Earners,

Negotiating effectively will add hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of extra dollars to your lifetime earnings.

I’m not exaggerating at all. This is a skill you quite literally cannot afford to neglect. Between those who negotiate and those who do not, I’ve seen first-hand how substantial the difference in earnings is. It’s obscene. There is no higher leverage skillset than being a great negotiator. It’s literally one of the most valuable tools you can have in your arsenal as you navigate the corporate world.

And yet, many think that they are terrible negotiators - or at best, they will have to plug their noses while doing it.

Today, I am here to make you 10x better at negotiating…okay, maybe I should calm down. How about I help you drastically reduce your anxiety around negotiating which alone will lead to an immense increase in earnings for you and THEN over time we will ladder on the skills and tactics that will get you to the 10x mark.

Why You Are So Scared of Negotiating

Because it IS scary. Fundamentally, when you are negotiating with another party, you’re disagreeing with what they’ve put forward, or they are disagreeing with what you’ve put forward. It’s a point of contention. It’s conflict. It’s super uncomfortable.

The thing is though, you have to do it throughout your career if you want to get ahead. For many of us, we are the only advocate or agent in our career. We don’t have Jerry Maguire pounding the table for us. It’s not that we should ask for more, we have to. The alternative is almost assured underpayment of what we deserve.

Here’s the great part though. If you simply decide to just ask for more, that’s 70% further than most people ever get and I’d argue it’s 70% of the work as well. A lot of negotiations are not as contentious and cut-throat as you would imagine them to be. Many in your career will go something like this:

• Company sends you an offer for $80,000 for a new role.

• You send an email thanking them, but kindly proposing $105,000 as that’s where you would like to be. Something like “thank you so much for the offer. I’m so excited to get started here and while the offer is great, I was hoping to be in the $105-$115k range for salary. I would really appreciate if we’re able to get within that.” The reality is you’d be okay with anything over $85k, but you're shooting high to see what they can do.

• They tell you they will check with their team.

• You wait a day or two (this is obviously the painful part that everyone dreads, but becoming familiar with this discomfort is where all the gooey good stuff is).

• They come back saying the budget is tight, but they were able to get approved for $90,000 and they need to know soon if you can take it or not.

• You thank them again and ask if they could extend to $100k.

• They say $91,500 is the most they could do and they are dead serious.

• You thank them for their patience and accept the offer.

All of that is like 6-7 emails and there really isn’t much skill or tact going on there. You are quite literally just politely asking for more money - and yet, that alone can feel like a movie. You may have this knot in your stomach and intense fear of loss. You think you may be pushing well above what you would be okay with taking. “I could live with 80” your fear tells you. “80 is so much money and I don’t want to piss it away”.

The Truth About Negotiations In Corporate

What you need to understand is that any company worth working for will hear you out if you’d like to negotiate. Whether that’s an offer, pay raise or move within the company, the good companies will consider what you are telling them. They may not say yes, but they won’t kick you to the curb just by asking like a professional. If they do kick you to the curb just by asking a question, is that really somewhere you want to be in the first place?

If you remind yourself of that, a lot of the fear dissipates. I’ve shared this framing for years on my social channels and I’ve found it has helped a lot of people find the courage to ask for more. Many of us conflate a lack of gratitude with negotiating. Negotiating does not need to stem from an ungrateful position. You can simultaneously be grateful for what someone is offering you while suggesting an alternative. A lot of people are concerned about coming off entitled, but the truth is that all comes from the delivery. If you are pleasant yet firm, it will command respect, not annoyance. The delivery matters a lot and you will improve at that over time. The key is to just be a kind and honest broker when asking. Again, that’s most of the work.

Then you have those who are fresh out of college and think they can’t negotiate their first job. Wrong. While I wasn’t able to get my first company to move on compensation, I was able to negotiate a relocation from where my firm wanted me to be to where was closer to home. This saved me roughly $20k in my first year and those savings compounded beautifully for me over time. I also had a close friend of mine negotiate his first year out with a big tech company. Most people would think they have no leverage, and he was one of them. But I begged him to give it a shot. Ended up getting $30k more between salary and equity. It’s POSSIBLE. You just have to have the courage to ask.

What Happens When You Ask For More

Let’s take our back and forth example from above and extrapolate it out to see what the difference is by simply asking for more.

Two scenarios - you accept at $80k or you push through those gruelling emails and land $91.5k. Let’s say you NEVER negotiate again for the rest of your life. You literally just do it once when you are 25. In both scenarios, you earn a 5% raise every year until you are 65. Can’t be that different right?

In the $80k example, you would have earned $9,663,982 over the next 40 years.

In the $91.5k example, you would have earned $11,053,179 over the next 40 years.

That’s a $1,389,197 lifetime difference from one modest negotiation IN YOUR ENTIRE LIFE. Maybe took 15 minutes worth of your time emailing? Hence the title of this article.

Here’s where it gets scary.

Let’s say you negotiate the one time to get you $91,500, then over your career you negotiate your pay raises and new roles, leading you to add a modest 2% to your average increase every year. This leads you to 7% per year (this is well under what is possible, but let’s be conservative). Then, let’s compare it against the $80k version from above that is 5% per year.

In the $80k example, you again would have earned $9,663,982 over the next 40 years.

In the $91.5k example with progressive modest negotiating, you would have earned $18,266,613 over the next 40 years.

I don’t know about you, but I think I’d have a few plans for an extra $8.6 million throughout my life.

But What Do I ACTUALLY Say?

We will get to that over the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

For now, I hope you realize that negotiations throughout your career aren’t as scary as they may seem. Furthermore, based on the calculations above, I also hope you realize how insanely valuable it is just to do it, let alone if you get really good at it. I LIVE for negotiating - it’s a total thrill and I encourage you to start treating it as such. There’s no greater feeling than getting a win after going back and forth. That euphoria is what I want for you.

If you literally just read this email over and over, it’ll remind you how important it is to speak up for yourself. I personally live by the following mantra:

SHOW. ME. THE. MONEY.

Earn more,

Nate