback on my performance is really important to me. I'd like to get some, you know, like documented feedback like every six months. So anyway, so, but if they don't like have like a formal compensation review. That is something that you're going to have to bring bring up to your supervisor or whoever makes those decisions. And, and have good reasons for for why you justify the higher compensation. I don't know your specific situation but it could be like look I've been here for two years. I've started taking on this much more responsibility I did these projects. I'd like, I guess you want to like kind of bring it up that you want to talk like review your compensation. And like kind of set up a meeting to review it and like doing it in a professional way and say, like, I think, I think kind of the first step would be, hey, I've been here for a little while, I'd like to have a conversation about my compensation next Thursday. And then that gives them time to prepare it gives you time to prepare and then as you prepare you can kind of do your research about what you're worth in the marketplace. I think it's important to have good communication with your employer to let. Yeah, to, to like let them know what your needs are and what your desires are. And, and it's okay if they say no. I think you're being compensated fairly for what you're doing. And then say, well, what would it take for me to get to that next level and try to get some like tangibles of like, okay, we need you to pass the CFP or we need you to start being a lead planner on on these types of clients or we need to help you, you need to like kind of manage this project to review this technology or something. So trying to like show that like one either you deserve more money because of XYZ, or what would it take for you to kind of earn that additional compensation. It's hard. It's hard. Yes, I some, I imagine some of you might be at like really small firms and like it's just you and the owner or something, and they might not be thinking about this with all the other things they have going on. So it might take some of your initiative to kind of get that conversation going. If there's anything inherently wrong with with doing that. And then Jack asked in the q&a. Any tips specifically for young advisors negotiating partnership. Yeah. Yeah, that's something that we're exploring at our firm about how to offer partnership to new team members or just to people that have been at the company for a while, and just to kind of define kind of what the expectations are. I think, like I was mentioning to Daniel, I think it would probably be like kind of the first place to start is to say it's like express interest to your manager or whoever's owns the company that you know I'm interested in learning more about becoming a partner here. What would it take to do that. Yeah, I think IT transitions is very popular in our industry for providing valuations and then they also can help with facilitating how you would buy in and most practices you do buy into the practice. And you buy over like a number of years like five to seven years and it's a small percentage normally like 10% or something like that and you pay for it over five, five or seven years. So I think it would be expressing interest that you're in that you want to explore that with them. And to kind of like, like find out what their thoughts are. And if they, if they, if they haven't even started to think about it, a good place to start would be well let's get an evaluation done through FP transitions. I think through NAPFA. There's like some equity builder program at FP transitions for like I think I don't think NAPFA has a discount. But it's like $150 a month. And then you get a legitimate market based valuation on your firm every year so that's really good for the firm owner to do for like business continuity purposes. And then also for retention tool for planners that are interested in buying in. Yeah, it's hard to know where you're at in the, in the process or where your company's at. So I'm kind of curious if you turn down an employment offer after you've gone back and forth. How do you not burn bridges or like keep in touch with those companies in case the more suitable offer comes up in the future. Yeah. It's a very small industry is a very, very small industry. That's why I was mentioning doing the negotiation from a respectful way. And it's okay if it doesn't work out where like you might turn down the offer. And if you truly are interested in maybe working there one day you could you could say like you know I'm going to pursue this for these reasons is the right reason for my camp my career my family, and where I'm at in life right now. But I really like you guys let's stay in touch, who knows what the future holds. And if the media see it a conference or maybe let's let's just like do a coffee chat in six months or something. Yeah, I think, I think that would be a good approach. Do you think the amount of times that it's that it is respectful I guess speaking of being respectful I mean how many times can you go back and forth with an employer, without it being, you know, a lot. Yeah, I think one to two seems right but I have had some clients that like have gone back like three times and we're like, like she was negotiating at visa. They offered her the position that you went back and ask for more than they gave her like they met her partway, and then she asked for more, and then they met her partway again and then she like asked again and then like, and got it and so it was like, got what she wanted and so I, my opinion like seems like one to two but I'm not like the expert or anything. I think if you have like justifications for it and like going back a third time and be like look I, I really, I really can't do it like it just doesn't the math just doesn't work for my family at that point like, is there anything you can do. I think there's. Like coming up with a call like a talk track like what's your top track for this conversation like think about how you can do it in a way that conveys your needs. Yeah, kind of in that respectful way. That makes sense. I understand your client that did that but when you are working with clients and how much of it is behind the scenes like doing work on y'all's end like are you looking at Glassdoor and those things for like comparables for them or is it really just them coming with a job offer and saying, can you just run like numbers. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean we do have some clients that ask us a little bit earlier on in the process, like at Google when you're interviewing there. They ask you like, what is your expected salary and it's like an empty form you have to fill in. And from going from going from like working at like, like, from like what type of a law firm to going in house is like a really big adjustment because you're going to be getting more stock versus like you're kind of just getting a lot of compensation. So that's where it. So to answer your question. I'm not doing, I'm not doing a ton of like research on Glassdoor or angel.co. We have looked in the past and like based on, you know, we've worked with, I think like 250 families now we kind of have a sense of what seems reasonable, you know, for the region that we live in the cost of living and like, like what would be a reasonable offer. So we're not doing a ton of like right now we're not doing a ton of research on that when someone's like, what would be a salary for this that's where you could ask like, what's the salary band for this role. Next question. He noticed that there's a proportion of his professional network that is very comfortable changing companies every couple of years whereas most do not do you find that most people need to put more thought into what their value is in the marketplace. And how do they get comfortable with making intentional next steps with their career. That's a really good question. That's a really good question like, I think like our parents generation like a lot of them work at one employer for their whole careers and like there was like that loyalty to that one employer. I think more recently I think there's a lot more job hopping going on. I don't know what the averages are but like I don't know it seems like three to five years people are switching jobs. I think I don't like my wife she's really concerned about having like continuity on her resume and like that, like she worked for one employer for seven years and then like the next one for five years. So I guess I mean like continuity at one employer, not necessarily just like continuity employer to employer. And I think your question about like, do you do I find that most people need to put more thought into what their value is in the marketplace. I think that's one role that we can play as an advisor, and I have asked our clients that have like you've been at this company three, four or five years. Do you think that you're being paid competitively for what you're doing. And so sometimes we need to kind of step in and say, you might need to look at for another opportunity, but it's also up to them too because we had one client at at Meta, and she was getting another job offer from Microsoft and she's like, things are really comfortable at Meta, like, I know my job, I know what's expected of me, everyone knows me, she just had a kid, and she doesn't want to make a change right now. But I think, to your point, it's like an intentional, it's an intentional decision and she's weighing the values of her personal situation and her goals. But if someone isn't on track to meet their future goals, and they're being underpaid at their current employer, they might need some nudging to say, let's see what is out there for you. There's only so much we can cut on the expenses side but like there's a lot of opportunity in earning capacity to help people reach their goals. Yeah, so I think for that question, it's like asking these kind of open ended questions, leading the client to kind of have some self discovery. Eileen, any tips to respectfully address salary discrepancies among coworkers in the same position and level, likely stemming from one negotiating harder when taking job than the other? Yeah, that's a really good question, Eileen. Yeah, there are some firms that are like open and transparent with what their compensation is and everyone knows what everyone else is making. That's not the norm. Most kind of don't share the salaries that every other team member is earning. We personally don't share the salaries for all the different team members. And that's something that I've struggled with. Like I want, I don't know, some parts of me wants everyone to know what everyone else is making and what the different compensations are. But if there are pay discrepancies and you think that you're contributing just as much as everyone else at the company is for similar roles, then yeah, kind of like that, like we were talking about earlier, it's like, how do you kind of set the stage for having a compensation conversation? Yeah, that's kind of delicate because I don't know if like everyone knows everyone's compensation and they might be like, oh, how did you find that out? And like whatnot, but I think maybe instead of like saying because this other person has paid this much, I think I should be paid that much. Maybe just focus on the value that you're bringing and like what a competitive salary is in the marketplace and then kind of approach it that way to request an appropriate compensation adjustment. I think that wraps us up unless there's anything, any like final thoughts that you want to share, Sean? No, no, this was fun. Like I said, I like doing this and like, yeah. Even also just so you know, like if someone loses a job, you can still negotiate the severance. Like we didn't even talk, like, so like a lot of layoffs have just happened and it's just like, and it came to me, like a lot of people are like, well, I'm getting laid off. Like, what do I negotiate? Well, sometimes the company will give you a certain amount of COBRA coverage and you can ask for that in a lump sum. They might accelerate some of your investing stock or they might pay you like one month per year that you've worked. So like everything is negotiable, I guess is what I'd say. And then your leverage there is the company wants you to sign a release. And so until you sign that release, they want you to sign a release that you won't hold them liable for anything and like a non-disclosure agreement. So you do have some leverage there. So yeah, I guess, no, I don't have any other closing thoughts, thank you for having me. No, that's great, that's great. Thanks so much. So on behalf of Napa Genesis, I'd like to thank you for your time today. Thanks to everyone else for attending and please remember to complete the survey that's emailed to you after the webinar. Hope everyone has a great afternoon. All right, bye.

job offers

raises

competitive salaries

compensation packages

negotiations

BATNA

ZOPA

start date