Is your boss ripping you off? Find out TODAY.
Is your boss actually paying you what you are worth? In order to find out you need to know the process of what it actually means to be employed and be the employer.
Every business works for profit, your boss is paying you the minimum amount that will get you to do the job.
One way to find out if you are actually getting paid a fair amount is to know the market. Research what other independent individuals are getting for doing the same job.
Resources mentioned:
Leave some feedback. We would love to hear from you!
Connect with Jonathan Green and Serve No Master:
The post SNM165: Is Your Boss Ripping You Off? appeared first on Serve No Master: Be Your Own Boss - Live Free.
Connect with Jonathan Green
Is your boss ripping you off? Find out TODAY.
Is your boss actually paying you what you are worth? In order to find out you need to know the process of what it actually means to be employed and be the employer.
Every business works for profit, your boss is paying you the minimum amount that will get you to do the job.
One way to find out if you are actually getting paid a fair amount is to know the market. Research what other independent individuals are getting for doing the same job.
Resources mentioned:
Leave some feedback. We would love to hear from you!
Connect with Jonathan Green and Serve No Master:
The post SNM165: Is Your Boss Ripping You Off? appeared first on Serve No Master: Be Your Own Boss - Live Free.
Connect with Jonathan Green
speaker 0: 0:00
is your boss ripping you off? Find out on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Shopify. Build a beautiful e commerce store in minutes with number one platform in the world to start your store the right way. Go to serve. No master dot com Backslash Shopify. Now are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you'll learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host thought I want to talk about something near and dear to my heart, and that's the experience of being an employee, what it really means and understanding the finance of being on both sides of a business. I was employed for a long time, and I'm the boss, was several employees, and it's very important to understand the financial decisions that go into becoming a boss and how every single business is run whether at the bottom of the top of the tree, understanding this process will help you to make the right decisions. And to figure out, is your boss actually paying you what you're worth? Businesses are built and found on a single principle. They're there to make money to make a profit. Would you invest $10 if I told you 10 years later if you come back and you would get your $10 back? Of course not. No businesses operated at the purpose of breaking even. Businesses that try to do that always disappear. They fade away. Many businesses try to serve two masters. They try to make a profit, but they also have a heavy influence on giving away large percentages of their income and their revenue to charity. And they end up getting stuck. They go stagnant. And most of not all of these businesses go out of business quite quickly. They can't last because businesses on Lee work when they're driven by profit. Your salary is very simply the least your boss can pay you to get you to do the job. If your boss thought he could get away with giving you a 10% pay cut without affecting your work or getting you to quit. He would do it immediately. As a boss, every penny. He doesn't pay you as a penny that goes into the company and eventually goes into him, whether your boss is the owner or middle management or somewhere in between regional manager or district manager, any of those things. His bonuses in his pay packets often are built around profit, and a big drain on profit is operating costs. How much do they pay everyone working in that region in that division? That office. If he can keep your salary down, he'll often get a larger bonus at the end of the year. And maybe your boss is a lady, so maybe she's seeking that bonus. The easiest way to figure out if you're being paid fairly or you're getting way underpaid is to look at the market. What do independent contractors get paid for the same job? One of the first places we could look that is the military in the military. As a soldier, you don't get paid very well. There are a lot of other benefits that they add in to try and make it seem more valuable, including getting access to the veterans hospital, which was, as we know, is not that great. They're trying to make it better, but it struggled for a long time. Every few years. There's a new scandal about how horribly we shoot veterans in American, those hospitals. They also give you free housing discounts at stores when you buy the military store and access to other different group discounts the same type of discounts you get when you join any other large organization that does group insurance or group health care group shopping. All of these benefits can be found in other places. But what happens when a soldier leaves the military and becomes a private contractor? Oftentimes a soldier will make 3 to 5 times more money simply by going private. And here's the crazy part. They're working for the same person. Look at how many private contractors that are in the Middle East. Whenever we start a conflict, we don't have enough soldiers. Where do we find extra soldiers? Will people that the military already trained so the most military will train someone, invest time, money and their weapons and equipment, teaching them everything they need to know. Then when the person leaves the military, they could get a job working for the U. S. Government simply by working as a contractor and make more money. And the same thing applies in lots of other places. There are a lot of opportunities in the last 20 years in intelligence gathering someone who worked for the CIA for 20 years, get their retirement, leave, become an independent contractor and come back the next day. Getting paid two or three times were money for the same job. Of course, you might be think. Well, the government's notorious for overpaying contractors, and obviously there's a big problem there. But this tells you what your value is. As a soldier fighting for the United States, you can get paid $60,000 a year or $200,000 a year. Which one would you choose? Yes, in one you're fighting for your country and the other one you're fighting for money, but you're still fighting for the same person. And we could look at other examples in other places where you could get paid a very similar thing. I look at what copywriters who worked for companies making a lot of companies havoc operators on staff and is making minimum wage, or maybe a little bit more. And that same person could leave, start their own little business, set up a website, hang up a shingle. And as a copywriter who's worked for a large company for two or three years, they could immediately jump and make 5 to 10 times our money. But riding a sales letter, I get paid anywhere from 4 to $20,000 depending upon three pieces of the contract and my writing emails. Working from something, it's completed how many project I'm doing for the person. That's a massive amount. More money than a lot of people were making $3000 a month copyrighting make for a few days work, maybe a week's work. I could make what they're making in a month or a year so you can look at what other people are making and you go, Wow, if I was just working for myself, how much when I get paid, look at how well consultants D'oh government will pay their staff a certain amount of money that will bring in a consultant to pay them 10 times more money to fire everyone. So we really want to think about what our value is, and it starts by looking at number one. What is our worth in the marketplace? If we're working for ourselves, what would someone who was hired me directly pay me to do this work? And if you're working for another company is providing was a service, for example, of Europe, an artist or graphic designer working for an ad company. The ad company gets paid a huge amount of money and then because your in house, they pay you one amount. But if you were working for yourself and you were building them, you could charge a lot more money. It's amazing what different service is called us. Just getting a logo designed. Yeah, you could get a discount logo for $20 but my Lou logo cost me $150 I was really lucky to get the price that low for really high quality work stuff is expensive, so the artist who worked on my logo is $100 an hour. The order to design my new logo charges $100 an hour and getting a new logo designed for that cheaply is considered a real coup. In my business, I really got a great price. Many people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a logo design when they hire outside house. So what you could do to find out what people charge is to just look online So many of our answers can be found it a little bit of reeds or top onto Google. Hop on up work and type in what your skill set is and see what people charge per hour. There are plenty of people out there who do exactly what you do, charging 10 24 $100 per hour about 15 years ago when I was selling computers on the phone. There are two types of employees. There were employees that were hired directly by the company, and they were considered staff and then their employees that were hired through Ah sketchy employment agency that allowed them to be called part timers. They were still working full time hours, but the company didn't have to give them health insurance, and they weren't paid any bonuses. They could max out around $18 an hour, where someone on my side of this fence was a direct hire could max out around 102 $100 an hour doing the exact same job. In fact, I was struggling in one of the areas of sales, cause we have so many metrics and they brought someone over who was making $18 an hour, and I learned what he was doing. He taught me a system to improve my sales, and I made massively more money from him. So the trainer was getting underpaid. You could be working at a company, and this is often true that differ. Employees make different routes of money. When you take on a job and they make you an offer, it's your opportunity to negotiate. And many people don't because they just want the job. And we're in the market right now where everyone needs work, and I totally understand that. So they say, Hey, we'll give this job. It's $32,000 a year and you go, OK, I'll take it. Thanks. I'm just glad to get hired was another burst of my walking ago. I'm gonna need 36. I'm gonna need 40 and I'll give it to that person because they found someone they want and they don't want to go back to the hiring cycle. I hate hiring people. That's a lot of work. You go through all these interviews, and every time I post a job for a new position, I get hundreds of applications, and most of them are people I would never hire. They're totally unqualified that haven't even read the application. They just click and apply to every single job they see. But even the people that I say okay, you've made it through Phase two and Phase three. Let's talk on Skype. A bunch of them never add me or never message me again. And so it's really annoying to go to that cycle. And even now, when I have a good team, when we're struggling with a team member, I would rather work, invest time, improving that team member's performance and try and replace them. Cos news huge amounts of money when they go through ah, hiring cycle. We don't factor that in, though we take a job, we just take the position and then we're stuck there and we're caught in between hope and fear. We hope for a raise. We hope we're gonna make enough money but were afraid of losing our job. And your boss's main job is to keep you in between those two magnetic poles so that you don't have so much hope that you ask for a raise. But you don't have so much fear that you eventually give up your job because you can't take it anymore. They want to keep you in that middle zone, where you have enough hope that you don't quit and the fear that you don't ask for a race. That's the dream employee. That's what every boss wants, that someone who does their job and they don't get a raise, even though money is worth less and less every year, every single year we have inflation, which means every year of dollars worth less than it was before. I'm only 36. I'll be 37 soon, but even in my lifetime I've watched money collapse in value, and if you want to see what I'm talking about, go buy a stamp. Every time you go to buy a stamp, the price is insanely higher. Use real e mail, an envelope for a penny that it was a niggle than it was 10 cents and it was 1/4. And now I think to send a letter, it's like $17 because money is so low value. And in fact, many people buy stamps that don't have a currency number of them. They're just a first class stamp because they know the price is gonna go up, up, up, up, down the line. And so you can try and future prove your stamp investment because money is always worth less. So if you get paid the same amount of money for 10 years in a row, you're actually taking a little pay decrease each year. Now there are a lot of other factors that go into how business pays you. Another way, they determine what to pay you is how much money you generate for the company. If you make your company $100 in profit every single day, they would never pay you $100 because they're a break. Even. What's the point? The greater the distance between the prophet you generate and what they pay you, that's their true prophet. That's their net profit. So if you're generating $100 a day and they're paying 99. They're making a dollar day or 30 days a month. Profits not very good, but they can get your salary down toe. $90.50 dollars, $30. Think about the difference for them, and that's really the way business works. And that's capitalism. That's how everyone is in business. Every single person is in business to make this much money for themselves as possible. This is one of the reasons I'm a big believer and working for yourself because you control your income. Now we're afraid of starting our own businesses. And there's a host of reasons for that. Our culture constantly tells us all the dangerous. What if your business fails? What if you leave your job, start a business and you can't find another job? And what a wasted afraid that is to start saving money and make sure you have at least six months of runway to really try your next project. I'm a big believer in starting your business from grassroots toe spend from profits rather than spending huge amounts of front. I was just approached by someone who want to hire me for a project and said, Oh, I could get a new credit card. No problem to pay you. And I said, I'm not interested in that. I don't do that to people. The last thing I want to do is bring more debt into someone's life, because then it turns from a strategic decision into gambling where there's a risk of them getting behind where there's a risk of them owing a debt and being strung behind, paying and paying a payment for a long time. I want to avoid all of those things when you go into work tomorrow. If you're still working for someone else, think about exactly what you're getting paid. One of the big tricks with salary is that they dazzle you with what you're getting paid per month. But do you ever think about what you're making per hour? And my last job? My yearly salary was $36,000. That was before taxes and deductions and all of those other things, and the real amount I was getting paid was between 2200 and 2100 month. But let's say I was making $3000 a month. That's for 160 hours of work. If you start breaking apart and looking at 40 hours a week, and we take that 3000. We divide it down at $750. We get to run 100 $25 a day. But if we break it down again into eight hours now, it's starting to look closer and closer and closer toe the minimum wage. It's really important to look at what you're actually getting paid for your time now. One of the things that's cool about salaries that you get paid even when you're not working. Unless, of course, you're a lawyer. You're in business with a track you minute by minute, so there are benefits to working in that environment. Look at how many hours you spend in the office. Most people, when they're looking at their work and their hours, they start the clock the minute they sit down there chair and then they end the clock the minute they walk out. And when you work for a company, you got a time card. That's how it works. Clock in clock out. But that's the hours there getting what you really want. Account is your hours. If you have to drive an hour to and from work every day. You need to add that commute here figures, because you're still spending those hours working for your company, even if you're in the car. Yeah, you can imagine that you're not really working, that you can listen to what you want in the car and you could be productive. And that's true. I do teach you methods and techniques where you could be productive with the car time. But it's still time. You're not doing what you want. Just yesterday I was talking to someone on the phone and said, Well, where is your office? Where do you work? I work out of my bedroom right now. I'm in the bedroom recording this inside room, every court episodes outside. But I'm doing a few inside this week and I'm hanging out in the bedroom with the dog. And as soon as I finish this recording, I could walk outside and in 30 seconds I could be swimming or I could be in the ocean. Or I could be kayaking or paddling, depending upon the whims of the tide. Removing a commute from my work day frees up a huge amount of time, and that has value so we want to really think about all of the time you invest in your job and what the true value is now. I recently heard someone talking about how you were 100 hours a week as an entrepreneur to war. Avoid working 40 hours a week as an employee, and that's kind of true. Often, entrepreneurs and people starting businesses work more hours, but that's because we're getting paid more per hour. That's because we have more leverage over time and really like you to spend a few moments today and think about how you're compensated for your time. And is it worth it? As they talk about in serving a master in other places, we often are held back by fear. We're afraid of what will happen if we lose our jobs. What will happen to my health insurance? What will happen to my family? What happens if this or that happens now? I don't push burning the boat. You don't need to quit your job and start working for yourself today and hope that you make it. I do believe that you should start building a revenue streams as a protection or bulwark against the possibility of losing your job. I just want you to start thinking about what your time is worth, because this will affect a critical decision you make when you start working for yourself. The first year I work for myself after leading that position. Okay? They fired me. I mean, almost exactly $36,000. I made within about 2% of that amount every month when I would make around $3000 go, Okay, I hit my number for the month. That's what I'm worth. And I only realized what was happening. One of my mentors told me that most people do that when they leave a job there. First year and business work themselves. They make almost the exact same amount of money because that's what we believe our time is worth. What you believe your time is worth will determine what people pay. I was recently approached about a job or someone wanted me to help them with something. They offered me $500. I almost immediately hung up the phone because I knew how much time it would take, and it would take me a couple of days of work and to me that's not even close to what my time is worth. About a time I would be investing the resource. I would use the people on my team that would be involved. I don't take jobs that small, but there are plenty of people who do. And the only difference between me and the person that is probably gonna hire for the job is self perception. That person believes their time is worth less than mine, so they take lower paying jobs. If you start to believe your time is worth more than it is worth more when you're working for yourself and people offer you positions or mentioned projects to you when you say, Well, this is what I get paid This is what my time is worth and my perception of my belief about my time and what I charge for projects comes from what people have paid me. Every single time someone approaches me about a job, I say Here's what the last person paid me and I tell them a really number, so it's never me saying all this is the price. I don't even have to do that. I said This is the last person paid me. Can you match it or beat it if you want me to work with you instead? It's a very simple, very honest way of negotiating. It's not manipulative. I teach other techniques where when you're starting out and you don't have wreck a track record of success, you simply say the biggest number you can say and see what happens. You can't throw a bomb and you sit there silently to see if people will accept what you said or if they go. Are you kidding me? That's way too high, and I still do that sometimes Sometimes I just say huge number to see what happens. But just this week someone wants me to work with them not quite exclusively, but to give them a huge amount of my bandwidth. And I said, Well, I'm already working with someone else and doing a lot and they said, Well, what if I pay you 30% more and I said, Well, that's obviously very interesting to me. You don't have to negotiate hard most of the way you generate revenue, and how you get paid comes from self perception. What, you believe your time is worth as you believe your time was worth more people will pay you more. And that's really something that we want to drive towards as you move forward and start to build your own businesses and start your own projects and take on consulting jobs. Or look at an online project. When I'm looking at launching a new book on Amazon, I'm very mathematical sometimes whom approach me and say, Jonathan, you really good at what? I write a book about this topic and I look at the topic, and sometimes it's a topic. Were all make $10 a month on that book, and it's just not worth my time. I really want to make 5 to $10 per day for every new book I added the catalog For me, adding books to Amazon is about building bricks in the wall, and I calculate my time so differently because I know that I'm gonna make that 5 to $10 a day for the next 5 to 10 years. So it's actually a massive amount of money just slowly delivered. It's like those people win the lottery and say, Give me money every year rather taking a smaller lumps sub. It's the exact same approach. Once I know what my time is worth. How long takes in a work on a project how much effort it takes that helps me really calculate the math and figure out how much time and energy I'm going to invest in that project or if it's the right project for me. So whether you're looking at building an online business, launching products, writing books or taking some consulting work in the short term to make short term money to fund your long term projects, it's really, really important to have a strong sense of what your time is worth. I used to take loping projects a long time ago when I was first starting my very first client was $200 a month, and that's where I started out. My business started out at a very low number compared to where I am now, but at the time I thought it was great money. What I want you to dio today as your homework assignment Number one is to calculate what you're getting paid per hour, and I'd like you to include all the extra things that are part of your job. If you are driving around in your car. You're running errands. Count that time in the gas money. If you're taking a big commute to and from work, add those hours. And if your boss calls you at home, all of these little things are part of your job and companies. When they give you a pay package, they do everything they can to minimize how much you're wrecking and maximize how much it seems like you're getting paid. So it seems like the best opportunity in the history of all opportunities, and this is them. Enabling perception is nothing wrong with that. We just want to be aware of that and look at perception the other direction to make sure we're getting the right benefits. So figure out what you're getting paid per hour and then sit down and save yourself. Is this what my time is worth? Go look online, see what other people who do the exact same thing but as a freelancer, get paid. Would you get paid more money if you were working for yourself doing the exact same thing? And I want you to decide what your time is worth. Choose a number and say what I work for myself. What? I work on my side projects. This is what an hour of my time is worth. Maybe for you, it's $20 or $100 worth $1000. Or maybe you're a super boss and your time is worth $10,000. I watch a lot of those shows with investors and people that are worth millions or even billions of dollars, and their time is work that they're so wealthy, and they control so many employees. They'll in such large company that their time is really worth tangerine. Hundreds of thousands of dollars hour. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm on the way there, so I'd like you to. Dio is really look at the numbers and find out if your boss is ripping you off. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe so you never miss. Another episode will be back next Tuesday with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts. Now for your chance to win a free copy of Jonathan's bestseller, Serve No Master, all you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you Tuesday. We owe you. Need a traffic explosion? Let me add a little accelerant with my free guide traffic bomb at served master dot com front slash bomb.