You are making around $200,000 a year or more. You're in the top 10%, maybe top 5%, depending on your city. You worked hard and you earned it, but here's the thing. Most people don't talk about. $200,000 doesn't feel like it used to. Maybe the house payment is going up. Daycare is brutal. Maybe you've gotten used to that income and now you're looking around going, wait, this is it. Maybe you want to retire early, or maybe you wanna retire a spouse. There's a lot of different motivations, hobbies, and goals that you have. And today I'm gonna give you a roadmap from $200,000 a year to 300,000, $400,000 and beyond how people break through that. Two 50 a year, two 60 a year stump. That's not it. This isn't generic advice about grinding harder or taking a course. These are my practical strategies I use with my coaching clients, people who are already making great money, but are ready for the next tier of success. This episode, I'm going to change how you think about your value pitching it, visibility. Career leverage and risk. So welcome back to the Move Up Careers podcast. Where we turn experience into offers and potential into income. If you don't believe me, go look at the hundreds or thousands of reviews on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Real people that tune in and make a lot more money after listening to this podcast. How do I do it? I'm a former executive recruiter. Search firm owner, talent acquisition VP and career coach for high performers like you. Let's talk about moving up a tax bracket. $200,000 is a new glass ceiling, and I'll tell you what I see over and over while I coach. High performers are making between. 180 and two 50, depending on your area. That might be one 50 a year depending on what state or city you live in, 250,000, $260,000 and they're stuck. They're smart, they're respected. They're doing excellent work, doing great work. Usually working harder than the people they report to, but they're invisible to the people who make comp decisions. This level, you don't get paid for working really hard. You get paid for scale. You get paid for visibility and ownership. You don't get paid to execute anymore. You get paid to drive results. Sarah was a client of mine working as a senior technical program manager. She had been at 1 2 15 and flatlined. She was super happy with it when she got it, but that just doesn't do it forever, right? So we reframed her story around business outcomes, shortened development cycles, launching features that drove millions of dollars in pipeline, and how she turned chaos into really the foundation of the business and their growth. She wanted a promotion, but through our work and through ideas I had within six months of working together, she landed. An offer for $312,000 with some performance pay on top of that same person. She didn't change better visibility and higher perceived value instead of being really smart and working really hard and being the genius. That's what she thought was good, right? That she was just really smart. We flip that around, right? Higher perceived value, what can she do at a corporate level? What's the bottom line on hiring her? What's the ROI If she was a stock right? Or maybe a stock isn't the right thing. If she was something that you buy that will appreciate, how do you define that and how do you talk about that in a non awkward way? So that's the name of the game from here on out. You gotta know your total compensation. So before you go hunting for $400,000 a year, you need to know what you're actually earning today. That means your base, your bonus. Incentive equity vesting 401k match, PTO payout, the whole picture. Have you ever put that in a spreadsheet? Most people under count it. You need to change how you negotiate, how you ask, but more so how you plan. So audit your full compensation. I do this with people. That's not what this episode is about. But you need to look at what you make total. And it's not fun. Sometimes it makes people nervous. Really dig into that log in, try and remember the password or whatever for your. 401k plan site, right? Look at everything you need to grow your scope, not just your skills. So from there, promotions at this level aren't about being more efficient, they're about owning more. Can you double your team? Can you lead a business unit? Can you own, can product line? I worked with a guy named Genes. He was a senior ops leader. I can't even remember where. I think that was his title. Senior Ops Leader, senior something leader of operations, and we worked on identifying an underperforming part of his organization that leadership hadn't figured out. He pitched a reorganization, which no one likes, but it was needed, and nine months later, he was promoted to VP with a comp package at $295,000 a year. You don't wait to be handed the reins in this case with James. I coached him on grabbing the reins, finding that pain point, that inefficiency that needed to happen. He did. He didn't make a couple friends in doing that, right? A reorg sucks, but he basically fixed a stalled business. Millions and millions. I don't know. It was 30 million. MR, something like that. So let's be real. Some companies don't just pay some industries just can't support high comp bands. So you might be at $225,000 a year. That could be $350,000 somewhere else doing the exact same things if you're in big tech, high growth software as a service, which is actually, from what I'm seeing struggling a little bit right now. Finance, p and e backed growth firms. Obviously AI is the big thing right now, but that's not easy to pivot into, but there is a lot of money there. If you are, you're much more likely to hit 400,000 or more because that's where the budget exists in these industries. So if you're plateaued in an industry or company, you might have to just jump, right? So if you are working in tech at a university. there's going to be a ceiling there that no matter how much you listen to this podcast or read books or whatever, you're just not going to hit that. Now, universities do pay that much. You get what I'm saying here, like places have limits and so you want to look at either companies or industries where there is that potential, where there's money. You need to understand. Equity. It's one of the biggest wild cards. So RSUs versus options, a public company versus a private company. Vesting periods versus cliffs. So if you're making $160,000 a year and counting on a hundred K in equity, but it's based off of fantasy valuations, which most of them are, you are not. At two 60 a year, you're at one 60. So know your equity modeled out. Be real. That comes down to risk. And that's a big thing where I see people that are making $500,000 a year, $700,000 a year. A lot of them are in sales and they took risks early on in their career, or they were making. Say $400,000 a year, and they took a job with a base of one 50 or 250 with massive upside, and that's how you jump. That's how you make a name, get a reputation, being well networked, proving that you can do big deals. The other thing is being highly technical, being able to understand how to implement something and that it's not just technical as in computers and code. I can be a very technical go to market plans. Ex helping expand a business instead of just maintain it. Launching product lines, things that you get recognized for. The next thing is you can do all this great work, and this is the biggest thing I see. There's 20 biggest things I see, but this one is really important. Visibility drives compensation, so if you're not top of mind for people controlling budgets, you just don't really get a raise besides the 3% a year. Or 5% or whatever period. Make sure your work is tied to business outcomes. So speaking metrics, figure out what your company is obsessed with OKRs or KPIs, whatever it is. Present your findings and share success stories within the company. So that could lead to a $70,000 raise because you know how to present your quarterly team results to the CFO instead of, we did this, we struggled with this, and then we did this PI pitch. What you accomplish and what more you can do. The visibility changes how you are perceived. A lot of companies want to promote people If you are helping the company succeed, if you're an attorney at a big firm that's winning a lot of cases and you're doing it with spending less money or doing it by booking fewer hours and winning more cases, whatever it is, a lot of times they want to keep you, not you. They wanna keep the person who does that, and that might be, or someone, you or someone else, they just don't know about it or it hasn't been drawn out for them. That's your job. I haven't worked Somewhere yet where there's someone whose job is like sitting around searching for the underpaid diamond in the rough that's on you. Next up is learning premium skills or taking a chance and not just learning a premium skill, but a like a new skill, right? Not all skills pay the same. Most of the high earners I work with have some of the following. Mergers and acquisition experience. A big one is go to market strategy, implementation of AI or language models, sales operations, or pricing optimization. Or like cross-functional executives and aligning those teams. You could be just proving your marketing skills, your research analytics. You can be high paid in about any type of job. It's just about how you position it. But you do need to do high value things. Not everything. Those people don't get paid. The jack of all trades has very little value. Unless you're at like a startup and that's when you're getting equity and you're getting paid for that, right? You need to do a high value thing and you need to figure out what that is that you do now, and maybe what you should pivot into or what you should lean into. You should be using interviews. You should be interviewing at least once a year, even if you're not looking. This is a huge thing. I have some long-term coaching clients, like they work with me basically on retainer for years and years. It's not that we meet every week or every month, but they basically leverage me to get more and sometimes even I'm like, look, you have been in this job for 10 months. You got everything you wanted. The CEO really likes you just kinda be happy for a little while Sometimes, a lot of times I coach the opposite. I'm like, you need to move now yesterday. But the people and the pattern, and I collect a lot of data that I see over and over again is. Interviewing at least once a year for a different job or an internal job every year. It keeps your tool sharp, it gives you leverage. It helps you network in a way that like this is a whole nother episode just for networking so that you can even just like interview and say no, or be told no, and then talk again later. You will meet the right people when you get to final round interviews, whether it's at that company or they move somewhere else, it gives you leverage. It helps you understand the market and what the market sees in you. Yes, it does often lead to a $50,000 bump or a $100,000 comp swing. So don't be passive. Test out the waters. Even if you're happy, this is your reminder right now, especially if you're employed. Go play around. Go apply for some jobs. Go network with some people. Don't use up all of your. Network equity and goodwill, but don't be stagnant. Three years in the same job is awesome and it looks good in a resume. Five years looks good. 10 years, you start to you're on the losing side of that unless you are getting big raises in promotions or moving around a little bit. Some of the people that I know that are in that high earner bracket that aren't in the C-suite at a big company, that want to get to that 300, $400,000 a year. They increase their income by consulting, which you have to be really precise in what you do and build up reputation, but also speaking huge for networking. You just don't want to become a speaker. That's the one pitfall, unless you want to become a speaker. But you don't want to just be someone who talks about doing stuff 40 hours a week, if that makes sense. Board roles is huge. Another great way to kinda get your hands in a lot of pies. And if you've done well, you should look into angel investing. That's not what this podcast is about. I know quite a bit about it, but if you're into that type of thing, think about leveraging some of your income. Invest 10 grand in 10 companies and watch nine of them fail. And then the 10th one or the third one or whatever 20 x that, or x that. Not everyone should, but if you can monetize your expertise, what you know from your job without trading your time for dollars, it compounds really fast. Some things to look out for and things that kill progress. A big one. This is like the risk reward that's up to you. But like equity that never matures is huge. I've seen that happen. I've had that happen to good friends. I've seen that happen with clients. it's just a risk. That's why it's like you want that equity to vest and mature, but you also have to know like when this company, if the company's failing, when to cut out. Taking on more and more without more pay is a killer. I think saying no is also really bad. It makes you look really bad, but you have to know how to balance that. Being loyal to a company that isn't loyal to you and your growth, a lot of 'em don't care like they, they're liking you and being loyal to you or to very different things. AI is proving that to a lot of people. A lot of people I'm helping get. Like outta a bad spot because of that, right? They're loyal until they can do your job for nothing or with ai. Or another thing to look out for is thinking. Your value is obvious. It might not even be obvious to you. And if it's not crystal clear to you, oh, think about the rest of the organization, no one gets paid what they're worth. You get paid what you negotiate and position yourself for. So in closing, this episode would probably be really good as a checklist, but moving from 200 KA year to 400 KA year isn't about being twice as good. And it's not about working twice as hard. It's not about working twice as many hours. It's about being positioned at the next level. If you're already in that range, you're not that far, you're probably two to three changes away from that leap, whether it's. That shift in visibility that I talked about, a new employer, a stronger narrative, or just finally negotiating the raise you should have asked for last year. You can get there. I've helped dozens, and dozens of clients do it. It's my expertise. I can help you do it too. You can apply for coaching@moveupcareers.com. I have a bunch of different coaching options there. Let's move you into a comp tier that actually reflects the value you bring. And if this episode helped you think differently, share it with someone else who's earning but still underpaid or just hungry for more. And If you're tuning in and you're not quite there yet, maybe you're being paid well, but it's a little bit earlier in your career. You haven't hit that $200,000 a year, use this. Now. this will probably help you more than anything if you're 26 or 32 and you're making $150,000 a year, and you're like, how do I fast track? This will be very valuable to you, but the average listener of this podcast is in a pretty high tax bracket for long in their career. Keep moving forward. No one else is gonna do it for you, but you, and you know me by your side. Thanks for listening to Move Up Careers Podcast Talk again soon.