How can I earn more? (Memo 29)

• How can I earn more?
• How can I get a higher wage?

Legitimate questions.

In order to answer those questions, consider:

• Where is the money coming from?
• Why is the money being paid?

Where is the money coming from?

• Nobody has a pot of gold.
• For all businesses, the money comes from clients. It is the client who is paying you, not me. The client pays you, not the shareholder.

Why is the money being paid?

• You are being paid because the client needs help.
• Your job is to guide the client to his destination. This means looking after and caring for your client.
• Clients are risking million dollars (in some cases) on their projects. You need to help the client so that they don’t lose their money, business and reputation.
• This means if you want to get paid well and get repeat business: focus on doing a great job for your client.
• If you do a mediocre job, barely good enough – then this will not impress the client. How then are you going to ask the client for a pay rise?

How can I get a higher wage?

If you want more, the only way to do this is to give more. The question you should be asking is: how can I give my client more?

(a) Outstanding Service

• First provide an outstanding service to your client. If you do this, you’ll get more clients and more work. If you don’t do this, then you’ll lose clients, and you’ll have less work. Keep doing mediocre work and you’ll soon have zero clients, and no work.
• Do the simple things well. I do not want to keep reminding you to:

1. update your status,
2. inform the client when you are unavailable (perhaps a cultural celebration, or an event, or a wedding etc),
3. or to post links to drawings in the private details of your statuses.
4. don’t promise things you cannot deliver.

• Once you have many clients, then we can choose our clients carefully, and choose the rates.

(b) Innovate

• Anything you can suggest which will make us cheaper / faster / better will be highly regarded.
• Innovate: This is the best way to get higher wages. Because if you provide something that the client finds valuable, that they cannot easily get elsewhere, they will pay for it. Small things are fine. Here are a few examples of innovation.
  • All of you have Teams accounts so you can better communicate.
  • We are now providing Live Links on all projects.
  • We provide statuses. We have private_details on all statuses.
  • All of you now have phones. Use them! Turn them on. Be a professional. Call clients on delivery of drawings.
  • We have multi-tenancy on the quote app. (Ram suggested it a long time ago).
  • Big one: we have EBs and approval process.
  • Big one: We have bonuses for winning and retaining clients (i.e. client reviews).
  • Barath made tutorial videos – this reduces our cost of training.

Proof of Tek1’s commitment to your remuneration:

1. EB. We have proven that if you give clients something valuable to them – they will pay you for it. You have seen this with our EB system.The innovation here is simple: give clients compelling documentation.
2. Bonuses. For winning and retaining clients. For high quality work.
3. Higher wages. Retaining a stable of premium clients allows us to pay you higher.

Higher wages takes time. If you focus on client outcomes, and innovate (or at least, help me innovate) then you will be able to get persistent differential returns. However, if you don’t focus on client outcomes, then it will be difficult for you to earn differential returns anywhere – whether inside or outside Tek1.