16 Mar Work a LITTLE harder and a LITTLE smarter than others…

We’ve spent a lot of time reviewing our financial past in regard to debt, savings, retirement accounts and real estate investing but its time to hit on the other end of the equation toward FI, Income.  In Scott Trenches book I commend his relentless pursuit of the big 3 expenses to get under control, but then he takes the time to focus on growing your income instead of just waiting out a longer journey to FI as a result of earning about the same plus nominal raises and keeping your expenses low.  While I say that on one hand, I give a tremendous amount of credit to those that are on the same journey to FI from a timeline standpoint while doing so on a lower household income than we work with.  We don’t even consider FI to be hard because we live a lifestyle of luxury in some categories and we’d make some in the FI community cringe if they saw some of our choices! In any case, we have a pretty high income to work with and want explore a bit of how we got here.

Starting with my wife who recently returned to work and is getting paid much more than we’d anticipated when we set out for her return.  We were pleasantly surprised at the market value for a role like hers after being off for 4 years, and the gap between what she was earning 4 years ago and what she earns now will nearly pay for the child care costs we incurred for my son.  On top of the earnings benefit we have the 401k match which is slightly more, the healthcare costs that went down, and she has access to a flex savings account that we get to utilize pre-tax up to $5,000 a year for child care costs which nets us about $1,000 in tax savings.  While I realize this post is about income, this is all part of the compensation category and any savings I have gets repurposed into our savings buckets and will accelerate our journey to FI.  My wife is a hard worker, gets up early to get there early and get home early, and aims to improve things in her immediate environment.  At her former employer there were some really good systems in place that had been in place for a long time, she worked for a giant that had been around a very long time.  While they had great systems, she was great at executing them, trustworthy, didn’t abuse things like “unlimited sick days” and even seemingly trivial things like taking it easy on the company credit card when traveling.  Leadership takes notice of things like this and it adds up and compounds over time.

My wife built a confidence in her work and had some promotions over her 8 or 9 year career at her former employer but she was stuck in some capacity because the employer valued a specific degree over hers that would limit her ability to become a food scientist which is the next step up and can take you leaps and bounds further.  Before our son was born she considered other work and other companies but nothing really seemed to jump out or fit and as we neared the decision to have a child it became pretty clear that she should stay put and ride it out until at least after the birth of our child to have the solid healthcare, forgiving time away policies, and flexibility to try and go for 3 days a week instead of full time.  There’s a whole post on what happened there when my son was born that you can read up on what actually happened but she ended up staying home with our boy for almost 4 years and when returning to work, the former employer wasn’t even a consideration because there’s a cap on her future there, their loss.

She landed at this newer company that has been around a while, is publicly owned and traded on the stock market, yet very quickly she noticed lack of systems and processes.  Interestingly, there are a number of her peers that are from the former employer as well and surely, they must be aware of some inefficiencies but nothings changed.  Her and I spoke about it a bit and inside of her first month at work she had a meeting scheduled with her manager and brought up the ability to improve a few things that would cost the company nothing, keep her busy during this weird Covid onboarding process and make everyone’s life a little easier.  She was granted approval and her manager went home that day smiling and able to share at the next update meetings a new project in order to improve efficiency and tracking of specific product and ingredients.  My wife didn’t ask for a raise because of that nor will she receive one, but little things like that are the difference makers that get you in the top tier for raise ability, and more importantly promotion opportunities when they become available over time.

We have to do the little things in life that are harder or other people walk past and ignore to put ourselves in a position to be noticed and promoted.  The phrase “that’s not my job” is very far from our vocabulary and something that doesn’t get said to a supervisor on the spot and is something reserved for a follow up discussion after completing a task that doesn’t fit your job description.  We need to continuously be a top performer in our category and space, while supporting the others around us to be the person that no one will have a bad thing to say about.  We can’t be the stand out performer that’s seen as cut throat and out to make others look bad.  There’s a balance between winning in performance while being a confidant for the peers.  We don’t call out lack of performance or execution by another publicly or privately to our supervisors, its viewed poorly and while it is a way to climb a ladder, it might only get you past a wrung or two while another flies past you.

When I look back on my career as mentioned in a post about my imposter syndrome, I have no degree and yet I went from hourly employee to VP of Operations in a 10 year time span and earning well above that of my peers who have MBAs and time spent growing in the corporate world and ladder in bigger companies.  How I did that was doing little things better than those around me, being a team player, listening to what leadership was saying and actually executing on it.  Think about how many new policies or procedures your company may have rolled out and most people don’t comply and they just fizzled out.  I complied with those little rules and policies whenever possible and would carefully ask questions about it to my supervisors over the years to ensure they knew I was paying attention to it, but something about it was unclear or where it was going caused some pause.  While the program may have died at some point, they knew I played along.  I wasn’t a robot that simply did what I was told and never asked questions or challenged things, but I played the game and did what was asked of me to the best of my ability and then turned around and “took credit for it” very tactfully to ensure it was known that I played along.  I never said anything like “I’m the only one around here that actually executes on policy ABC”, but I guarantee I walked away from conversations where I asked a question about policy ABC and the supervisor thought to themselves “he actually is doing it, the other 5 people I have to force feed to even do the fundamentals and he’s over there doing it to the fullest and trying to apply it to this other bigger picture goal”.

In Scott Trench’s book “Set for Life” as referenced earlier in this post he speaks about getting into performance based jobs and roles.  While I agree that careers that pay for direct performance and dollars provided to the bottom line often pay the highest, not everyone is going to feel fit for those roles and I think its owed to my audience that you don’t just transition from being an I.T. Support Specialist to an outside Sales Executive overnight.  You have to become that person over time which is going to be a radical shift for you to overcome, this will require reading, podcasts, practice, and taking a job that will put you on that path and it very well may not be in your current company.  I’d evaluate your potential leadership qualities as well and consider going down the path of leading people in your current role or space, and see where you can improve your skill set and potentially income right where you are at while you consider these other radical changes you may need to make to become the career person you want to be.  We don’t get to jump from hourly employee to Director in a year, that almost never happens but the ladder can go: Hourly Employee Part Time, Hourly Employee Full Time, Team Lead, Supervisor, Area Supervisor, Department Manager, Assistant GM, GM, District Manager/Director, Regional Manager/Director and so on.

There are a lot of little steps in there that can incrementally increase your income as you move up the chain, and the good news is, companies need leadership talent badly.  Most companies deeply struggle to find great leaders so they instead settle for seniority based decisions and promote someone that was great at their role as a role player, but never belonged being in management or leadership.  The company will never fire them because they have been around forever, and the people get mediocre leadership as well as great leadership talent being left stuck behind in roles when they could be leading people in those roles instead and the cycle continues.

I feel like this post is all over the place so I want to hone back in on the center of this post, do hard things, and do things just a little bit better and with more intentionality than your peers.  If you do that repeatedly over time, you will automatically stand out and move up in your roles should you choose.  You’ll move up faster because you’ll be creating a spot for yourself, and well exceed the “seniority model” that many witness and think is the path to success.  You will step right past and lead your peers that have been with the company for a few years before you were hired as a result of performance and leadership skills.