Need help on getting shafted at work.

[Rick Lee]

I have definitely determined that I could win this battle and lose the war. I'll let it go.

[KFC911]

It still sucks, I feel bad for ya...

[tabs]

When U work for someone else and they tell U to pick up the stick. U pick it up, or move on.

If the losses are negible then there isn't much to say. If they cut into your BONUS...then you have a real gripe...If you want to approach your boss with this that is the ground on which to stand. Let them give the farm away so long as your performance numbers don't suffer and it doesn't effect your income in a serious way.

The Performance numbers and resulting Bonus are what matters. The rest is just corporate BS. If the company arbitrarily gives away the farm and its your income they are hurting then they are in breech of your employment contract. Your not working for free for them are you. Will your bills go away every month.

If U move to the SW with them that is clearly something that will have to be discussed. Your performance numbers shouldn't be effected because of company largess. How is the co going to compensate you for those lost numbers that you would have gotten if they didn't give them away.

Mother always told me if you have a coupla hundred K in the bank it makes picking up the stick so much easier. Cause you can tell em to shove it anytime ya like.

Friend of mine was an S5 saleman with 3M. spent 30 years with them. He was always hustling side business where the company wouldn't service or supply the customer. For instance 3m would only sell bags of 1000 cable ties, but clients would only need 300 at a time so for years he sent them to Electrical Distributers as a service to them. One day he woke up and thought why don't I sell them those ties. So he started his own biz. After 3 or 4 years 3M got wind of it and made him stop, he kept on doing his job just like before and actually 3M liked him more.

[Rick Lee]

I totally agree with the Golden Rule - the man with the gold makes the rules. I understand that. And that's why I wanted a commissioned sales job. When you make your numbers, you tend to be pretty immune from the rest of the corp. BS the salary folks have to put up with. I'm at 106% of goal for the year, so I'm looking ok for the big bonus. But the margin here is not so great that the X-mas lull combined with last week's giveaway won't put me just back to 99.99%, in which case it's collect base pay only, no commission, no bonus. In that case, there will be a big fight.

[Superman]

Let your union rep handle this.

[Rick Lee]

Originally Posted by Superman

Let your union rep handle this.

We don't need unions and I would never join one. I work far too hard and smart to need one.

[Rick Lee]

Originally Posted by GDSOB

I'd suggest the company split 50/50 with the sales staff. Both benefit, so both should contribute in the spirit of"fairness and cooperation".

Well, if it were helping the community, I would be only slightly less opposed to it. This is, however, only helping already well-heeled clients of ours and has no trickle down effect whatsoever for fire victims. And besides that, the company picks a few charities and sends us to work for them on volunteer days. Nothing volunteered about it. Why should I lose a dime, or take a 50/50 split because someone who make almost $1 million a year thinks it would be a good PR stunt to give stuff away and who didn't even think about who actually pays for it? Oh yeah, I'm working for the man. So that's why!

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Originally Posted by 911Rob

Jeff!
3 to 5 years out?
Man, that's a few hundred thousand dollars in income for you!
Change that to 3 to 5 minutes and get on with it man!
or at the most; 3 to 5 months.

Start by calling in well......."Hello Boss, sorry I feel too good to come to work today"

Haha! I wish it worked that way, but in my field (architecture) one's hands are tied legally by professional licensing requirements. If you don't pass a whole slew of examinations and state reviews, you're severely limited in what you're legally allowed to do (which is a good thing, from a public life-safety standpoint). Right now I'm working pretty aggressively towards getting all the tests completed and making sure all the various hoops are jumped through - it's sort of similar to a medical school graduate having to take their medical boards before being given free reign to practice on their own.

I should (knock wood) be done with everything by the beginning to mid part of next year. That will open the door for going out on my own, although to be realistic I will probably remain here for another couple of years in order to gain more experience and make a few more connections before trying to go out on my own.

In the meantime I'm doing side work to the extent I'm legally able to and trying to get the most out of working. It's not all bad, but intermediate-to-long-term I most certainly want to be on my own and not dependent on anyone else for my livelihood. That either means a partnership/ownership stake in this firm or starting my own. I don't really care which, but I think going on my own would be ultimately more rewarding, if more work. . .

[Shuie]

I would not send the email and I would not mention it further to my manager unless I already had another job offer I was considering taking.

[Dennis Kalma]

Ok, having spent most of my life as an executive, my bet is that he didn't really think all this through, was trying to do a good thing and build good will and really didn't consider the impact on his staff. One of the challenges of being higher up the pecking order is that you tend to see things in broad swaths and not really get the detail view. The other thing is that your pay packet is a lot bigger and taking a small chunk out of it, especially when you can rationalize it may actually pay off in the long term by virtue of more sales etc etc, is not seen as a big deal.

Now what to do about it. It undoubtedly depends on the personality of the guy. If he is pretty open and you see him a lot, then drop in and chat about what is good about the idea first....remember conflict resolution. Step 1 - defuse emotion, Step 2 - review areas of agreement, Step 3 - delineate areas of disagreement or concern....Step 4 - deal with them on an issue by issue basis.

So I'd drop in and say what a great deal things were, how it would be good in the long term etc etc, however, it does sort of cause an upset in the commission scheme, had he thought of how best to deal with it if it is material in an individual case? And then go from there.

If he is a prick, then just move on. You may get the chance later when you deal with the commission/goals process to raise it again, but likely not.

My view is that a really classy company would take the corporate hit but not disadvantage any particular individual. A sort of classy company would wait and see if it made a material difference to the commission pay out and then decide what to do about it. An OK company would wring their hands and give out brownie points, a nice tee shirt or other corporate consideration and a crappy company would just tell you to suck it up and live with it or leave.

Dennis

[mjshira]

Originally Posted by Rick Lee

I need some detached advice on something I'm too mad about at the moment to write cleary on to my boss. But I need to write him soon.

Last Monday, as I walked out of my Santa Monica hotel and was looking at the smoke in Malibu, my Blackberry buzzed with an email from our CFO announcing that our company was comp'ing (as in totally free of charge) every press release to our most expensive domestic distribution circuit that had to do with the CA fires. This deal ended Friday. Obviously, this cost some money, but was intended to be a PR effort to bolster our image and build some goodwill. I think it worked too. But since I am paid base plus commission, this has taken some money out of my October revenue and thus November commission check. This wouldn't matter too much in January, but as the end of the year fast approaches, we can get huge bonuses for meeting our 2007 goal early. It's basically the CFO telling sales folks we're donating part of our commissions to the groups that wanted to put out statements or info on the fires. He didn't ask us, he told us.

I haven't computed the actual dollar figure yet, but I'm guesstimating at least $3k in freebies for my own clients and that's only the stuff I have access to. The company set up a special email address for this "sale", so I can't see what all went there. Our commission structure is so complex, that it's almost impossible to figure out what cut of that amount would be my commission. Since my division deals solely with public interest news, we have been hit a lot harder by this than the rest of the company, which deals with business and financial news. And crisis communications is our business. We thrive on it. Why give it away?

My boss is nowadays way more of a management guy now than he used to be and actually told me, "If you had been here last week (I was on my honeymoon), you could have capitalized on this by reaching out to prospects who had previously not returned your calls." I'm not making this up. In the end he said he could see where I was coming from, but I know he's trying to spin this into a big picture thing that is somehow supposed to benefit me and, at the same time, gingerly warning me to not make a big deal of it. I can take the hint. But he has asked me to write him an email, explaining why I think we should not be docked this comp'ed revenue and how much I would be "due". He says he'll pass this on to our CFO.

What would you write?

He is inviting you to walk the plank.

No doubt the CFO had to get 'buy-in' for this little idea and that had to involve his peers and probably his boss. That means a lot of people have invested this PR move and your email would no doubt make the rounds of a number their inbox's once your boss forwarded it.

So either A) he is just ignorant of politics and really expects the CFO to be responsive B) wants to throw you under the bus and at the same moment ingraciate himself to the CFO and the group who elected to do this or C) some other reason

I think a good boss doesn't let his subordinates make bad decisions. Rather, he attempts to keep them from making bad decisions while not micro-managing them.

In your case you need to decide how important it is to you to 'be right' vrs how important your career in this company is to you.

Good luck

[cstreit]

Originally Posted by Rick Lee

Had this happened in late December, a $3k cut in revenue could mean over $10k in lost commission, if it took me just below my 2007 goal. That year-end payout is an all or nothing deal.

I'm a commissioned guy as well... Since this is the big deal, I'd focus on this part rather than the other money involved. Ask them to give you a leeway on quota by the amount they gave away in your sales opportunities and towards "presidents club" or whatever special bonus' you get.

Your situation would burn my a$$ to no end!

[Shuie]

Does one guy really make a decision like this? Doesn't a decision like this usually involve several reasonably educated and intelligent people that sit very high on an organizational chart spending several hours arguing over who's budget its going to come out of before reaching some kind of compromise that makes sense for the entire company? You cant just email one of these people after the fact and tell them they were wrong because your commission got hosed.

Im not saying you're wrong, or that you didn't get hosed, but I would try to think about the information the execs had and the process they had to go through to make a decision like that before I questioned it out loud or in front of anyone at work.

[Rick Lee]

As I said, I was on my honeymoon when I got this email and had no idea it was coming. I doubt it would have been any less of a surprise had I been on the phones back in the office. I have met the CEO, CFO and senior mgt. several times and feel like they are approachable and reasonable people. They spent $19 million buying my old company out and so think we're worth something and give my boss a much longer leash than any other division head. I am truly blessed in that regard. You can't imagine the BS the other people have to endure.

But I do believe the CFO is the big boss when he feels like being it. The CEO is not an American and I think he defers sometimes to the local folks. The CFO is a very good guy and a very smart guy. Doesn't matter though. I'd be egregiously breaking the chain of command by going to him directly. My immediate boss has been my boss for six years. If I can't have an honest discussion with him, then I can't do it with anyone. Problem is that I'm sure he agrees with me in his heart, but is A) so well paid now, that our commission checks don't much matter to him anymore or B) he's really gone native, sort of like when Kevin Costner got captured in Dances With Wolves and the soldier said to him, "Turned Injun, dintja?" He just drank the Kool-Aid and sees his job as selling senior mgt's decisions to us folks in the trenches. 180 deg. from how it used to be when the two companies were fierce competitiors and ours was a lean, entrepreneurial machine. Now we're in the belly of the beast and half the day is spent fighting the internal beast, rather than drumming up business and revenue.

No, I'm not going to send the email. FWIW, when I left the company last year for my brief foray into subprime mortgages, my boss asked me for a very brutally honest review of the company and commission structure. I gave him a several page response and he seemed like he couldn't have been more grateful. But a few mos. later they were bought out by our present company, and so none of those ideas were ever implemented. Now I'm back in the belly of the beast.

[Rick Lee]

I should add that my boss told me later today that he heard from his boss that the company did the same freebie thing after 9/11 and Katrina. I reminded him that this company also had several rounds of layoffs after 9/11 as a lot of the local PR firms did too, while our company (pre-acquistion) boomed! I was in Europe during Katrina, but my clients sent in a lot of work then too. Crisis communications is how we shine. No need to give stuff away then. It's our chance to show off how good we are and no one ever left us because of price. There are no sales people left at my current company who were there before they bought out our old company. We were very small and only wanted about 5% of their business, but we got it and gave them a serious run for their money. So they fired all their sales people in the DC area, bought out our old company and told us to take over the DC stuff. That's why my boss gets a very long leash - they know we do well when left alone.