Work hard, prove your worth, get paid. Right?
Sounds easy enough, and it’s the belief most ambitious people at companies hold today. Keep trucking along, work my ass off, slay it, and surely the big fat raise shows up.
I believed that for years. I believed it hardest in a role where I was running an entire business unit inside a larger company that had acquired the agency I built, on my own, with zero management. The unit was profitable. My title was director. My salary hadn’t been touched in two and a half years.
Running a business unit is not the same as being a director, and I knew it. I just didn’t say it. I assumed the numbers would say it for me. What took me far too long to see is that the profitability was the reason nobody looked. A unit that runs itself and makes money is a unit nobody has to think about. I had made myself very easy to ignore.
So I did what overfunctioning people do. I worked harder and let the resentment build quietly. When you’re an employee, it’s impossible to truly understand how a business operates. In your head, there’s a giant money tree, and it’s being held back from YOU specifically. The business has a bad quarter? Not your problem. EFFUPAYME is the mentality you develop. I believed I was entitled to a bigger piece of the pie while assuming none of the risk and all of the benefit.
How to Ask for a Raise: Advocating for Yourself with Confidence
Then I finally asked. I prepped with my business coach, got hyped up from my friends and finally worked up the courage to ask if my base salary was negotiable. For some reason that ask felt like I was asking him to co-sign a mortgage. The CEO’s answer was one sentence: give me a number, and I’ll evaluate it.
That’s it. No money tree, no one hiding anything. He was waiting for me to do the one part of the work I had never done. I had never advocated for myself, and the resentment I’d been nursing was my own fault. So I went and found market comp, tied it to my performance, and made the case. I asked for a 28% raise, and we met in the middle at 14% plus performance bonuses.
Turning Your Results Into Real Salary Negotiations
I’ve been an entrepreneur for six years now, and it’s easy to forget what the other side of the table felt like. My mind forgets. My body doesn’t. Yes, there is a money pot in the business. There are also boards, note paybacks, and term negotiations that most employees never see. Yes, employees carry real risk too, and layoffs are not abstract. But a paycheck doesn’t dip when the quarter does. The person who signs it absorbs that.
That conversation taught me how to ask for a raise, and it’s the lesson I try to instill in my team now. I watch ambitious people build resentment without ever asking, the exact thing I did. When they do ask, I’ve usually delivered. The ones that don’t land are tied to effort or need (“you still owe me”) instead of value, which is the same mistake in a different outfit.
Being busy is not a result. Results are not a raise either, because results don’t speak for themselves. Someone has to translate them into a number and say it out loud.
Work hard, prove your worth, (tie that worth to value for the business and ask for the raise), get paid.
There, I fixed it.
