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Comment by 1337biz | Hacker News Reader

From my experience in the entertainment industry I always wish I could hire a manager to represent myself in negotiations with employers/bosses/etc - even if this would mean having to pay a 15-20% management fee on my salary. But I just can't convince my boss to negotiate with my agent...

You can train and optimize your negotiation skills all you want, but in my opinion it is extremely valuable to separate the "talent" from the "money". Top performers, no matter in what industry, are usually extremely passionated about their craft and undervalue the monetary value they can bring to the table.

Having a third party represent them puts a "neutral" monetary evaluation on them. Good management allows a much more strategic long-term development that focuses on value building and not just opportunity hopping.

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1337biz - Our core claim is that an an advisory/coaching model is a better fit for the tech industry. It's why we brand ourselves as "Advisors", and not "Agents". In addition to compensation advice, we provide meaningful career coaching advice as part of the process - this helps you figure out which place is actually a better fit along non-monetary dimensions.

Also, our fee structure is much more reasonable than an agent's - we're charging 20-30% of the cash increase, or a $2k flat fee, whichever folks feel is more reasonable. Incentive alignment is important, but there are also cases where candidate may get a huge bump in equity they can't can't necessarily pay us out of.

It'd be interesting to consider derivatives-based model in the future to align incentives better by capturing the value of the equity increase, but that's a long ways off, and not terribly important to us at the moment.

I wrote about this, and I think it's a useful idea, although it has some ethical issues (around whether one can trust the consultant to deliver) that need to be nailed down: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/fixing-employ...

> From my experience in the entertainment industry

Well, from experience in the music industry, it seems that the person doing the hard work (the artist) most often is on the bad end of the deal, while all the middle-men are laughing their way to the bank.

I'm just saying that analogies are not always to be relied upon.

(Also, a 15-20% management fee is totally not reasonable, except if it is time-limited.)

My experience with self-managed artists is quite negative - but this is entertainment industry related. Just the fact that there is somebody you can call during the day and get a definitive answer on a request, and who makes sure the talent is showing up and delivering on the negotiated the deal, is securing them deals they otherwise would never get. This is most certainly not something that one would classify as "hard work" but it is super valuable when "talent" meets "corporate".

I would expect to see a per-negotiation fee structure along the lines of MAX(30% of the outcome in excess of expectation, 3% expected salary) - but obviously where the actual percentages are properly reasoned.

> Well, from experience in the music industry, it seems that the person doing the hard work (the artist) most often is on the bad end of the deal, while all the middle-men are laughing their way to the bank.

No, the person assuming the most risk, the label pushing large sums of money in promotion in a high risk investment, gets the most money.

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