Fuck You, Pay Me [video]
creativemornings.com
creativemornings.com
I've idolized and watched this video many times.
Here is the truth of most everything in business: Asymmetric power structures.
Walmart is offering you a deal, but they don't allow strikeouts in their contract. You must sign the boilerplate. You do it because a deal with Walmart will change your life and you accept the risks.
My point is that very infrequently do two sides of a contract have equal leverage. I ran my own consulting company for 10 years and even as we grew there was always a bigger fish that we really wanted and even needed to survive.
The other way of looking at it would be who has "fuck you money?" or the "willingness to walk away". Sometimes both sides do, but a lot of the time, only one side does.
While I find this video satisfying, I'm not sure how much it actually helped me because as soon as I have the leverage, definitely, I'll make the terms the way I like them, but the opportunities have not been as frequent as I would have hoped.
Somebody is always twisting my arm or I'm twisting their arm.
Even a shitty contract is still better than none. At least I know what I agreed upon. If I have to take the job despite a shitty contract, I’d have to take the job without any contract, too. And that would be magnitudes worse with an opponent whose goal is to screw you over.
Imagine this as a thought experiment: Walmart hands you a contract in which they have plenty of other suppliers they could go who would be eager to take your place if you reject the contract. In this case, Walmart is leaving money on the table and what they should have done is hand you a contract with lower prices that fewer companies are willing to compete for which gives you more leverage but gives them better terms.
https://twitter.com/XCK3D/status/1093937747478233088
This is the basic formula for figuring out your day rate:
[expenses] / (231) = day rate
But this isn't the whole story, because you also need revision,
hourly, rush job, per asset, and asshole rates.It's funny that this is posted now. I hadn't thought of this talk for quite a while, but referenced it in a reddit comment just a week or two back.
Sure, contracts are a mechanism for people who don't trust each other to work together. But clear contracts only provide some leverage, if things go bad. And even with contracts that seem clear, there are still many ways to get screwed. As in, "I have no reachable assets, so fuck you."
Over many years, working as a consultant, I rarely had more than verbal contracts. Often, just telephone conversations, and then emails to create records.
And even so, I almost always got paid. Sometimes it took months, it's true. But really, my allies were typically the people I reported to. Although I never actually stated it clearly, clients that paid promptly (and paid at higher rates) got scheduling priority.
Maybe that could have been part of my standard contract. But I'm not sure how useful that would have been. I mean, suing my clients would have been rather awkward, no?
“A contract is written in good times so that the bad times never come.”
A written contract is the written summary of what you agreed upon so you can later return to it and say “This is what we did agree upon.” I have a lot of written contracts with people that I trust.
Keep in mind that people that you trust and work with at a company sometimes go away. Promoted, fired, ill, dead. Companies get sold or go bankrupt, Management is replaced by some less amicable management. In all those cases your sympathetic sponsor may still be sympathetic, but no longer in a position to help you. A contract is.
A contract should be fair and balanced. If either side regards the contract as a tool to screw over the other side you’ve already lost.
A written contract necessarily is an imperfect tool, but it’s much better than a verbal contract because our human memories are much worse on keeping track of what was actually discussed and agreed upon.
> I mean, suing my clients would have been rather awkward.
Suing is the last last resort when everything else has failed. There are a lot of steps that escalate towards that. A written contract can help that you never end up there just by virtue of having a written set of agreements that you put on the table and point to. But last resort: yes, sue your clients. When you’ve reached that point, they’ll never be your clients again anyways. A lot of them will sue you too. And even there, a contract may be what saves your ass.
I guess that I'm biased by the fact that, in the few cases where things really went to hell, a contract wouldn't have helped.
Edit: never mind, I found it (it's the green rectangle)
Fuck you pay me
Pay me, fuck you