Over the weekend, I had lunch with a few friends. One of those friends is a corporate trainer and an executive coach. Unlike every other “executive coach” I’ve ever met, she does it for real, with real companies, here in Barcelona.
Recently, my friend was hired to facilitate a meeting at a startup.
Her job consisted of sitting at a table with a dozen people from the company, smiling, and occasionally inviting somebody else to comment.
I don’t know how long this meeting lasted — I don’t think all day — but my friend got paid 1,500 euro (about $1,700) for her facilitation services.
This is the third time she’s been hired to do this by the the same company. Each time, she feels like they will never hire her again because she’s not doing anything.
And yet they keep hiring her.
Another girl at the same lunch, the best friend of the first girl, threw her hands up at this. “How unfair is that?” she said. “1,500 euro is a monthly salary for many people in Barcelona, for people who REALLY work. And what do you do? Nothing! And you make that in a day!”
Suddenly, both of them turned on me, because their impression is that I am the king of getting paid while not working. (“He just writes an email a day and somehow makes money.”)
I felt under attack. i had to fight back.
The fact is, there is little to no connection between how hard you work, and how much you get paid.
You can go all Leon Trotsky on that, and claim that the world is unjust, that we should castrate the billionaires, dispossess the white collar workers, and hand over all the land, buildings, railroads, highways, heavy industry, biotech companies, financial services, patents, copyrights, and trademarks to the peasants and the factory workers of the world to enjoy and manage, because somehow they deserve it, because they work harder than anybody else on this planet.
It’s been tried, repeatedly. It’s been found to fail, spectacularly.
In today’s world, where so much innovation and wealth creation depends on ideas, on reading sentiment, on slight nuances that can only be recognized with expert training, you can do very little and yet create a lot of value.
During lunch, I made the case for why it can makes sense for that company to hire my friend at 1,500 euro to smile and sit around while they have their meeting.
The company is a software company. A minor change in positioning, in market selection, in marketing strategy could spell the difference between this company’s product being worth tens of millions of dollars and being worth nothing — regardless of how much software and thinking and hard work has gone into it.
Maybe the fact that my friend is a respected outside presence keeps the meeting more civil and productive.
Maybe her placid and accommodating demeanor calms people and makes them more open-minded.
Maybe her occasionally inviting somebody to speak who hasn’t spoken draws out a single idea that can spell the difference between failure and success for the company.
Or maybe I’m just trying to justify myself and the way I live, writing an email a day and somehow making money.
In any case, next Tuesday, I will hold a live and free presentation about email list monetization.
I’m gonna talk about specific advice I’ve given over the course of this year to an email list owner, which has allowed him to go from making $2.2k per month to regular $6k+ months from his list.
Because you can work hard — lots of emails, lots of calls, lots of free bonuses — and not get paid very much from your email list.
You can also works less, spend less time, and make more money.
How? Well for that, I hope you will join me for Tuesday’s presentation. Here’s where you can sign up for it: