You don’t bring a salesman into the game until you have a scalable business where you can put in one dollar of marketing and get a positive ROI on your ad spend.

A good marketer can make something valuable out of thin air just like a great developer creates value out of lines of code. The marketer and the developer are climbing up opposite sides of the same mountain. A good marketer can reposition an entire industry. A good marketer can make an entirely new economic ecosystem. Marketing is the engine that drives commerce. Just like there are hundreds of different coding languages there are hundreds of subsets of marketing disciplines. Marketing strategies like SEO, PCC, SEM, copy and direct sales etc. etc. The rabbit hole goes pretty deep. At some point you have to stop reading all of the books and blogs on 10 ways to do X and actually make something happen in the world.

Mike you have some really great insight and experience and I appreciate your openness and honesty. The openness from those with experience is what makes the startup community online so awesome.

Will, above is the URL. All of our podcast transcripts are located on the main podcast website. Just find the episode and then click on “Read More”. We dont offer them in anything other than HTML from. The site, but you could copy/paste it into a document if you wanted.

Kind regards, Will Rayer

Then along came consumerism and the age-old numbers game and sound-bites to woo a technically-inept public. Processors had to be faster, despite everything else on their systems being slow and imbalanced, so gamers could preen their feathers based on how many big numbers they could quote. Along comes a new processor and you have to buy one to maintain respect amongst your peers. Same thing with hard-drive capacity, irrespective of speed, cache, or seek times for given applications, and so on.

Now we have the “Widescreen” must-haves, marketed to Joe Public sold on being able to watch widescreen movies on his/her PC – irrespective of the fact he could watch them anyway. But it does reduce real-estate for the manufacturers and therefore reduces cost, EVEN THOUGH the old 4:3 aspect ratio was originally chosen as the optimal format for motion viewing! But heh, ” I can watch wide-screen films just like the cinema, on my PC” (LOL).

This kind of marketing crap to the ignorants is going on everywhere now, to the point that suppliers and service providers can easily dictate terms, for their own advantage, to the overwhelmingly Ignorant, dumbed-down masses. It’s not about what WE really want any more, it’s whether it can maximise profit and sales by differentiation and sound-bites.

This would be a prime opportunity for a small manufacturer to start building them again. Wouldn’t have to have many options, but they could charge a premium. The issue I think is that the LCD manufacturers simply don’t make them anymore.

I will have to wait until July to ask for the raise in order to actually have the leverage of possibly leaving. I’m not sure I could stick to my principles and be willing to pay back the $3k for leaving before the 6 months are up.

Thanks again, Mike. Your insight and openness have been invaluable to me.

If you don’t address the situation now, you’re going to be a less than stellar employee for the next 6 months and feel as though you’ve been taken advantage of for the entire time.

I would come up with some solid facts about why you deserve the raise. Cite things like your work ethic, the fact that you’re a known quantity now, as opposed to a risk of hiring someone new, etc. Obviously, having another job opportunity certainly gives you additional leverage.

But I think I’d definitely bring up the fact that you hadn’t taken into consideration the additional expenses of SE Taxes, medical insurance, etc. As an independent contractor, generally you should be able to walk whenever you feel like it. Make sure you have a definitive number in mind when you ask and just say “$36/hour would make me happy.”

If they do it (and I suspect that they will), then great. If not, find something else. You’re not doing yourself any favors by sticking around.

As a last ditch effort, you could simply ask the customer if they would consider hiring you full time. Typically, with contract agencies, there’s a policy in place that states the customer is required to pay $X if they hire a contract worker directly. Sometimes it’s a fixed dollar amount, other times it’s based on the rate, and occasionally it’s based on the cost of finding a replacement. However, it might be barred completely.

Given the discrepancy between what your salary is and what the contract agency is making from you, it might be worth it for the customer to break that contract and hire you directly. They’re not likely aware that you’re being paid so little, and if they were, they probably don’t realize that you’re paying your employment and medical insurance yourself.

The numbers you threw out (at least to me) seem too far out of whack to justify. Someone is making a killing and for you to ask for an extra $6/hour is very little for a sales rep to give up as opposed to going completely without while they find a replacement, and then risking the inability to find someone the customer likes at a similar price as what you are being paid.

It’s not unusual to pay 2X salary for a consultant. What is unusual is to pay 2X salary for an independent contractor for a 6 month basis. Really, it should only be 1.5x at the most because the money and income is basically guaranteed to the agency.

I think if I were the customer, I’d be really upset if I learned I was paying 2x what the person working for me actually costs. There’s something to be said from their standpoint for flexibility on a short term basis, but for a lengthy contract, that’s just not right.