I started a new job almost 5 months ago in the I.T. department of a growing call center here in Maine. Everything I.T. related, from workstations and VoIP phones, to servers, PBX, T1's, switches, firewalls and changing toner cartridges was being handled by one person, who happens to be a friend of mine. I was brought on to lighten the load by dealing with hardware problems and help desk tickets. In the past 4 months my position has gone from very flexible 10-20 hours/week to 50-70 hours/week. I also have several small business clients in the area I do support work for as-needed, which as you might imagine has become more difficult.

This company is growing fast. Last month they had me open a new 24 seat call center in Florida which consisted working an average of 13 hours/day 12 of the 14 days I was there. Over the next year, I only see this company growing more. I'm quite certain in the next 6 months I'll be converting the Florida facility to a 100-150 seat office.

My boss would now like me to become an official full-time employee. I'm not exactly sure how to negotiate, nor what I should be asking for, so I figured I'd throw it out to some of you that may have been in similar situations.

I know that I have a tendency to work all the time, as long as there is work that needs to be done, I'll work. I really need to avoid getting stuck in this trap- that is my first concern. The boss wants me to be a salaried employee, but I'm dead set against it for the reason above. The idea of working any job where you could potentially work an open ended amount of hours/week on a regular basis and be locked into a fixed salary has always seemed foolish to me. It's realistic to say that I will never work less than 45 hours/week.

This company is open 24/7. I will be expected to be on-call some nights and weekends to handle emergency calls. My counterpart handled more than 8 such calls during sleeping hours just last week. Where there will be just the two of us, I'm sure I will be expected to be available 50% of the time I'm not already working.

I'm accustomed to working 4 10-11 hours days/week. I would love to work alternating 5-day and 4-day weeks, allowing for a 3-day weekend every other week. The boss is more interested in having us working 5 and 6 day weeks making sure there is a 4-hour I.T. shift on Saturdays and Sundays.

When I have to travel to open a new facility in a far away place, what kind of compensation should I be getting?

Cheers

Meet with your boss alone in his office and start punching yourself as hard as you can, breaking some glass shelves in the process, all the while screaming "No! Stop! Why?!"

It's not terribly relevant, but I've got two jobs, one on the road and one fifteen minutes from home. The one on the road pays half again as much as the home one, plus guarantees 10 hour work days with California overtime rules. (no security of employment, and no health care included, however)

Of course, the one on the road is booked on a per job basis. I've never heard of a job paying more for days on the road, but I suppose it's out there.

It seems like your big fear is working 80 hour weeks and getting paid for 40 hour weeks like the rest of your call center breathren. On the other side, your Boss doesn't want to pay expensive overtime bills. I deal with this with "Compensory Time Off" -- overtime is authorized on the condition that I'm willing to take time off instead of getting paid for it. (I then use that time to hit the road on my other job, making it a win/win situation).

Good luck. If they're not willing to budge on overtime/schedule, make sure you're getting paid enough so that you don't feel like you're being taken advantage of every day.

Matthew

Salaried work can feel like one is been taken advantage of it most of the time one is working 50 or 60 hours a week with out additional remuneration. In my experience there has been business cycles of busy and quite times, and while one was expected to be there for the busy times, I made sure to relax a bit during the quite times.
Does it always balance out? No, but you can be damn sure I didn't arrive to work early if I'd been up half the night working a problem. And the one time I was in work till 4am, the next day I got sign-off to use a local hotel should it happen again.

In your case you may not feel you have such leverage. Maine isn't exactly IT Mecca, but neither do you want to cut your nose off to spite your face. If you push to hard can you afford to lose the job? Your boss is likely been pushed to bring you and your friend's wages down, moving you from 50-70 hours a week to salary does that, you just need to insure that the salary that you are offered is fair. Does Maine require time and a half for hourly workers for time worked over 40 hours?

In any case, I would look back at what they have been paying you for the past 4 months and use that as a starting point. But this likely means cutting your small business clients in the area. If you are not willing to loose these clients, then you need to figure what you are willing to give of your time to this company. This can be a set number of hours per week, on-call support (which could be paid per incident, time per incident or waiting by the phone time) and a another agreement for times that they need/want to send you Florida.

Given that the company is growing you want to ask your self if you want to grow with it. Not talking about stock options here, but rather career path. Does continuing to work at this company provide you with some good options? Or will you always be expected to be a jack of all trades, master of none and smile about it?

On the subject of travel, the policy will vary greatly from company to company and from rank to rank. Typically the company is going to pick up all your expenses, and pay you as if you were at the office, hourly in your current case and yes if you were salaried there would be an expectation that you work your ass off to get the project done in the allotted time. So flights, hotel, car hire and meals should all be covered. They should also be covering millage to the airport and airport parking costs. How they cover these is going to vary, some will expect you to pay for everything, and submit and expense report with receipts for every cent and will cut you a check in a few months, again it varies.

Good luck Randall.

I have strong opinions on this stuff, but you asked :-). Obviously, everything here is just my opinion, but it's served me well.

There are two major parts to a negotiation of this nature: the "value" part, and the "cost" part. You're entering into a negotiation because what is "value" for you is "cost" for the other party (and vice versa), or at least they perceive it to be.

The advice I offer people in your situation breaks down to several areas:

1. You need to see yourself as the CEO of RandallFarr, Inc. and act accordingly.

2. You need to understand the factors influencing the other person's decision.

3. You will *never* have a better opportunity to get a massive raise than when you first join a company. Once you're at a company, you will have to live within the system of annual adjustments. Extra compensation you negotiate coming in forms the basis of all future raises and bonuses, and it's extremely important to maximize.

4. There are other factors beyond cash compensation.

Let's take them in order:

1. In the economic world today, nobody gives a damn about you. I realize that sounds harsh, but it's the truth. The time of people working at a company for their entire life and retiring with a nice pension is over. Pretty much everyone realizes this, but almost nobody has adjusted their behavior or philosophy toward work accordingly. Your job *will* be outsourced to a worker who will work 18 hours for a bowl of rice the *instant* it becomes cost-effective and feasible to do it. That's not a moral judgment, it's just a fact about the nature of global competition today. The thing is, if a company doesn't behave that way, they get eaten up by a company who does.

So, it's against this backdrop that we're all struggling to make a buck. If you really accept the reality of our world today, then you have to look out for yourself. No company is going to do it for you. I call this becoming the CEO of You, Inc.

I see people doing things all the time "for the company" or to get "recognition." That may have made sense when the company had demonstrated a willingness to take care of people, but it absolutely does NOT when there is no reciprocity. Even if you work for the greatest company in the world, and they bend over backwards for their people they can still be acquired, management can change, they can go out of business or whatever. I've learned this the hard way.

You are on your own. You're *already* the CEO of RandallFarr, Inc., and there's nothing you can do to change that. What you *can* do is become a good CEO.

I'm suggesting you enter into this negotiation the way a CEO would if they were planning to partner with this company. That is exactly what is happening. You're willing to spend the resources of your company (your time) in exchange for something in return. It's up to YOU what you want to exchange and it's up to YOU what you're willing to accept for it.

In order to make realistic decisions about these kinds of things, you've got to have an idea of where RandallFarr, Inc. is going. What is your 1-year financial plan? What is your 10-year financial plan? How does this fit in with your overall goals about where you want to be? How important is family time to you? What alternatives do you have to this job? What won't you be able to do if you take the job? What doors might it open if you do? There's no right answer to that stuff, but if you haven't thought it through, you're not being a very good CEO. What I'm trying to say with all this is simply this:

* Forget about what they want for a while and think about what YOU want. Then create a plan to get there. Go into business for yourself, even if you want to work as an employee.

If you think all that through and you're "dead set against it", then you just say "no." No big deal. But I think you should look very closely at your statement "I know that I have a tendency to work all the time, as long as there is work that needs to be done, I'll work. I really need to avoid getting stuck in this trap- that is my first concern." That is not a very CEO-like thing to say. You have control over your behavior and your decisions. My guess is that you do this to gain accolades and affirmations rather than advance your agenda. I hope that doesn't sound too harsh, but if you're doing that youmay have some very confused ideas about what's going on.

Many people claim to be working for economic reasons, but they really aren't. They work for the admiration of their peers, or their boss, or to be a part of something larger than their own self interest. All those are just fine, as long as you are honest with yourself about why you're really there. So, take a good, hard, honest look at what you wrote there.

2. There's two parties to the negotiation, and what THEY want does matter. It's not that it's more important than your objectives, but there needs to be a match in order for there to be an agreement. In order for you to be able to maximize the value to you, you need to know what's valuable to *them*, and why, and how valuable it is.

You should know things like: Why are they asking you to become full time? Why *you*? Why *now*? Why not stay as a contractor? Is it cost containment, or some other reason? What happens if you say no? How difficult will it be for them to find another qualified candidate? How much flexibility do they have in compensation? What is your counterpart making? If you say no, will they source through a recruiting agency? If so, then there will be high costs associated with it.

What is their perception of the value you bring to the company? To know that, you need to know their alternatives and what those alternatives would cost.

Can they offer other things besides cash compensation?

3. All things being equal, I'd rather work for more money than less. Keep in mind that your job will not change based on how much they're paying you. If you can clearly articulate your value and you know the (high) cost of alternatives, you can often ask for quite a lot of money, or a signing bonus (frequently the case if they don't need to pay a recruiting firm).

4. You mentioned this is a small company. What is their business plan? How do they intend to cash out on the asset of the company they're building? Will the take it public? Are they targeting firms to acquire them? If the company is very successful and growing very fast in this economic climate, then stock options could have considerable value. You can say that you'd "be willing to consider making that level of commitment if you felt you were participating in the success of the company with equity."

I'm out of time. I've been through this a bunch of times on both sides of the equation. I hope some of this is helpful, and I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Jim

Very true, I've changed jobs 3 times and got a pay rise 3 times. Once I've started the job, that's been it. Other than inflation-related rises that everybody else in the company gets too, I'm still on the same money as I was when I started in 2005, and this year we won't even be getting that.

Yeah no one pays people to stay anymore.

And with the advantage of 20-20 hindsight, I can attest that this may be the most important factor of all.

I was incredibly fortunate in my working career (I'm now retired) in that I enjoyed my job so much that for 25 years or so I never even took vacations because I couldn't imagine a vacation that would be as much fun as my job. I wasn't particularly well paid, and I never was nor ever will be wealthy. Nonetheless, my retirement is secure enough that for the rest of my life I will have a roof over my head, food in my belly, and paid-for medical coverage. Anything beyond that is gravy. Only once in my life did I work at a job I didn't like, and I would live in a cardboard box under the bridge before I ever did that again.

The absolute number one priority is to be happy in your work.

tanstaafl.

When I first joined my company (almost 11 years ago), my mentor told me 'The only way to make money is after three years, you go to another job for a 33% raise, then after three years you come back for another 33% raise'. Sadly, this is the truth. I've been offered increases of that much from headhunters, but my annual raise has been between 3% and 9% except for promotions.

I am not sure if the company should reward loyalty more (retain the knowledge), or take advantage of that loyalty. You can't work for a company that is out of business because they don't have money, but at the same time a company can't stay in business without keeping talented employees.