In the summer of 2018 I received an offer by Kathryn & David Allen to attend a two-day seminar on the fundamentals of Getting Things Done®, the famous productivity methodology that sold over 2 million book copies worldwide.

It wasn’t just any seminar — I actually had the opportunity to fill in for someone in what was essentially a “train the trainer” version of their entry level class, filled with people who had integrated GTD® so deeply that someone's project board even included a to-do list dedicated entirely to their dog, with current and future to-do's.

As extreme as that may be, I fell in love with many of the concepts discussed and highly recommend reading the book or following a class yourself.

As is the case with most great seminars or books, you tend to remember a few elements that stick with you. For me, one of those elements was the waiting-for box.

Or as I like to call it, the parking lot.

But first, why and how do to-do lists work?

In the words of David Allen: “Our minds aren't built for holding ideas”.

Writing down what is on your mind quite literally frees up cognitive space that your brain will otherwise use to constantly remind you not to forget about XYZ.

As a CEO I am constantly switching from discussions, to phone calls, to trouble-shooting for a client, to urgent emails and back to new discussions. The only way I can be fully present in each of those moments is by constantly offloading my actions into my to-do app, so that I can move on knowing it can reviewed later.

Fundamentally, three things matter most in writing my to-do lists:

1. Capture it all, or don't bother. Keeping half in your head and half on a to-do list is still going to give you a 100% of the cognitive stress.

2. Capture it all in once place. Splitting tasks over multiple apps or loose papers doesn't bring me any closer to feeling in control.

3. Always think in ‘next actions’. Something as complex as designing a marketing plan might paralyse you into procrastination, however the very first step of that process (your next action) might be as simple as “schedule a brainstorm with the marketing team”. Write that down instead.

Now let me throw you a slight curve-ball.

What if your next action requires input from someone else before you can complete it? What if you need to schedule a brainstorm with the marketing team but you're still waiting to hear back via email whether a meeting room is available?

Enter the parking lot.

Waiting for someone else to respond creates an interesting to-do list dilemma.

• You could hit the check-box on your to-do and consider it done, but at the risk of getting no response and forgetting about your unfinished task afterwards.

• You could leave it open on your to-do list, unnecessarily cluttering your list with an item that is currently outside of your control.

Neither are great and there is a better solution.

Within my Microsoft To Do app I keep track of multiple lists. There's one for my personal life, one for work and one dedicated entirely to the Hatchet.

Each of these lists are split between an inbox, a parking lot and a backlog of tasks called ‘some day’.

Whenever I'm dependent on someone else to complete a task I will drag that to-do from my inbox to the parking lot with a description of who I'm waiting for and when I feel it's realistic to have received a reply. All you need to do next is periodically review your parking lot.

And that .. is how you never forget about an unfinished task.

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Investor Update #4

Dear investors,

It's been a while — almost 3 months — and an update is due.

Maybe it was naivety on my part, but I completely underestimated the challenge a second baby would add to my time management this year :-)

Our little family is doing exceptionally well, although mom and dad have had to transition into a military baby operation in order to keep the household happy, fed and entertained all while managing a serious lack of sleep.

Luckily, easier times are on the horizon and I finally have time to sit down, create content again and share with you my updated plans for the Hatchet.

The startup pivot

I wouldn't be running a real startup if I didn't at least once decide to pivot in a substantial way — which is what I've decided I must do.

As of today, I'm pivoting away from a revenue model.

I want to share with you how I came to this decision and what the implications are for you as a subscriber, as well as for the direction that I'll be taking the Hatchet in.

Why are you pivoting away from revenue?

When I started the Hatchet I set a goal for myself to reach Dutch minimum wage (€19.836) within a year — the amount I would need to pay my bills and prove this endeavor was a viable source of income that I could pursue into the future.

I've now managed to hit €11.871 in revenue within 11 months. Although it's only 60% of my goal, I am proud of the accomplishment now that I fully understand how much work needs to go into building an audience from nothing.

However, since I no longer need this income to pay myself a salary, the paid subscriber model has started to feel like an unnecessary paywall that will limit the exposure and growth of the Hatchet's overall reach. With only a sub-segment of my content being made available to free subscribers, it's challenging to grow the audience because of what content I can or can't share on social media.

With almost 60% of annual subscriptions being renewed between December and February I felt like now was the moment to make the call.

What this means for your paid subscription

This week I manually deactivated your credit card subscription in my Stripe account, meaning you will no longer be charged for a monthly or annual renewal.

I have also changed each and everyone of you from a paid subscriber to an honorary subscriber, because that's the personal recognition each of you deserve for supporting me to follow my dream and launch this project in December of 2020.

Going forward:

• you will receive new articles again starting next week — share them as far and wide as you'd like because they are all free to read from now on

• you will still receive the occasional investor update about strategy and growth, where I will continue to pay tribute to you as honorary subscribers

• you saved some extra money for 2022 — go and buy yourself a gift!

But most importantly, you can enter the holiday season knowing that you hold a lifetime of my karma credits for investing in me and my project. Thank you!!

Yours truly,

Wytze

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TL;DR

• startups can have a hard time providing above-average salaries, but they usually make up for that by providing appealing employee participation schemes;

• the unfeasibly high costs associated with buying actual shares are the main driver for share options (or equivalents of) being a popular instrument;

• holding startup equity has some great advantages: your early commitment, belief and hard work in the company could be rewarded in the event of an IPO or sale;

• the three questions to ask yourself to value your options: when was the strike price set, at what valuation and what's in the fine print?

A guide to receiving startup equity

In the world of startups and scale-ups, a common challenge we face as employees is the fact that startups have a hard time providing above-average salaries.

The fault lies in the nature of the startup-phase, which often implies the company is either still unprofitable or trying to reinvest the majority of it's potential profit back into the business to grow faster. In either of those situations, cash is a scarce commodity.

By contrast, large and established companies are much better positioned to offer high salaries and paid secondary benefits, because their maturity in the market tends to mean they already generate a lot of free cash flow. Once the need to grow aggressively disappears, it opens up funds that can be redirected to employee compensation.

Thankfully there's a great instrument that allows startups to match those higher salaries with a form that doesn't involve cash, called employee participation.

Employee participation is really an umbrella-term for the many legal structures that allow an employee to benefit from the success of the startup they are helping to build with their blood, sweat and tears. However, the most commonly found constructs at startups are instruments that behave like shares or share options.

My goal for this article is to help you understand what this component of your compensation means in terms of value and potential.

employee participation = umbrella term for various legal structures that let employees share in the overall success of the company;

startup equity = one sub-category of employee participation that refers specifically to instruments that behave like company shares or share options;

shares and share options = (an option to buy) a small slice of ownership in the underlying business you're helping to build;

How suited am I to advise you on financial matters?

I have absolutely no qualifications to be providing you financial advice, but what I can provide is my experience of being on the receiving end of startup equity grants.

I have also interviewed several qualified investors and asked them to poke holes in this article before I share it with you, so in conclusion, I feel reasonably comfortable that what I have to share will help you make your own decisions when the time comes.

Understanding the basics of startup equity plans

Employee participation can be structured in multiple different ways, each with its own advantages and drawbacks relating to ease-of-use, fiscal treatment and/or the associated rights and obligations it provides the person participating.

Before we dive into the various instruments for startup equity participation, it's important to understand in the most general sense which advantages could be unlocked by holding shares or share options of a company:

1. the shares/options can increase in value if the company flourishes;

2. there's a possibility of receiving future dividends/profits;

3. there's a possibility of receiving the right to be informed and/or vote on important company decisions that require shareholder approval;

In the startup world you'll find that most startup equity schemes are centered around point number one — the other two usually won't be relevant or applicable to your particular agreement or the situation that the startup is in.

So far I've been referring to shares as well as share options, and it's vital to understand the difference between them and why you are much more likely to encounter a startup equity plan that works like an option.

As an early employee, you probably won't have the funds available to buy actual shares of the company even if you were offered the chance. Purchasing a 1% stake in a startup that is valued between €1-€10 million means you'd need to pay up to €100.000 to receive your equity stake. That's the kind of money most of us don't have lying around.

Even if the company were to gift you those shares, it would trigger an instant taxable-event that requires you to pay up to 49,5% (box 1 Dutch taxes) of the received value in taxes. That's still a lot of money that you would be paying for shares that carry some inherent risk of being completely worthless if the startup fails to succeed.

Share options, or instruments that work similar to share options, try their best to mitigate that problem for us by removing the necessity to put down money up front while still keeping the advantage of profiting from long-term company growth.

Hence why, the most commonly found employee participation vehicles found at startups are either share options or instruments that work like share options.

To put it all in perspective, here's an overview of the most commonly found startup equity instruments and where they fit into the share or option-type model:

Instruments that work like shares:

• Shares — which are issued by a notary and (unless specifically stated otherwise) include voting rights, dividend rights and can increase/decrease in value;

• Certificates of shares, issued by a STAK, that don't include voting rights but do include economic rights like dividends and value growth;

Instruments that work like options:

• Options on actual shares — which give you the employee the right, but not the obligation, to purchase company shares in the future at a discounted rate.

• Options on certificates of shares — which give you the right, but not obligation, to purchase certificates of shares without voting rights in the future;

• Share Appreciation Rights* — also known as Shadow Stock, which aren't real options or shares, but act as a bonus agreement that mirrors the same value growth you could get from having shares (dependent also on the agreement);

• Purchasing shares on loan — purchasing actual company shares through a favorable loan offered to you by the company that needs to be repaid.

Why it’s worth participating in a startup equity plan

There is an active debate going on in The Netherlands to make startup equity plans more attractive, in part because of the potential trickle-down effect.

If more employees profit from a successful company exit, the chances are higher some of that money makes it back into the tech ecosystem through early employees starting new companies or re-investing some of their earnings as angel investors.

Aside from the ecosystem benefiting, there's also plenty of other relevant benefits.

Participating in a startup equity plan has some great advantages:

• it strengthens your alignment with the company — if the entire team does well and executes on its goals, you stand to do well in the future too;

• it adds an interesting component to your compensation — both early and late employees of Airbnb, Uber, Adyen, Zoom and other tech startup successes made life-changing money when the company IPO'd, the same will soon happen to employees of companies like Mollie and Messagebird;

• your early commitment, belief and hard work in the company is rewarded in the event of an IPO or company sale;

But there are also risks inherent to startup equity you need to consider:

• you can't always linearly match company value growth to (your) option/share value growth; founder and/or investor shares will sometimes have a different class of shares that provide preferential treatment in the event of a sale or IPO;

• in the Netherlands, some option instruments are viewed as a form of salary and profits will be taxed according to the same progressive scale that applies to your regular salary — this could mean forking over 49.5% of your future earnings;

• share or share option instruments usually come with certain restrictions (listed in the fine print of your option agreement) on whether or not you're allowed to keep them if/when you decide to leave the company before an IPO or sale;

Not all startup equity plans are created equal, and there's merit in making sure you understand what value you are being offered when you are given an opportunity to participate in one of these plans.

The three steps of understanding share options

Since the most commonly found employee participation vehicles found at startups are either share options or instruments that work like share options, it's important to be able to read and fully understand the offer that you are being made.

For the sake of simplicity I'm bringing back the assessment of a highly complicated document to a few main questions I believe are most fundamental to you understanding the value that your options offer represents.

1. When was the strike price set?

2. What was the valuation then (‘when the strike price was set’) and now?

3. What obligations will I find hidden in “the fine print”?

Answering these questions can help you understand and track the value growth of your personal share or share option grant as the company grows.

Before we go through each of these together, let's run through how an option contract works with some dummy numbers so we're clear about how this transaction can translate to future compensation for you.

• your offer will list a total number of options you're being granted, let's say 2.000 — these options can be exchanged (‘exercised’) for shares in the future;

• you will receive an exercise (‘strike’) price per option, which usually corresponds to the current price per share of the company or a slight discount — let's say €10;

• let's say in the next 4 years the company triples in value and the Founders decide to sell the business to Megacorp for €30 per share;

• you'll exercise the contract by paying the exercise price per share (€10 x 2000 = €20.000) and instantly sell your shares to Megacorp (€30 x 2000 = €60.000).

• Your profit after this transaction is €40.000 before taxes.

*my beautiful dummy calculation assumes that there are no Founder or Investor class shares that have preferential rights. If there are, which is often the case, it can negatively affect your payout as an employee holding common class shares.

Back to the questions now.

#1 - When was the strike price set?

When Founders make employees an offer to receive share options, they have an accounting obligation to make sure that the exercise (‘strike’) price resembles the current value of company shares as closely as possible.

While Founders may issue share options to employees on any given day of the year, it's unlikely they'll perform a new company valuation each time they do. Valuations are a time-consuming and costly exercise usually reserved for the moments a company raises outside funding so it can establish how much new investors are asked to pay.

So how does this apply to you?

The strike price in your options contract — the discounted price at which you can buy shares in the future — is usually based on the valuation assigned to the company during the most recent investment round.

Depending on how long ago the previous investment round took place, there's a likelihood your strike price will reflect a discrepancy between the share value listed in your offer and the actual value a share holds on the day you receive it.

In other words: if the strike price was set a year ago and the company has continued to grow since then, it's likely the actual company valuation will have grown beyond the valuation being used in the strike price. If this is the case, then lucky you, it means you're essentially receiving a discount hidden inside the strike price of your contract.

Consider asking these questions:

• When was the strike price set that I'm being offered in my options offer? Does it correspond to a recent investment round?

• If it does, how much would you say a company share would be worth now based on how much the company has grown since?

#2 - What was the valuation then and now?

Possibly the most challenging question of the three, since answering this involves combining accounting math with ambiguous assumptions about the total addressable market, the quality of the founding team or the future potential of the business.

There is never a definitively correct answer, and when founders raise funding or try to sell their company, a large part of their work is trying to convince their counterpart that the valuation they have in mind for the company is in fact reasonable.

Challenges aside, the three most common valuation frameworks in business are:

• the EBITDA-multiple; the value of the company is a multiple (eg. 8x) of the earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. The multiple will depend on factors such as industry, growth rate, debt and other metrics.

• the Revenue-multiple; the value of the company is a multiple (eg. 5-7x) of the trailing 12-month annual recurring revenue. This valuation method is common with high growth SAAS-businesses.

• the Discounted Cash Flow-method; the value of the company is derived from calculating the present value of the future earnings a company expects to make. This method is often used in small businesses, but my advisor for this article Aik Deveneijns views it as an error-prone and generally overestimated valuation model and borderline useless when pricing tech startups.

I'm not telling you this because you need to be able to perform your own due diligence on valuation. I'm telling you because Founders will rarely disclose the latest company valuation, but you can still extract very useful information by learning which valuation method was used and what revenue/earnings the company was hitting at that time.

Say you know that the most recent investment round took place in January 2019, that the company was valued using an EBITDA-multiple and that the company EBITDA of 2018 was €50.000. You still won't know how much the company was valued at in total because you won't know the multiple itself (was it 6, 9, 15 or 20?).

However, if the CFO tells you in a few years time that the EBITDA for 2024 was €500.000, you will be able to make a ballpark assumption that the company — and the value of your options package — will have grown 10x.

I use the term ballpark for a reason, because even if the valuation method stays the same, the multiples can change due to reasons such as high company debt, general market outlook for the segment your company is in or because the acquiring company that wants to make an offer has some strategic/synergetic value to bring to the table.

You'll only ever have a best guess, but at least it will give you some direction.

The questions I would recommend asking are:

• Can you share the valuation method used during the latest investment round (is it an EBITDA multiple / Revenue multiple)?

• How much EBITDA / Revenue were we doing at that time? How much EBITDA / Revenue are we doing right now?

• What percentage ownership do my options represent? (This is a trick question — they probably won't share this information with you, because if they tell you the %, you'll be able to calculate the total company valuation).

#3 - What obligations will I find hidden in the fine print?

We've covered the most important aspect of your options offer, but that's likely only 10% of the documentation that you need to review and sign.

The other 90% are contractual clauses covering crucial elements that warrant just as much scrutiny as the actual offer. Amongst those you'll find:

• it could contain additional and stricter non-compete terms on top of those already covered in your employment contract;

• you'll find explanation about what voting rights (usually none) your shares have once you've exercised your options and how shareholder decisions are made;

• there will be specific guidelines as to whether or not you're allowed to keep your options if you leave, or whether you're obliged to sell them back to the company.

Especially this third component — what happens when you leave — is often documented quite extensively. Founders want to avoid having employees leave a month after they issued them ownership in the company because the entire idea behind sharing ownership is to build long-term commitment with key employees.

To cover their bases, the most important clause Founders will add to your documentation is referred to as a vesting schedule.

A vesting schedule is an instrument that allows Founders to issue you share or share options, while agreeing with you that they only truly become ‘yours’ after a certain amount of years. You'll be granted the options immediately, but depending on the agreements in the vesting schedule, you'll unlock a set percentage of them at predefined intervals throughout a period of (usually) 4 years after the grant.

The vesting schedule can make for a great pair of golden handcuffs, because leaving before all of your options have vested can mean losing out of a lot of money.

A typical vesting schedule at a startup might look something like this:

• 25% of your options shall vest and become exercisable after one year;

• 2,083% of your options shall vest and become exercisable on a monthly base during 3 years starting 1 year after the grant date.

The potential implications of a schedule like this for you are best summarised by illustrating examples of what would happen if and when you left the company:

• if you leave the company 10 months after receiving the options, none of them will have vested and you'll have to give everything back for free;

• if you leave exactly 2 years after receiving the options, you'll be allowed to keep or sell half of the options back to the company — the other half will still have been unvested and you'll need to hand those back in for free;

Some final advice

Even if the contents can feel overwhelming, there is always room to have an open discussion about the share (option) offer you're being made by your employer.

How much leverage you have to demand alterations to the terms is highly dependent on the phase of the company and the importance of you/your role. Even if the offer is non-negotiable, it doesn't absolve you of your obligation to understand what you sign.

Startup equity plans can be an amazing addition to your compensation, but they can also leave you in a world of regret if you accidentally breach your contractual terms or leave the company before your share or share options have fully vested.

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TL;DR

• high performing product teams use a strategy that helps them create better product decisions over time — I've summarised this into the SPA-model™;

• step one is to speed up your decision-making and safeguard your development team's momentum by avoiding an overkill of debate;

• step two is to log your product hypotheses so that you can evaluate which assumptions led you to make the right or wrong product decisions;

• step three is to create your own Product Framework, a living document logging all of your product knowledge and previous decisions;

• step four is to leverage this document to manage a highly motivated and happy development team.

The art of successful product management

As a product manager, I've always been fascinated by understanding what it is that makes some SaaS companies succeed in making products that conquer the world, while many others try and ultimately have to admit failure.

I truly believe that high performing SaaS businesses run on a success formula and there's no better graph to prove my point than this: once SaaS companies hit their first $10.000 in annual recurring revenue, the speed at which they grow is exponential.

How do they do it?

There's a holy grail in product development that every SaaS business dreams of designing into their product. It's called the ‘compounding growth loop’.

On a very basic level, a compounding growth loop is when you make it possible for your product to become more valuable to users upon using it more often and with more people. Compounding growth loops are what make products like Facebook, Pinterest or Slack so successful: the more of your friends or colleagues you invite to it, the more value you get out of the product.

Having worked on many SaaS products myself has made me realise that highly effective product teams don't just try to design compounding growth loops into their product, they also borrow the concept and implement it into their own strategy for guiding product development.

Each new product decision they make becomes infinitely better because they feed the results of the previous product decisions back into their decision making process.

Sound complex? I've broken it down into what I will now dub the SPA-model™ (Samuel's Product Approach) for highly effective product teams:

Step 1: Accelerate the speed of taking decisions

Building great software is all about effective time and resource management.

SaaS startups usually have a million and one great ideas parked in the backlog of their roadmap, but development teams have limited time and are an expensive cost.

Most product managers spend too much time debating the “right” decision, where instead they should be making “a decision”. The problem with too much debate and too many opinions is that a good decision will rarely make up for the time and productivity lost by taking the momentum out of your development team.

This isn't a new thing: Maimonides, a jewish philosopher, already wrote about this in the 12th(!) century: “the risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision”.

All great digital products go through iterations, not in the last place because you won't get real user feedback until you've shipped your idea and it's up and running. It's more important to decide with speed than to get things completely right the first time.

Instead of getting bogged down in looking for endless data to support your hypothesis, look for confidence. Ask yourself what the minimum information is that you need to be able to champion making this product decision. What would convince you that there's a realistic chance the idea will work?

It's always better to ship fast and evaluate after, than to get stuck trying to find consensus on how to move forward at all.

Step 2: Start logging your product hypotheses

Now that you're making decisions fast, let's revisit how you can actually avoid crashing and burning the company by not making bad decisions all the time.

Product management is strangely similar to investing. There's a concept we can borrow from the world of investment that will help you learn from each decision you make — whether bad or good. One of the most successful hedge fund investors of the world, Ray Dalio, lives by a mantra that best introduces this concept:

“It's OK to make a wrong decision, it’s not ok to not learn from it.” - Ray Dalio

If you’re moving fast, it’s acceptable to be wrong on occasion, as long as you can use the learnings to be right the next time. In order to do this effectively, you need to establish a hypothesis for each major product decision and evaluate whether it played out as you had intended once you have enough information to evaluate.

By making your assumptions explicit, your evaluation will be much more valuable:

• if you were wrong about a product decision, you can analyse which assumptions in particular where incorrect and decipher why;

• if you were right about a product decision, it can help strengthen your confidence in making other product decisions based on the same assumptions.

Either way, wrong or right, you're learning.

Step 3: Bundle your hypotheses into a Product Framework

Remember that ‘compounding growth loop’ I mentioned earlier?

As you start creating and validating new product hypotheses, you should start bundling them together into a document that helps you make more informed future product decisions by encapsulating all of your wins and failures.

I call this living document your “Product Framework” and it's essentially a bible that your team should reference every time it makes a roadmap decision. It's also extremely useful for onboarding new employees and making sure that product knowledge doesn't leave the company completely when senior members leave the team.

As with many living documents, they can become unwieldy the more they are used. At a certain point, it can add value to distill the majority of your confirmed hypotheses into proven insights that relate specifically to core product questions like “who is our user?” and “what problem(s) is our app solving for them?”.

Your marketing colleagues will usually have comparable insights to the same question, so it can be valuable to compare notes or work on the document together.

Step 4: Use the Product Framework to keep your team motivated, happy and productive

How do you keep development teams happy and productive? Now there's a question many management teams have grown grey hairs pondering about.

When productivity falls behind (for whatever reason), many companies will look to tooling or training as a means to solve the problem. There is no shortage of consultants that can advise expensive trainings like Scrum or Agile, but I have yet to see these methodologies significantly impact a product team’s performance.

One place you do see a lot of highly productive teams is at Hackathons. Whenever I'm at such events I have to laugh when I hear puzzled business people try to figure out how it's possible that developers are so productive in comparison to their normal way of working at the office and while working on a project that doesn't even pay them!

Then they try to organise internal company hackathons and it doesn't work. The reason it doesn't work is because they copy the wrong ideas.

It's not the event format that makes people productive, it's the fact that they work in a small team towards a clear common goal. There's no process, fancy team methodology or an appointed Scrum leader, just the shared goal of creating something that's ready to ship by the end of the Hackathon.

Interestingly enough.. it works. Teams figure it out as they go. If they need to address a roadblock, they will. If they need to do research, they'll make it happen. As long as product teams are motivated and excited about what they’re doing, they will figure out how to get there without the need of any predefined process.

The companies that struggle with their productivity usually have a very different issue: often it's a result of being unable to explain why or how the work their teams do contribute to the overall success of the company.

The Product Framework can solve this, because it explains why the work matters. It reminds everyone why we're building what we are and articulates the potential impact a positive outcome of a product decision could have on the success of the company.

Even in the case of a negative outcome, the Product Framework helps remind everyone that even a failure helps create learnings that become the foundation of success.

A final word

You don't need to implement a Product Framework to perfection in order to still get significant results. Even an MVP of this process will help you speed up your decision making and help communicate the why behind important decisions to everyone with a stake in helping you design a product that will conquer the world.

Interested in hearing more about how I've implemented this myself? Feel free to reach out via Email or Twitter. Also, Veed.io is hiring!

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Investor Update #3

Dear investors,

I have multiple exciting updates to share about my personal life that relate in part to your subscription of The Hatchet; but first, let's dive into the numbers.

After a blowout quarter earlier in the year (revenue up 119%) I've had to come to terms with a rather underwhelming 5% increase in total revenue this quarter. After losing two paid subscribers and gaining a few more, I am now at an email list of 1064, with 54 paid subscribers, 1 content partnership deal and a combined gross annual revenue of €6.179.

I've identified the lack of new revenue to be a direct result of my 4 weeks away from the company to onboard a new employee into my family: Oliver Julius de Haan.

I am immensely grateful that your support has allowed me to take valuable time off.

Major changes ahead

When I started on this project 6 months ago my plan was to create a financially sustainable startup by sharing interesting advice that I had come across during my career as a tech startup manager. I decided to follow this path, in part, because of my desire to build a product from scratch and become an entrepreneur myself. 

So far, these 6 months have been extremely rewarding. I’ve been able to write 18 articles, help 8 people with business challenges as part of the mentorship program, while also being able to take valuable time off to spend with my newborn son.

I’ve also learned a lot about how to run The Hatchet effectively, and now that the majority of my operation is up and running I spend about 8 hours a week sourcing, preparing and writing my newsletters. 

My plan had been to use the rest of my week to take on consulting assignments, because — let’s face it — a monthly recurring revenue of €515 isn't going to cover for the expenses my two sons manage to rack up at their young age.

Last week I decided to throw that plan out of the window though, because one of my subscribers made me an offer I couldn't refuse and I've taken him up on it.

Starting next month I will be abandoning my consulting plans to add a new chapter to my entrepreneurial journey, by becoming part shareholder and the CEO of a company called Squares. Squares recently won the Dutch Governments’ Startup in Residence challenge by launching an event platform that is helping clients like Microsoft, Tommy Hilfiger, World Forum, Siemens and KPN host digital and hybrid events.

This is a huge decision — one I haven't taken lightly — but some opportunities only come by once in a lifetime and this has every feeling of belonging to that category.

My commitment to The Hatchet is unwavering, but I have decided I'll need to make some strategic changes to how I run it in order for me to continue forward. More about that next after we review the performance of the last quarter.

Reviewing Q2 goals

Clearly I underperformed on the goals previously set, but let's take a look at the results any way to remind myself I need to make some moves next quarter:

• Reached 81 out of 300 followers on our Instagram account

• Reached 104 out of 500 followers on our Linkedin account

• Decided not to launch a sponsorship proposition

• Grew total email list with 32 instead of 471 subscribers

• Reached 54 out of intended 75 premium subscribers

• Reached €6.179 of €12.000 goal in gross revenue

• On the bright side: I did deliver 5 articles as part of my content partnership deal; some of these are saved in the backlog as future editions you'll receive

There was an opportunity for me to renew the content partnership deal of Q1 and add an additional €2.125 to the gross revenue total, but I've decided to do syndication of articles on a case-by-case basis going forward because the nature of this deal allows me to write only about topics related to hiring/getting hired at tech startups.

I have a backlog of articles on that topic now and want to make sure I balance the newsletters out between content that covers other areas of interest too.

If you're a frequent Instagram-user you'll have noticed Lana's done a great job at populating our account with shareable quotes from our previous articles. It's a long-game, but Google Analytics is already seeing signups originate from the platform.

Setting Q3 goals & strategic changes

I'm excited to get back to work, but my new role at Squares will mean I need to make some changes to how I operate The Hatchet going forward.

Some strategic decisions I've made:

• I've closed the mentorship program for new applications; next year I might just focus entirely on subscriptions-only depending on how I manage my week;

• I really enjoyed collaborating/co-writing with a guest author, which is why you'll see a few more of those in the future — they are also a great way for me to delegate part of the workload to people experienced in domains I am not;

• I've decided not to roll out a partnership or advertising model, because I simply won't have the time myself to set this up anymore — maybe in the future I can bring someone onboard to help take this to the next level;

• I've come to terms with the fact that active sales for new subscriptions is going to suffer as a result of my new adventure — this is a choice I'm willing to make, given The Hatchet will no longer need to provide my primary income;

• As mentioned earlier, I've decided not to continue my Q1/Q2 content partnership deal but instead, to present articles I've published for syndication on a case-by-case basis. If I happen to write something that matches the content my client is looking for then it's a win-win if I can provide a version of it for them too.

New goals for Q3 — a bit more realistic given all of the changes:

• Reach 150 followers on our Instagram account

• Publish two new co-authored articles with a guest author

• Grow to a total email list of 1300 subscribers

• Reach €7.500 in gross revenue

• I'm hosting a keynote at sTARTUp Day 2021 to see if I can generate a meaningful number of new subscribers from this experiment

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TL;DR

• finding the right company or job can be hard in a job market with entirely new industries emerging that didn't even exist five years ago

• revisiting your personal career map can help you decide what really drives you and how your next step fits into the grand scheme of ‘your career’

• narrow down your ‘fishing pond of job opportunities’ by establishing which core values your job needs to meet and overlaying your unique skillset

• use a funnel approach to place multiple bets and increase the investment made to differentiate yourself as you move opportunities further down the funnel

• build long term career net-worth by investing in a strong network; the best future job opportunities will come from unexpected directions

How to nail your next job search

Figuring out your next career move can be an incredibly daunting task.

Whether you're looking to apply for your first role out of college or take the next step in your career journey, it can be difficult to know where to start or how to go about the process of finding your next job in a structured way.

The current state of the job market also adds an extra challenge for those entering: there is a growing skills gap between applicants and available positions, and entirely new industries emerging that didn't even exist five years ago.

It's no wonder that many of us are having a hard time deciding what to do next, or left wondering what options are truly available to us.

Fortunately it doesn't have to be this way.

In this article I will cover the strategies I have adopted in order to guide my search for the next step in my career — strategies you can start implementing today.

Together, we will also look into answering a series of important questions such as:

1. How do I find the right company for me?

2. Where does my unique skillset add value?

3. How do I differentiate myself among other talented candidates?

Why I started with revisiting my career map

On August 16, 2009 Usain bolt was getting ready to run the fastest 100 m dash on record in only 9.58 seconds. The atmosphere in the stadium was electric as the crowd watched him warm up on the side of the track. Usain was preparing for the race both physically and mentally; silently visualising the finish line.

In the lead up to such a race spectators would be surprised, if not worried, to see an athlete skip this crucial preparation and walk straight onto the track.

Yet, when applying for a new job or considering the next step in our career, most of us tend to skip the warm up and run straight to the starting line. We will head towards online job boards and career pages ready to fire off applications at employers.

I've concluded there's a better way to start: first revisit your career map.

Your career map is the mental piece of paper you carry around that outlines your idea of what a fulfilling career looks like. Whether you're one of the lucky people that know exactly what that route to success looks like, or whether like me that journey is still unclear for you, both situations merit asking yourself these questions about your map:

• what genuinely drives me in my work — what makes me happy?

• how clear am I about my the map of my career and the possible avenues I could take to progress from the point I am now?

• do the skills and experience I've built up so far match my longer term thesis for the type of career I want to have?

• have I consciously thought about where I am right now on my career map and in what direction I'm headed, or have I stumbled into work and simply moved along according to what society/business has suggested as a next step?

• what things would I like to learn or develop at my next job that will help me continue in the right direction?

These are tough questions, but taking time to pause to ask yourself these calibrated questions will help guide your search with much more focus.

> Want to dig deeper into this part? I recommend Wait But Why's advice on picking a career that actually fits you written by Tim Urban.

Aligning core values an employer should meet

Over the past 12 months, I've spoken with a number of friends and former colleagues that realised jumping into a new role too fast can turn out to be problematic.

Maybe your career map is extremely clearcut, but before you move forward I'll argue it's valuable to take a step back and establish which core values about life and work you feel should be represented in the type of company you want to work for next.

Within my own work experience I found that these questions were some of the most important to answer first as they helped me narrow down my scope of search:

• How important is it for me that the company and my work have a positive impact on society and the global challenges it faces?

• What factor does compensation play? Do I need to earn a lot of money, or can I get by with slightly less so that I can favour other values/advantages?

• How do I currently feel about work/life balance? Am I still willing to go above and beyond in pursuit of a common mission, or do I need the job to be the job?

• Am I want happy to work in a scrappy startup culture, a bit more matured scale-up or would I prefer working in a more streamlined corporate organisation?

• Does my work have to have impact on a local or a global level?

Now, none of these questions are meant to drive you into "analysis paralysis mode", but the answers can be powerful indicators for narrowing down what type of companies should enter your wishlist. As you start adding companies, answer these follow-up questions in relation to your current position on your career map:

• What can I expect to accomplish in this job/company over the next [insert number] years?

• Will this role allow me to learn the skills/ industry insights that I want to posses and/or become an expert at?

Map out your personal competitive landscape

At this point you know what type of companies would fit you best, but there's a crucial element missing from the equation: the unique skills you have to offer.

In order to establish which roles are relevant enough for you to apply to, you need to overlap your “wants” — the type of work you'd like to be doing at the companies that meet your criteria for core values — with the reality of the current skills you possess that these potential employers would deem valuable.

There's a very real scenario that the outcome of this exercise is the realisation that your current skills aren't sufficient to give you (1) a large enough option pool of potential jobs you could successfully apply for, or (2) for you to have a fighting chance within that option pool given the competitive landscape of available talent.

If you do decide that further development of your skills are needed for you to move in the right direction of your career map, consider this advice by Guillaume Boubeche:

The more you can "stack" specific skills, the more unique and interesting your profile becomes to certain companies.

• Marketer = common

• Marketer + copywriter = uncommon

• Marketer + copywriter + coder = holy grail

• Stacking up skills can help you become a rare asset.

• Rarity gets you paid

I decided to take this exercise one step further and to map out my personal competitive landscape to help visualise how my unique knowledge and skillset compares to talent available at other companies in the world of impact ventures.

This exercise wasn't just beneficial to me, I've been using variations of this personal competitive landscape in my applications to relevant job opportunities.

The value of placing multi-directional bets

It's common knowledge not to put all of your eggs in one basket, but too many people only start applying this advice in the final stage of job search — at the point where you actually send out applications for available positions.

Instead I treat my search for a new job as a strategic funnel with multiple layers.

Top of the pipeline - at the first stage of the funnel my goal was to talk to many relevant companies/people in my network and get the word out about my search. I shared my career search on LinkedIn and planned coffee calls with my extended informal network (especially those in positions that linked to my career map).

Not every coffee conversation will lead to a job opportunity today, but..

1. it's a chance to put yourself on people’s radar for future opportunities

2. your network can provide valuable input for shaping your career map

3. you give serendipity a hand by making it easier to find unexpected opportunities

Bottom of the funnel - in the second layer of the funnel it's all about narrowing down the highest potential opportunities and then doubling down on the effort you put in. Where the top layer is entirely focussed on discovery, the second layer is about putting in the homework to find a way to stand out from the crowd of talented job seekers.

As you navigate this process, you'll likely have conversations in both stages of the funnel, which is why I've found it extremely important to track all of the opportunities in an overview that lets helps you monitor the status of your search.

> One of my favourite examples for the discovery phase of your job search is the fifty coffees project by Lindsay Ratowsky. Having recently left her job, she decided to discover her next great adventure by first planning fifty coffees to figure it out.

The importance of standing out in the crowd

Once you've narrowed down great opportunities that have entered the bottom of your career funnel, it's time to do your homework.

Why is this important? Because nowadays great employers run equally great employer branding campaigns, and if working at this particular company appeals to you it probably appeals to a really large group of other people too.

High profile companies such as Google, Netflix or Facebook have hiring rates that fall well below 1%. This means that if you stick to what the average person does to apply, you have to statistically find 100 companies you love just to get into one.

Your best bet for getting past the initial application stage is to make an impression. In my experience you can make an impression on three levels of ascending importance:

1. Eye for detail - (ie. you've designed your CV in their brand identity or maybe made a reference to a new product they launched in your Cover Letter)

2. Understanding of their business - (ie. you're able to communicate your understanding of their core challenges, how their business model works and/or you've done research that shows what untapped opportunities you see for them)

3. Communicating the value opportunity - (ie. you're able to share how you possess specific skills and knowledge that they currently might not have in their team and that could provide unique value to overcome their business challenges)

How you go about communicating this impression is up to you: you could turn to social media like this Airbnb applicant, design a presentation instead of a cover letter or record a video of yourself communicating this content to your potential employer.

Resourcefulness is the name of the game, and in 2021 even the most successful CEO's like to be impressed by a candidate who can think "outside the box".

I've found career pages and corporate social media accounts to provide the best information for coming up with an approach that is unexpected!

> For one of my job applications at a leading Venture Capital firm I decided to use the format startups use to pitch for funding to instead pitch.. myself.

I presented how hiring me could be the solution to their business challenge

Keep in mind that this is only a first step to get you a potential interview. Once you’ve made an impression, you’re likely going to be faced with a multi step interview process before receiving an offer. Here are some questions that might help you prepare for it.

Finally, your network is your net-worth

People that know me also know I’ve spent years growing my network. I've travelled to over 65 tech conferences in 27 countries, worked pro-bono as a startup mentor for many accelerators or impact venture initiatives and my full-time job was to connect startups to investment.

I didn’t do any of these things because I was looking for something in return, but because I genuinely enjoyed doing them and liked helping out. And now that I'm searching for the next adventure in my career, it's easy to see how the value of my network is a huge contributor to my ability to find interesting opportunities.

Your personal network is built slowly, overtime, through all the interactions you have on a daily basis. It’s not merely about looking your best at the occasional networking event or dinner party. It’s in the way you greet colleagues, deal with clients, connect with people at the restaurant or at your local gym. It’s about genuine curiosity and building relationships with other human beings.

If there's any advice I could close off with, it's this: building a network and community is a long-term play that has so many benefits to developing your ideal career.

You never know what the people you meet today will be doing in 1 year, 3 years or 10 years from now, and how they might be able to provide interesting opportunities for you in the future. Remember to give, give, give, and then give more — and then ask.

On the flipside, don't let lack of network deter you from aiming for the opportunities you're interested in pursuing. Ultimately, all that stands in the way of you finding your next challenge is the limit to your creativity in standing out from the crowd.

“You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play differently than everyone else. ” — Sebastien Toupy

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#12 - Be your own legal team

Management roles almost always come hand in hand with a certain level of budget ownership, and with it, the responsibility to negotiate contracts with suppliers of products or software that your team need to operate successfully.

Your ability to negotiate a reasonable price will set you apart as a leader, but price alone isn't the only relevant negotiable element of contracts. Those additional pages of legal fine print that you're being asked to sign are all up for discussion. Doing so effectively is a sure way of gaining the respect of your CFO and legal counsel.

Today we're diving into 3 common contract clauses that you should consider negotiating on to mitigate the risk you expose your company to.

#1 - Payment terms

While revenue and profit are often touted as the most important company metrics, managing cashflow is equally vital to a company's success.

Your company could be profitable but still go out of business if all the revenues fall in the latter half of the year and your expenses in the first.

Contracts always provide one or more clauses about payment terms covering questions like: is the full amount due in one go or can you pay in installments? How soon are those payments due? Does the entire contracted value need to be paid upfront or can part be paid upon delivery?

ADVICE: try paying as late as possible, if necessary with staggered due dates and ideally with a small percentage being paid after successful execution, so that you always maintain some leverage in evaluating the delivery of the product/service.

#2 - Cancellation policies

Nobody gave a bat's ass about cancellation policies until Covid-19 came around, but suddenly it turned out to be the most important clause in every contract.

Evaluating and negotiating changes to this clause help to mitigate the risk your company is exposed to for worst-case scenarios. They'll likely never happen, but if you do find yourself in the middle of a black swan event like Covid-19, you might just find yourself needing to invoke this clause for every active contract.

Cancellation terms usually focus on how much of the full contracted value still needs to be paid when cancelling at specific times during the contract.

ADVICE: Consider asking yourself some of the following questions to challenge or negotiate how you would like to structure this clause:

• Can I limit my financial risk to paying for the actual expenses the supplier has made up until the point of cancellation? e.g. if a catering company hasn't cooked the food, but has spent time designing a menu, pay them for those expenses only.

• Can I convince my counterpart to let me convert the full contracted value to credits for next year if I cancel, so they keep my business and I don't lose money?

• How will we deal with Force Majeure situations like Covid-19 outbreaks or service delivery issues due to national lockdowns?

#3 - Resolving a dispute

Like marriage, you don't plan to break up when you first tie the knot, but it is sensible to discuss how you'll go about resolving disputes while you're on good terms.

When you venture into contractual obligations with international vendors, a common clause to add to contracts is to decide on the governing law and/or in which country disputes will be settled if they arise.

Your first worry is not that another EU country will have barbaric laws, but more the fact that your own company's legal counsel will be well-versed in the governing law of the country that your company operates in. Imagine you do have to go to court over a dispute: you'd be making it your Dutch company very challenging if they have to fly over to Budapest to defend your case according the Hungarian law.

Additionally, it's common practice in contracts to agree on an indemnification clause where either:

1. you agree to hold each other harmless for liabilities, loss, claims or expenses that flow from a breach of contract e.g. you weren't able to deliver what was promised and as a result I lost a client worth €1 million and I want you to cover for that.

2. you agree to limit the amount each of you can be held liable for to a specific total sum, so that you mitigate the exposure your company has to being sued.

ADVICE: aim to align governing law with the country your company operates in and depending on which side of the contract you're on, either limit your exposure to liability or increase your ability to make claims for losses incurred through the other's fault.

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TL;DR

• Even a half-decent attempt at negotiating can end up making a difference of €40.000 in 10 years. You owe it to yourself to negotiate.

• You have an unfair advantage: the risk/reward ratio on the outcome of this negotiation is massively in your favour.

• Establish the market value of your skills by doing research through third-party recruiters and your network. Be wary of public info on the internet.

• Make sure you understand and fully value all the building blocks of compensation, including the non-salary benefits.

• You start negotiating as soon as you meet, but you should always delay the money conversation for as long as possible. This is critical to your negotiation position.

• Respond excited to the first offer, but refrain from reacting to the numbers. Embark on your fact-finding mission instead.

• Improve your future negotiation position by developing your personal brand.

How to negotiate salary for a new job

Most of us grow up with the idea that negotiation is a slightly shady and mostly greedy practice that should only be applied in a limited set of socially acceptable situations, like haggling about a €1 discount for a used handbag on a french flea market.

This mindset couldn't be further removed from how the real business world works. The reality is that successful people negotiate all the time about almost everything.

You might feel awkward and uncomfortable about negotiating, but it's time to accept that neither of those feelings are an excuse to leave yourself at a disadvantage.

Why should you be negotiating salary at all?

My mom used to be great at buying weekly groceries from 3 different supermarkets just to take advantage of the various products on discount at every store. This weekly exercise would cost about 2 hours of extra shopping time for a net saving of €80.

My mom is all of us trying to be smart about how we spend money, yet neglecting the fact that even a half-decent attempt at negotiating a better salary could easily provide you with an additional €3000 a year for possibly 10 minutes of extra effort. None of us are reasonably going to find jobs that pay even €3000 per hour, but you can casually pick up €3000 more in salary by simply following the right strategy.

Once you're inside a company your salary will likely receive a 1% - 10% annual raise depending on how well you've performed each year. Even at an average "you've done okay this year 4% raise”, that €3000 will compound to almost €40.000 in 10 years.

If that amount of money at stake doesn't appeal to you I'll happily provide you with a shopping list of fun things to spend it on to provide some inspiration.

“Think of it this way: your salary negotiation is just a paid assignment you're doing for your future self. The highest paying assignment you'll ever get.”

You have an unfair advantage

Hiring managers and HR reps will have the upper-hand in experience when it comes to negotiations. They'll have played this game many times before.

HR reps are great people and in no way will they be trying to bamboozle you, but it's important to understand that the first offer you receive will likely be lower than what you could potentially earn in that role at the company because:

• a lower salary offers more room to keep you motivated with future raises

• a good negotiator anticipates the negotiation and leaves room for it

• their objective is to get you signed for as little as possible

The good news is you have an unfair advantage: the risk/reward ratio on the outcome of this negotiation is massively in your favour.

While the other side's job is to get you signed as cheaply as possible, they aren't remotely as invested in the outcome as you are, because they aren't spending their own money to hire you; they are spending their available budget.

That additional €3000 — your potential reward — means you'll be able to take an extra vacation to Greece and stuff your face at an all-inclusive luxury resort. All your counterpart gets for convincing you to take €3000 less is a thumbs-up emoji on Slack from their boss after announcing you accepted the offer.

They stand far less to win and much more to lose in negotiating with you.

How do you figure out what you're worth?

What you are paid has nothing to do with your life situation or costs. Whether you're single, married, have children, student debt, have a low net-worth or don't really need the money, none of that should be part of the conversation about your compensation.

Your skills have a market value and you need to figure out what that is.

An important factor in market value is the push and pull of supply and demand. If you're applying for entry-level jobs you'll have a hard time negotiating for more than a 5% increase since you're competing against so many others with the exact same skillset (and no, your top-graded MSc thesis really isn't going to move the needle).

As you start specialising, obtain management experience or build up significant experience in in-demand professions, like software engineering or growth marketing, the range within which your skillset can be valued will increase and with it your potential to negotiate compensation.

It's imperative at this stage to acquire a good understanding of what value (read: compensation) others with a similar skillset can command in the market. As salaries are always in flux, this will require research on your part:

• consider reaching out to third-party recruiters and ask for their opinion on what would be a reasonable compensation for your skills; you can trade information with being added to their database for future job opportunities

• consider asking friends in your business network that work in similar or higher positions to share what kind of compensation is usual within their company

• take salary information you find on the internet with a grain of salt; salaries are highly dependent on company size, location and industry

If you're uncomfortable at the prospect of openly asking people about this information (which you shouldn't be), here's an open invitation to ask me.

Understanding the building blocks of compensation

Your total compensation includes more than just your base salary, making it important to fully value all the tangible and intangible components of what you'll get offered.

Let me address some obvious and less obvious examples:

• evaluate base salary on an annual figure so you understand whether the offer includes a 13th month, a 14th month and vacation money

• if a pension plan is included, understand what amount the employer is contributing on your behalf (versus what you need to contribute). Just because it's not cash in hand, doesn't mean this component is any less valuable

• understand the impact of receiving company assets that lower your personal costs, such as a company phone, car, laptop and/or travel reimbursement

• consider the value you place on non-tangible perks like vacation days, freedom to work on side-hustles, remote work, flexible working hours, commute time and the potential impact working for this brand will have on future earning potential at other companies ie. will working at this company boost your CV

• particularly relevant at startups and scale-ups: being offered equity can stand to become a substantial component of your total compensation

The further along you are in your career I also recommend carefully considering contractual separation agreements as negotiable elements:

• how long of a non-compete will you have after leaving and does that relate only to specific clients or to working in the entire industry

• how long of a notice period does your employer have before letting you go

As you start negotiating, I recommend focussing on base salary first but keeping sight of the additional components to use as secondary inputs for discussion in order to come to a complete package that you are happy with accepting.

When should a salary negotiation happen?

There are two critical things to keep in mind leading up to the ‘money conversation’; each of these have an outsized impact on how well you'll be able to negotiate.

#1 - You essentially started negotiating the moment you met

Every email, meeting or phone call, however insignificant you might think it is, subconsciously contributes to the employers perception of you.

As you interact, they will start painting a mental picture of how qualified they think you are, how valuable and in-demand they think your skills are, whether you are desperate for this job or whether they'll have to compete against your other job interview options.

As you navigate the entire process of interviewing, you should be mindful of subtly portraying an image that says:

“Hey, I really like this company and I think working together could potentially be really beneficial to both of us, but I want to carefully find out, together, whether this is the case. I have some other equally impressive job opportunities lined up and I want to make the best possible decision for my career”.

How skilled you are at designing this perception of you and your current situation will ultimately affect how well you are or aren't able to negotiate.

If you start giving off signals that indicate this is the only job you're interviewing for, that you're under pressure to sign a contract before you run out of money or that the position you're interviewing for is slightly above your skillset — well, then you've basically thrown in the towel before you've even entered the ring.

#2 - Always delay the money conversation

Always delay discussing salary until someone with hiring authority has agreed that, if a mutual agreement on compensation can be made, you will be hired.

An experienced HR rep will try to ask for your salary expectations, but you should politely yet firmly respond that you're not comfortable sharing that at this stage. Every employer will ask about expected salary and every experienced professional knows to not to give an answer. Practice dodging this question with variations of this line:

You: It's a bit too early for me to share / I'm not comfortable sharing that just yet, but I'm sure we can work compensation out if we find that there's a great fit between us. I really want to learn more about the company and position first.

Why is this so important to delay?

By the time you arrive at the point that the hiring team has decided they want you to fill their position, they will have already spent a ridiculous amount of time and resources interviewing a truckload of different candidates. They're invested now.

Try doing some mental math on how much money the company would be wasting if the negotiation doesn't work out at this point. Multiple people have been kept from doing their normal day-job and the idea of having to go back to square one of the hiring process is something every hiring manager will rightfully dread.

So, what should you say during the ‘money conversation’?

At some point, HR will let you know everybody is enthusiastic and that they'd like to extend an offer. You've now successfully entered the ‘money conversation’.

Here are the most important tactics to keep in mind.

#1 - Respond excited, but refrain from reacting to the offer

Your first objective is to share your excitement about this new job without reacting in any way to the financials of the offer being made. Whether it's higher or lower than you expected, don't let any of that come across; you want to first buy time to find out more about the specifics of the offer.

HR rep: Hey Wytze! The team is very excited about you and would love for you to join the company as Event Manager. Here are the details of our offer:

• €39.000 annual base salary (incl. 8% holiday allowance)

• a flexible/open vacation policy

• a company laptop

• fixed travel reimbursement of €150 per month

• pension plan with a 3% employer contribution

Wytze: Really excited to hear this and the feeling was mutual after my conversations with the team. I'm really thrilled about the prospect of joining.

Thank you for extending the offer. I'll need time to review this, can I come back to you in a few days? In the meantime, I have a few questions for you.

The goal of this approach is two-fold:

1. to first collect more information and then calmly analyze and evaluate the offer

2. holding off on responding to the offer adds to the notion you're not desperate

#2 - Embark on your fact-finding mission

Ask all the questions necessary to fully value the benefits you're being offered, and make sure to ask about any that have been omitted from the initial offer.

There is one question I recommend definitely including:

• What is the salary band for this level/position?

And one question you could consider including if the company is large enough and the type of role makes this question applicable:

• What seniority level is the job for, and can you share what the requirements are for this level vs the level above it?

Usually this question starts becoming relevant when companies are over 35 employees, but even more so at companies with larger teams of 100+ employees. At that scale, the company will generally have a structured setup of seniority levels per job type.

#3 - Time to negotiate

Remind yourself that the company has spent a substantial amount of resources to get to this point, they probably needed the job filled last month and the hiring manager has had to take a lot of time out of her regular work schedule to find a replacement.

At this point, everyone wants the deal to happen.

It's challenging to provide a script that'll fit every possible situation, but I'm going to provide two scenarios for how this next part could play out.

Scenario 1: you've found out that some of the requirements for the level above you (e.g. Senior Event Manager) overlap with your current/previous job.

Wytze: Hey Justin — can we have another look at the offer level? In my current role, I'm the lead event manager for our flagship conference, have 3 direct reports and participate in a weekly strategy team with the CEO. It seems like your Senior Event Manager level is much more in line with what I currently do at Company XYZ.

The HR rep will have to divert back to the hiring manager to discuss this remark.

If the direction you take with this line of conversation ends with the positive conclusion that they agree you should be positioned as a level higher, then repeat the earlier step of inquiring about the salary band for the Senior Event Manager level.

Even if — and this is likely to happen — the other side is unable to hire you at a higher level, this conversation will still help immensely in negotiating a higher starting salary, since you'll have established that you're close to overqualified for the proposed level.

Continue the negotiation as described in scenario 2.

Scenario 2: you're generally happy with the offer but ready to negotiate the full potential of the deal so that you can take that extra vacation to Greece this year.

Now that you know the full salary band of the position/level you're being hired for, pick a target in the upper half of the band that you'll negotiate for.

Your gameplay will be to stay firm and resolute about this figure being what you need to make it work, and only to back down on base salary if you can get an equivalent value alternative benefit to make up for it.

Wytze: Hey Justin — thanks for answering all of my questions. Again, I'm really excited about this opportunity. I think we'd make a great team.

In terms of salary I'm actually looking for something closer to €45.000, which is in line with the other opportunities I'm interviewing for. Given my experience, would you be able to agree on a €3.450 p/month base salary?

Justin: Hey Wytze, great to hear that. Unfortunately this is the most we can do for this position, but there's plenty of room for growth in salary in the future.

Wytze: I don’t think I can make it work at the current level — €45.000 is what I'd need to be able to sign. Is there anything you can do in terms of equity or EOY bonus?

<At this point, Justin realises that he's not getting out of this negotiation that easily>

Justin: Let me talk to the team and see what I can do.

<A day later>

Justin: Hey Wytze, unfortunately bonuses aren't part of our compensation structure at Company XYZ. I have spoken to the team and what we are willing to do is increase our offer to €3.250 a month. This is really the maximum we're able to do in this situation and I hope it shows we genuinely want you on our team.

Wytze: Justin, thank you for your effort on this. I really appreciate it. We're still not at the number I'm looking for, but I understand your position and would be willing to compromise if the company could cover my mobile phone plan (€35 a month). I'll be using it a lot for this job. If we could make this work I would be ready to sign.

Justin: Hey Wytze, we can make that work. I'll send over the paperwork today!

Stay positive, show understanding and write/talk in the ‘we’ form as much as possible to indicate you're trying to overcome this obstacle together versus battling it out.

Bonus tip: negotiating over email can be as nerve-wracking as it is in-person, but the benefit is that you can ask a good friend or your spouse to spar with you to see if you're making the right moves and saying the right things.

Some final words of wisdom

Early in your career you won't have much choice but to apply for positions that interest you through job listings on the internet.

This is by far the hardest way to land a job.

By working on your personal brand and establishing yourself as a leader that delivers results in your respective domain, through for example public speaking, networking and guest-writing for media, you'll eventually make it much easier for your network to recommend you for applicable open positions at their companies.

Whether it's fair or not, personal recommendations always have a headstart in comparison to other applicants. If you can start off your hiring journey with an informal conversation with the hiring manager first, you'll find that you'll soon be playing the negotiation game on easy-mode.

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Great leaders write great copy

When you write copy intended for larger audiences, you inevitably have to deal with the fact groups are made up of people with wildly different wants and needs.

You might want to reach all of them with your message, but you can't write a compelling story that resonates with everyone. So don't.

Great copy doesn’t try to please everyone. It focusses on converting a small but perfectly suited segment of your audience that is:

1. most likely to buy your product

2. be pleased with the results

3. be open to spreading the word about it afterwards

If you try to offer everyone something relevant, your messaging becomes ambiguous.

Try instead writing with a single individual in mind that matches your ideal customer. Write your copy while thinking about what they really want and helping to answer that intrinsic question: what’s in it for me?

Worried about the idea of neglecting 75% of your audience?

In some marketing situations you can solve that by splitting your work up into multiple campaigns, each designed for a different type of client. For example:

• splitting up your database and designing multiple variations of the same email campaign so each one resonates with that particular demographic

• designing landing pages unique to one client type and using those pages to target a much more narrowed down subset of people through advertising

• creating and distributing white papers specific to a problem relatable to one part of your intended audience

Remember, if you try to please everyone you risk interesting no-one.

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Investor Update #2

Dear investors,

In the 60 days since my last investor update revenue is up 119%.

You'll understand why I had to open with that statement, since I might not ever get another chance to impress you with triple digit growth.

I am now at a total email list of 1029, of which 53 paid subscribers, 1 content partnership deal and a combined gross annual revenue of €5.863. More importantly, I am at 30% of my €19.836 target to prove I can generate minimum wage in 10 months.

Thank you Sille, Joris, Tino, Doenya, Robin, Cas, Anke, Daan, Marvin, Bart (2x), Martijn, Sebastien, Kriszti, Matthias, Hans, Jemma, Daniel, Yoram, Sebastiaan (2x) and Màr for your support since my last update. Great to have you on board!

Why am I building The Hatchet?

I want to start off a little philosophical before I talk results and strategy.

The last 3 months have been a rollercoaster of trying to wrap my head around how I want to shape my own future of work. Some of the puzzle pieces:

• what do I enjoy doing most during a week of work

• what is my long term vision for building The Hatchet

• how do I best spend my own time to make this a success

I've come to realise that what's most important to me about building this company is creating a sense of legacy. I want to build a brand that people enjoy interacting with, that genuinely provides value and to feel pride knowing it comes from something I've built. I care about this a lot more than I care about making money.

This realisation has led me to make a few key decisions:

• I want to start hiring a team of people (parttime) with complementary skillsets in marketing, social media or content strategy to help me grow the brand;

• I'm going to pay for that by reinvesting most of the cashflow I generate this year — this should also free up more of my time to help the company grow faster.

I could save up all the money I make to try and succeed as a fulltime writer, but the reality is that I started this project to become an entrepreneur. My ultimate goal is not just to work in my company, but to work on my company.

My financial buffer will keep me going until the end of the year, and I'm confident by then I'll be able to sustain myself financially by paying out some of the earnings.

Over to the results.

#1 - Marketing

After trying out various different paid and organic methods to promote The Hatchet I've finally found something that works extremely well.

Each week I ask around 5 people in my network to post an update on their own Linkedin account promoting the newsletter, with a boiler template story that I personalise to their relationship with me. It takes a bit of work from my side, but it's fascinating to see that these posts get me an influx of 5-50 new subscribers per post.

When I started The Hatchet I also created social accounts for Instagram, Facebook and a company page on Linkedin, but I've started to realise that:

1. I don't have a strategy in place for how, when and what to post here

2. I could research what a good strategy could be, but..

3. I don't particularly enjoy this part of the work as much

With this in mind I'm very excited to announce the addition of a new team member to the Hatchet: my good friend, early subscriber and marketing expert, Lana Miller. I'm grateful to have her on as a sparring partner to talk strategy as well as someone to help me make better use of these social accounts than I have so far.

#2 - Editorial

Now that I have an actual team member I need to clean up my act and make sure there's some planning going into the articles planned for the upcoming months. I built this beautiful content calendar in Trello last week so that I can plan ahead which stories I want to work on for the upcoming weeks.

The other great news is that I've signed a content partnership deal with a government funded project to co-produce a short series of articles aimed at convincing people of the allure of working in technology. After approval of the topics, I get to write the articles myself and we'll publish slightly adapted versions on both of our platforms.

The funding for this deal will also allow me to spend a bit more time than usual to create articles that warrant some research versus my opinion only.

Finally, my lovely ex-colleagues have syndicated one of my articles as a guest post under their Growth Quarters brand. I'm curious to see whether this will drive signups to my newsletter in the coming months.

#3 - Sales

I didn't quite make my ambitious target of 100 subscribers by the end of Q1, but overall I am satisfied about the number of paid subscribers so far.

Currently there's just a strong correlation between sales effort and subscription sales.

I need to actively reach out to free subscribers to ask them if they'll consider upgrading, as it rarely happens people will upgrade due to the friendly reminder to consider doing so at the top of my free posts. As you can see, I accurately keep track of my efforts in my cheapskate Google Sheets CRM version of Salesforce.

From what research I've done, I've concluded there are two things that could encourage more subscribers to upgrade without my personal intervention:

• I (still) need that referral program and I'm in talks about launching a separate landing page on top of Substack that would let me integrate referral software;

• I've seen others be successful by bundling offers together into special deals ie. get a subscription + a free ebook I wrote.

I like the idea of coming up with some interesting ways for me to package a subscription into a special deal, although I would first need to come up with something smart that doesn't require locking myself up to write an ebook.

Goals for Q2 of 2021

This next quarter is going to be quite hectic, considering I have an additional commitment to my newly signed partner as well as a baby due to arrive March 30!

Here are the goals Lana and I have outlined for the upcoming quarter:

• Reach 300 followers on our Instagram account

• Reach 500 followers on our Linkedin account

• Launch a sponsorship proposition and sign 1 partner

• Grow to a total email list of 1500 subscribers

• Reach 75 premium subscribers

• Reach €12.000 in gross revenue

Thanks again for all of your support everyone!

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Why free work has no value

Picture any one of these situations:

• Your client asks you to pick up some work outside the scope of your assignment

• Your boss asks you to work on a presentation over the weekend

• Your boyfriend asks you to do his laundry together with your own

As ambitious, caring and hard-working individuals, we're all the type to willingly accept handling some extra work outside of our usual scope, but I'm here to tell you you should stop doing work for free without asking for something in return.

People get used to overdelivery

As my friend Andre Huizing, former CEO of Avanade NL, used to say:

“If you drop your car off for a check at your local garage and they decide to surprise you by washing it for free, you'd be pretty fucking ecstatic. You'd still love it the second time it happens, but you'd start half expecting it to happen by the third time.

By the fourth time you decide not to wash it for a while because you'll get it for free at the next check anyway. Then they decide not to wash it: F this garage!”

The same applies to your client, boss or boyfriend, they'll get used to you working over the weekend, delivering more than what was promised or taking up laundry-duties.

Suddenly it's a thing, and if you stop doing it, people will be disappointed.

How to solve?

I'm not advocating you start charging money for every extra thing you do, but consider asking for (1) something (anything) else of value or (2) karma credits in return.

The value of what you receive can be mostly unimportant, but the fact that you're asking for something in return achieves two things:

• it acknowledges that this indeed extra work you're doing;

• it positions you as equals — you are not the subordinate of your client, you are equal partners and their extra work is not something they can shove over to you

Here's a few examples of asking for something else of value or karma credits:

• “Don't worry Wytze, we'll take care of this work even though it's outside of the scope, but in return I want one of those branded company sweaters for my team”

• “I'll make sure the presentation is finished by Monday morning, but it means I'll have to work on it over the weekend: you owe me one.”

Alternatively, you can use these moments to ask for something of more strategic value.

• “I'll do this without charging for it, if in return you can make sure that our other proposal for XYZ is reviewed by management next week”

• “I'll do this for free, but then I want you to introduce me to Company XYZ so I can discuss whether we can do work for them in the future”

Finally, applying too much of this in your relationship is probably the worst advice I could've given, so let me close off with a rectification.

• In love, give without expecting anything in return

• In business, always ask for something in return

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TL;DR

• firing employees is hard: we constantly focus on building trust within our teams and then suddenly we have to break it for the benefit of the company

• you can make termination talks easier by already having a proper structure in place for communicating expectations and giving feedback regularly

• when you structure the conversation, consider that it's not really a conversation, it's more like an announcement followed by a Q&A

• listen carefully to detect what emotions the news elicits with your employee; respond accordingly to which emotion is taking the lead

#8 - How to fire an employee

In my 10 years of being a manager I have hired more than 80 people and fired only 5. You can take an educated guess which of those conversations stuck with me most.

What makes these conversations so hard is that as a manager, you're constantly asking your team members to put their trust in you:

• “trust me, this strategy will help us reach our goal”

• “trust me, this is a great company to work for”

• “trust me, this job will be good for your career”

Suddenly you have to break that trust for the benefit of the company.

As painful as firing an employee may be at the time, it's important to realise that leadership sometimes requires making a tough decision in order to move on to a more satisfying future for everyone involved.

Read along to find out what has helped me get the process right, or access the script I used to savagely fire myself on Wednesday this week.

#1 - The lead up to firing someone

The worst termination talks I've had have been those where my employee felt completely blindsided by the news I shared.

Although this might be unavoidable in some situations, I've found that it was usually a result of my own shortcoming in not having invested enough in a transparent process of goal-setting and feedback leading up the final step of letting them go.

If you're firing an employee because the performance isn't there, having invested time into the following actions will make a termination conversation easier:

• you've invested in recurring one-on-one meetings and used these to make clear what your expectations are for their performance;

• for new hires, you've set clear short-term expectations and goals that should be achieved within the 30-day probation period;

• you've conducted honest performance appraisals during which you've acknowledged strengths and shortcomings in their performance.

If you don't do any of these things and decide, seemingly out of the blue, to fire someone on your team, you'll have a great recipe for an emotional clusterfuck.

Vice versa, your termination talk will be easier if you're able to fall back on those conversations by using phrases like: “as you know, Wytze, we’ve talked several times about quality problems in your work.”

#2 - Run your decision by a jury first

Over time I started involving my manager, my second-in-command and our HR manager early on in the decision-making process.

I have five reasons for doing so:

1. As I present my argumentation, I check with them whether anything I've said could be viewed in a way that suggests that the real reason for the termination is not the individual’s performance but rather a shortcoming from my side.

2. My HR manager helps advise me on personal circumstances I might be missing: is my employee close to a burnout? Is something happening in their personal life I should consider? Is their visa to stay in the country contingent on them keeping their job?

3. My HR manager also prepares most of the necessary paperwork and will follow up with my employee on practical matters after the termination. I usually invite her to the conversation too, as I believe having a friendly more neutral face in the room can take the edge off of the confrontation.

4. My second-in-command can help subtly answer questions or gauge sentiment among the remaining team members after the process is done.

5. My manager will help justify to leadership why this course of action was taken.

#3 - Why you must do this conversation yourself

I was only 23 when I had to fire the first employee on my team and I was scared to shit of having to step into the room and have that talk.

I didn't sleep well during the two nights before and I eventually left home early after I had had the talk just to open a bottle of whiskey to bring my adrenaline down to a level lower than “defcon 1 - you're about to die”.

Boris, my manager, had kindly offered to do the conversation in my place to spare me the ordeal, but as tempting as it sounded I wanted to take my responsibility.

Years later, I now know why it's so important to do this conversation yourself.

Your team member might not remember every day they worked at the company, but they will definitely remember the day you laid them off. They will remember every last detail about that day and how you handled the details will matter greatly.

Your reputation, and that of the company, depend on you taking ownership for having this difficult talk.

#4 - How to schedule the meeting

Here's a nice puzzle for you. Ideally, you will want:

1. a dedicated meeting for this, instead of handling it after an existing meeting;

2. not to share what the meeting will be about;

3. not raise any alarm-bells because of point 2;

I've found the easiest is to use one of your existing recurring one-on-one meetings for this conversation, and if necessary, bring it forward or backward in the calendar to the most suitable moment in the day or week.

I prefer 15:00 or 16:00 on any day but a Friday, because:

1. if your employee feels like it, it offers them the possibility to say goodbye to the team before they've all gone home for the day;

2. the rest of your team can use the remaining hours of the day to process the news without having to worry about having to be productive for a full day ahead;

3. Friday makes for a very depressing way to enter the weekend instead of having a few weekdays for your employee to focus on what the next steps are for them.

#5 - How to structure the conversation

First of all, it's not really a conversation, it's more like an announcement followed by a Q&A.

You're communicating that the irrevocable decision has been made to let this person go. Therefore it's important you change your usual conversation structure:

1. No small talk, get straight to the point — prepare a script and open with a sentence like “Hey Wytze, have a seat. I've got some bad news for you.”

2. Keep it short, keep it honest — state the reason for termination in a maximum of 2 or 3 sentences. Assume that 80% of anything you say after that might not come across anymore as their mind starts racing to understand what's happening.

3. Use decisive language & the past-tense — this decision had been made; you want to avoid getting into a debate about second chances.

4. Stop talking after this part and listen — everyone responds differently to the news of losing their job (see point #5). After I've made clear that this is their last day at the company I'll ask if they understood what I've told them so I can get a sense of how they are taking the news and adapt my communication accordingly.

5. You can elaborate during Q&A — you want your opening message to be clear and concise, but if your employee asks for clarification you can and should take the time to provide context during this phase of the conversation.

6. Be specific about what will happen next — when is their final paycheck, how do they handover projects, how will you announce this to the team and what resources do they need to apply for unemployment support.

7. Wrap it up as graciously as you can — which is a challenge in itself, I know. I usually end by suggesting that I can give them a call tomorrow to answer any further questions, that I can walk with them to collect their belongings and we can walk out together to say goodbye at the front door.

#5 - Try to avoid doing/saying these things

• Avoid accidentally blaming your employee to justify your action i.e. “if you would have put in more hours, maybe you would have reached better results”.

• Don't let your employee bait you into starting a discussion about whether or not a termination was justifiable. The decision is not up for debate.

• It's fine to apologise for the situation, but don't apologise for your decision. As painful as it is for them, you stand behind the decision you've taken.

• Try not to say: “I understand how you feel.” Because you don't. A better alternative is to label their emotions: “I can see this comes as a shock”.

• As difficult as it is, try to stay human and show compassion. Offer them a glass of water, a tissue and listen to what they have to say.

#6 - How will your employee respond?

I've had conversations that seemed easier than having to cancel a gym membership, but then I've also had situations that turned into one big explosion of emotion.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the most predictable responses correspond to the emotions associated with a painful loss (ie. death): shock, denial, anger and grief.

Once you start listening for the response to your initial message, try to decipher for yourself whether one of these emotions has the upper hand. Best-selling author Dick Grote published this great overview in Harvard Business Review that gives you a good idea of how to adapt your communication according to the type of emotion you see.

#7 - Don't forget who you're doing this for

As a caring and compassionate manager, it's only natural that you feel a sense of regret about the pain you're having to inflict on your soon to be ex-employee.

Just keep in mind that postponing this challenging conversation often implies your other team members have to deal with a higher workload, more pressure or downright frustration about the fact that someone on the squad isn't performing.

You're doing this because it is your obligation to them.

After you've gone through the process of firing an employee, make sure to explain your decision to the team in a way that both clarifies why you think the course of action will benefit the team, while also respecting the privacy of your former employee.

Ultimately it will help you keep a strong and motivated team.

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#7 - Improve your online security

On average some 30.000 websites get hacked each day, many of which fall victim not to any kind of sophisticated high-tech hacking, but simply because employees of the company that was hacked weren't applying basic online security measures.

While researching this topic I found an overview in the UK Cybercrime Report of 2019 showing the most common passwords revealed in cyber breaches worldwide. The fact that 23 million hacked accounts used the password ‘123456’ kind of says it all.

As business professionals, I believe we have an obligation to ourselves, our family members and our employers to take care of our online security. Today I am sharing a list of tools, advice and precautions I've taken to improve mine:

1. Anti-theft software

A few years ago I started using Prey, which allows you to track your phones or laptops in a way that is best compared to ‘Find my iPhone’, but with much more functionality.

The service lets you add up to three devices for free, or more if you upgrade. Some of the best features include the ability to remotely activate your phone's front and back camera to take pictures of the thief, the fact that it keeps a log of recent location history and that you can lock as well as remove data from your device. I also get these email warnings whenever my laptop has been offline for longer than usual.

2. Use a password manager

Why is it a problem if you use the same password for multiple online accounts?

Because it won't be Facebook, Gmail or your local bank that gets hacked, but that silly Farmville-type game or the Hunkemöller loyalty program you made an account for.

Suddenly, the combination of email address and password you used for these accounts will be circulating on the dark web and all hackers need to do is run an automated script to see whether you used that same combination for services like Facebook, Outlook or Gmail. You'd be surprised how badly people with the wrong intent could ruin your life by getting access to a few of your most important online accounts.

I use a paid service called 1Password that allows me to create impenetrable passwords that are auto-completed into my browser when I login to online services. All I'm required to do is remember my one master password. The password-generator feature makes creating new accounts a very smooth experience.

3. Subscribe to a VPN, Ad-blocker & activate 2FA

Whenever I am using the WiFi in a public location like a coffee place, an event or a train station, I make the effort of turning on my VPN to ensure that all of my internet activity stays encrypted and can't be hacked remotely.

I use a service called Encrypt.me which works great, because you can teach it to recognise which WiFi networks (i.e. at home) are deemed safe and leave it to automatically activate when connecting to new networks. It's a paid service, but there are plenty of free VPN services you can subscribe to that will work just as well.

I also recommend installing an adblocker, like Adblock Plus. You'd be surprised how often ads place malicious malware on your computer without your knowledge.

Finally, a growing list of online services will now allow you to use two-factor authentication. By needing a code from your phone to unlock your online account for services like Facebook, Gmail or Slack, you make it virtually impossible for a hacker to access your account without your knowledge.

4. My emergency folder

Have you ever thought about what would happen if your house were to burn down without you being able to save your laptop, phone or any of your most important documents?

I have and hidden in my Dropbox cloud storage account is a folder called ‘Emergency Scenario’ that contains several important files I would need should this ever happen.

Since it's saved in the cloud, I don't need to worry about losing my phone or laptop, I just need to make sure I memorise this password by heart. Some of these files are particularly useful in claiming back insurance for lost property.

What's in the file?

• A systems report of my Macbook Pro listing the serial number and type

• A screenshot of my iPhone's serial number and IMEI-code

• A backup file for restoring my 1Password account

• A copy of my passport

• A copy of my most important insurance policies

4. My ‘What-To-Do-If-I-Die’ email

This one may be a bit grim, but it's useful nevertheless.

Two years ago I wrote an email to my wife titled “what do do if I die”, in which I outline how and where she can access the most important financial accounts I use.

I don't add any secure/compromising information in the actual email; the point is simply to help my wife understand where the information she needs is located. Some of the explanations I've added to the email include:

• How to access or restore my 1password account (she knows the password); I also store a list of all of my banking passwords and backup codes in here

• A list of which banks I have accounts or investments with that she can retrieve

• Which life insurance policy and pension fund she's entitled to

• How to access my cryptocurrency funds; and who of my friends she can ask to help her access funds from a cold wallet

Of course, let's hope it never comes to that 😄

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#6 - Master the 65-85-95 negotiation tactic

As an event-organiser it hasn't been uncommon for me to have to make deals with more than a 100 different suppliers a year to facilitate the production of an event.

Usually the longer-term nature of these collaborations mean both parties are willing to take time to build up a relationship, establish rapport and create some form of mutual trust before entering price negotiations. I prefer this way of working because it allows you to leverage that relationship to arrive at a price that is acceptable for both.

However, sometimes in life you get forced into some real streetfight-type bargaining with a hard-ass haggler.

The worst of these I've ever encountered are moms selling second-hand baby products on Marktplaats. These stone-cold women stick to their game plan, jump straight into negotiations and tell you to take the deal or stop wasting their time.

It's these situations where I like to deploy the Ackerman bargaining strategy for navigating the conversation. The strategy was coined by Chris Voss based on CIA-operative Bill Ackerman's bargaining strategy during ransom negotiations.

Here's how and why it works.

#1 - Set your price target

Do research before the start of the negotiation and decide for yourself what your price target is. Consider asking yourself some of the following questions:

What is the product worth to me? What is a reasonable market rate for it? How in demand is the product? At what price is the product no longer desirable to me?

#2 - Set your first offer at 65 percent of your price target

By setting your first offer at 65 percent of your price target you're hoping to accomplish two psychological effects to help you further negotiate:

• you will set what is called an extreme anchor; establishing an imaginary range between your anchor and the asking price that will define the bandwidth between which further negotiations will take place.

• the shock of an extreme anchor will induce a fight-or-flight reaction in most people, limiting their cognitive abilities and making it easier for you to get them to divert from their own negotiation game plan.

I've been playing around with different opening percentage offers depending on the situation. For example, I recently bought a used car and felt 65 percent was too low of a first offer for this type of product. I encourage experimenting, but keep in mind not to start too close to your price target or you'll lose the advantage of the psychological effect it's trying to accomplish.

#3 - Calculate three raises of decreasing increments

Here's where it gets interesting.

Your next offers should be structured at 85, 95 and ultimately 100 percent of your price target, but you have to make sure not to drop them in too soon.

In an ideal flow you should be asking questions (see point #4) while you wait for your counterpart to make another offer. Structuring your next offers at these progressive intervals works to your advantage on a few different levels:

1. they work on the norm of reciprocity; since you've just made a concession, you are now inspiring your counterpart to do the same for you.

2. by cutting the amount of your increases in half each time, you are convincing your counterpart that he or she is squeezing every last bloody drop out of you.

#4 - Use empathy to unlock a counteroffer

As you're navigating through this process of haggling there's two tactics that can help you unlock a counteroffer: tactical empathy and open-ended questions.

An example of tactical empathy in my battle for second-hand baby products would be:

“I'm sorry that my budget-issue is holding us up. I realise you must have a hundred other things to do being a mom yourself.”

The purpose of tactical empathy is, on a human-to-human level, to make your counterpart feel heard and understood. Your goal by doing so is that showing empathy should lead to receiving empathy (in the form of a lower counteroffer please).

When it comes to open-ended questions, the best type to throw into the conversation are those that have no real answer but give off the illusion that you're asking your counterpart for help and that they are in control of this negotiation:

“How will I be able to get everything I need for my baby if I spend almost all of my remaining budget on this Baby Björn rocking chair?”

How do you even answer that question? Nobody knows, which is why a good question like that has a tendency to bait your counterpart into a making you a lower offer.

#5 - Use non-round numbers in the final amount

When you share your final offer (your price target), make sure it's a precise non-round number like, for example, €14.893 rather than €15.000.

It gives the number so much more credibility and weight, because it literally looks like you ran your numbers twice and scraped the last cent out of your bank account to be able to make this final offer.

#6 - Add a non-monetary item on the final amount

On your final precise non-round offer, add in a non-monetary item to show that you're at your absolute limit. I prefer adding items that I know my counterpart doesn't want, because the point of this strategy is simply to show that they've now bled you dry.

When I was negotiating the price on the used-car we purchased last year I sent this final offer to the car owner. I don't think I've ever embarrassed my wife more than I have with this email, but ... the magic of the Ackerman bargaining strategy worked.

Hey ****,

Thank you for this generous offer and for thinking along with us so far.

Unfortunately it's still above our budget, but Lotte and I have been able to scrape together all of our savings to get to €13.489.

I know it’s below your offer but I'm hoping I can convince you to let us cover the difference by giving you an 18-year old special edition Scottish whiskey that I received as a gift from a client last year.

We really love the car and want to make this work!

Wytze

#7 - One more thing

All of this works in reverse too, so if you're on the selling side of the equation you now know with which increments to structure your offers.

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Interview: she makes a six-figure startup salary as Head of Strategic Partnerships

Hey *****, thanks for accepting this interview, let's get started.

Q: Your job title reads like the type that could differ quite a lot depending on which company you work for. Can you tell us a bit about what you do?

Partnerships is traditionally seen as a business development role and at my previous company I was responsible for bringing our ecommerce platform into the European market. In countries where we weren't ready to set up shop yet I would start strategic collaborations with local partners to enter the market instead.

This was at a time when the foundation of the company had already been built and partnerships were a great growth lever. That's also what I love about strategic partnerships, it's one of the ways you can 10x your business. In new markets like Israel and South Africa, where I had zero contacts and knowledge of how to localise our product, our partners were essentially an extension of myself that I could rely on to help me execute on the company's business development goals.

I now recently moved to a company with a SaaS-product, where although I hold the same job title, I am now embedded in the Product team and my role is split between:

• maintaining our own product integrations with platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter; essentially acting as a solutions engineer to stay on top of new API updates and to ensure our product's feature set remains competitive

• setting up larger marketing partnerships that can help us grow our exposure; think of securing high-profile speaking slots or event partnerships

• overseeing relationships with third-party integrations; the companies that use our API to build apps that live and operate in our ecosystem.

When I joined, these responsibilities existed but weren't formalised in any way. As the first person to work on partnerships it meant focussing on the foundational work first such as doing an API clean-up, running a Table Stakes analysis of what our product looked like for partners and working with the legal team to formalise the existing relationships with third parties in contracts. Now that this part is done, I'm starting to shift more of my attention towards new opportunities like community-building or exploring an affiliate program as an area of growth for the company.

Name: —

Job title: Head of Strategic Partnerships

Experience: 9 working years

Current salary: €97.000 - €105.000 p/year (depending on conversion rates)

Location: Amsterdam (remote), US-based startup

Q: Was the move from a Strategic Partnerships role in a Business Development team to one in a Product team a conscious one?

At my previous job I started off in the business development team, but entering new markets soon also included responsibility over localisation of the product. By virtue of that I ended up getting a lot of product experience.

By the time I moved to my current company I wanted to make the shift into a role that combined partnerships and product, primarily because I enjoy the technical side of looking into documentation and thinking about how the product is perceived by an end-user. Because I didn't have any engineering resources at the start of my work here I ended up doing a lot of solutions engineering myself, which has helped me become a lot better at my job now that I actually do have engineers in my team.

In terms of career growth, I also felt that moving into product would be a more robust choice for future opportunities than simply staying in the business development domain. Ultimately there's more demand for product-jobs and the salaries are higher.

Even though my role is still very much business development focussed, I'm now also a product manager helping to shape both our own product as well as our internal tooling. I really enjoy having that variety of work: the social aspect of working with people and building relationships, while also helping to ship the actual product.

Q: How is success measured in your role and has that changed between your current and previous company?

At my previous company there was a very clear overarching company objective that my team and I were measured against, called gross productive clients. These were the absolute number of clients in any given market that joined our ecommerce platform and had generated at least $1 in revenue. I would oversee the country managers who then had sub-targets for how many of those clients would come in through partnerships, direct marketing or other channels. A clear north-star metric.

The big difference with my job now is that my objective is to add new value to our existing customer base as opposed to bringing on new leads to help the company grow.

We work with the OKR framework and as a result of the company being fairly small (80 employees) our quarterly department objectives are really focussed on making sure we ship that which is needed most for the company to reach its overall target. Being in the product team myself also means my own objectives relate much stronger to the product roadmap than to the business development side of strategic partnerships.

Q: How important is it to have a budget you can spend to do your job effectively?

It depends on the phase of the company you're in. There's definitely room for organic partnerships to drive meaningful results, but often having a budget when you're past the early startup phase can be necessary to setup the tooling you need.

As an example, at my previous company we had plenty of in-house capacity to build an affiliate program to ramp up lead generation, but at my current company building something like this would detract too much from the core roadmap. Having a budget to work with third-party platforms or external contractors can be a way forward.

You don't need a strategic partnerships budget to go off and pay an influencer money hoping that it'll drive results, but being able to invest in the proper software tools will certainly help you be effective. Part of that comes with its own price-tag.

Q: Tell us about your career trajectory: how did you get to where you are now and what helped shape you skillset along the way?

I definitely followed a non-linear path, as is the case with most people in tech. Product management isn't even a study you can follow in school as far as I'm aware of.

I initially studied political science and communications, but it was through my involvement in the student association that I started dabbling in the tech space. Although the focus was on politics, I received a lot of requests for creating graphics, posters and websites, leading me to eventually decide to go back to school again to study web development and get a degree in computer science.

School ended up being incredibly expensive and being from a working class family made me realise that I needed to roll up my sleeves, take care of myself and make sure that I was in the position to repay school debt as soon as possible. When I moved to the Netherlands to accept an interesting low-salary traineeship it prompted me to use my web development experience to generate an alternative source of income.

For a while I was taking web development jobs from Craigslist for as little as €10 an hour, which in hindsight makes me cringe thinking about how I robbed myself. On the positive side working for a lot of small companies gave me room to fuck up and hone my skills, which is something that has proven beneficial for my move into product.

Interestingly enough my developer-experience also helped me secure the Strategic Partnerships position at my previous company. I knew there was a candidate in the running with a stronger commercial background, but I was able to convince the company that my technical and entrepreneurial background would be more of a complement to their existing group of employees. After I got the position I remember thinking what a great reminder this is that just because someone is a better fit on paper doesn't necessarily disqualify you from being equipped to do that job.

If there's one other thing that helped me get where I am today, it's the fact that I really wanted to meet other young female developers when I started living in Amsterdam and as a result decided to host my own meetup. It turned out to be a very organic way of building industry connections and forced me to build relationships with companies such as Google, Booking and Adyen to help support these events. Many of my career opportunities can be linked back to the network I built up in this phase of my life.

Q: What drove you to switch jobs in the years that you did?

I've always had a list in the back of my mind with a few companies that I would love to work for one day given the right position opens up fitting my skillset. I've been lucky that both my current as well as my previous two jobs were at companies on that list.

What made me decide to move at the first of those three jobs was actually a combination of factors. In my first year I had an extremely steep learning curve, but after that the opportunities to grow no longer matched my ambition and the irregular working hours (event partnerships) made me realise it wasn't sustainable for me longer-term. When the opportunity came up to apply for another one of my dream companies I took the opportunity and decided to move on.

At my previous company, the decision to leave came after being there for more than 3 years during which I had been promoted twice and had grown my team to 8 people. At that time, we reached a point where we had entered the European market successfully and my team and I were now focussing on small incremental changes. It was still fun, but it lacked the same excitement I felt when we were still in that phase of growth.

I also think I would've hit a glass ceiling, because we started to move into a phase where even though you'd been at the company for a long time, they would hire someone from Google with 20 years of experience a level above you.

I really wanted the opportunity to grow again and the current company I work for offers exactly that. The company itself is already quite successful, but Partnerships is just a new functionality they've added into the mix. Even though I was able to increase my salary, taking this position felt like a risky bet at the time. I think my ego started messing with my judgement because I kept wondering whether letting go of having direct reports would be too much of a 'step down’ in my career.

What ultimately played a large part in my decision was factoring in quality of life. My previous job had me travelling once a week and living out of my suitcase. I really wanted to improve my work-life balance and at my current company I'm able to dedicate time to side projects, spend more time with my friends and pick up Dutch classes again. I ended up realising those things were more important for me in this phase of my career than the ego-boost of a fancy title or large team of direct reports.

Q: You've made quite the exponential jump in salary over your previous few years. How did that process go for you?

I've become more headstrong about knowing my worth. When I transitioned to my previous company I completely low-balled myself because I hadn't correctly assessed what my market value was or what salary-levels were common for a company that size.

Although growing my salary from €37.000 to €45.000 felt substantial, it was completely out of line with the level of pay for that particular company. I only realised after I was there for a while that I was earning much less than almost all of my colleagues.

When I received a promotion it initially came without a pay raise, but I decided to kick up a fuss since I knew my previous boss had been making almost €150.000 in the position I was now about to fill. It was definitely a frustrating experience and a learning curve for myself. Unfortunately most companies have a very untransparent salary scale and it just makes it very hard to know whether you’re on par.

If I had to summarise a few things I've noticed throughout my career about salary progression, it's that substantial increases usually come from either:

• moving into a management position

• moving from company to company

• or having a particular skillset which companies are willing to pay up for

When I managed my own team I had direct reports with the same job title making less than me and more than me. In situations like that people had been placed on a much higher experience level in the same job type because their skillset or the prestige of their track record of previous companies demanded it.

Q: Any final advice for readers of The Hatchet?

I've always tried to focus on personal growth in my career and then chose to move on as soon as I hit a point where that stagnated. I think you really can't go wrong with following that advice.

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Write recommendation letters for employees

I am a religious believer of karma in business and so when good people leave my team I genuinely want them to succeed in whatever they choose to do next.

A great way to contribute to that success is to provide them with a carefully crafted recommendation letter. That means writing a letter that eloquently highlights the strengths of your former employee, while avoiding overused, vague and hollow statements like “has a can-do attitude and is very flexible”.

The problem with recommendation letters is you always get asked to write them at an inconvenient time: when an employee leaves. As a manager, you'll already be busy having to think about their off-boarding, finding a replacement and figuring out who will take over their work in the meantime. That's why you need to be prepared.

Create good templates

Although the teams I managed varied in size from 8 to 25 employees, each team could be split up into a maximum number of job profiles. Employees within that same job profile will have a commonality in skillset and responsibilities, making it easier for you to create one good template per profile that can be used when an employee leaves.

Does it matter that your recommendation letter won't be 100% unique to that specific employee? No, what matters more is that the letter is a quality piece of work that provides honest insight into the type of work your employee performed for you and the qualities they possess.

I'm going to share with you three of the templates I used for employees in my team during my time at TNW. For privacy reasons I've replaced all personal information with that of some famous friends, but the setup and structure remain intact.

Please use them as inspiration for creating your own templates — feel free to copy them to a new document to start editing your own. The yellow highlights indicate the sections of each template that I've altered per job type.

👉 Show me the templates

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Create a user manual about your leadership style

A few years ago I read an article that advocated for managers to create their own user manual to share with their new team or co-workers.

It struck me as a great idea given how much time we spend trying to figure each other out when we work together for the first time. The manual would provide a more explicit description of your character, personal values and how you like to work with other people. The idea would be for you to share it with when you start working with new team members to help shorten the learning curve of having to decipher ‘you’.

I reviewed several user manuals I found online and assembled the best ideas into a user manual about myself. I created two versions: a text-based one below and a more visual slide deck that you can download the keynote or PDF file for here.

Please allow yourself to copy the construct and create your own.

If you need help deciding which personality traits to list in your manual, consider doing an online DISC-like test to get some input. I asked my network to share their preferred suggestions and, in order of votes, these were the top 5 recommended:

• Crystalknows

• 16personalities

• Gallup’s CliftonStrengths

• Birkman

• Marcus Buckingham StandOut Assessment

Wytze's User Manual

Introduction

Hey, I'm Wytze and I wrote this user guide to give you a better sense of me and my unique personality, style of communication and how my character is wired. Think of it as a shortcut to help us develop the most effective work-relationship.

I'm 30-years old and currently live in a village called Oegstgeest after moving out of Amsterdam in 2018. I live there with my wife Lotte, my 18-month old son Vince and we're expecting a second boy in March of 2021.

I'm equally ambitious about work as I am about spending time with family. I love working hard, delivering quality and pushing my brain to and over the limit. Having worked in Events, I'm accustomed to working under pressure towards tight deadlines.

My character in bullet points:

• I'm calm and composed. I only speak if I have something to say and generally don't let my emotions get in the way of making the most rational decision.

• I value relationships and results. They are not either/or with me. I care deeply about the people I work with but equally for the results I want to achieve.

• Trust and commitment are key to me. I expect people to respect when information is shared privately and to always give 110% in effort.

My style

• I believe the best managers work in service of their team. I'll always adapt my leadership style to what fits your specific needs or what the situation requires.

• I'm most energised when I get the opportunity to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty working together with you on strategy, copywriting or sales.

• I believe in giving people freedom, flexibility and stretch assignments, and equipping them with the tools they need to develop their potential.

What I value

• As a manager, I appreciate being kept in the loop on the status of projects you're working on. A short paragraph with bullet point updates is usually all I need.

• I value resourcefulness and proactivity. Be smart, move fast and pivot quickly. Ask forgiveness rather than permission. Make mistakes and learn from them.

• I value co-workers that treat others the way they want to be treated.

What I don't have patience for

• If you make a mistake or something is heading off the rails, tell me before the crash. I would rather avoid surprises.

• I default to trust, but if my confidence is shaken, it’s hard to rebuild. Ways to lose my trust: withholding important information, avoiding hard conversations, or treating others with disrespect.

• I am turned off by entitlement, ego and self-importance; I don't care what title you have, we're all part of a team trying to complete the same mission.

How to best communicate with me

• You can message me over Slack at any time of day without worrying whether or not you're invading my privacy. I'll respond later if it's an inconvenient time.

• Please only call me on my cell phone if it's an emergency. Answering phone calls interrupts my workflow and I don't always remember to phone back.

• I value clear messages instead of having to decipher what's being asked of me. If you need to choose: be blunt instead of being vague.

My strengths

• I'm a great copywriter. If you're struggling with formulating the best message for an email or announcement, I am happy to help you.

• I like presenting, negotiating and selling. These things come naturally to me.

• I'm good at reading people and can get along with almost anybody.

My growth areas

• I'm a perfectionist and constantly trying to make sure that this aspect of my character doesn't hold me back from starting now and iterating later.

• Having worked at one employer for a decade means my business knowledge is skewed to one source; in the near future I'm looking to expand my horizon.

What people misunderstand about me

• Even though I am great at communicating, I am actually an introvert.

• If you find me silent in a conversation it's probably because I'm carefully weighing your words to form my opinion or advice on the matter.

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How to negotiate a salary raise

The sun always rises in the east, the only certain thing in life is paying taxes, and people don’t always get the salary raise they deserve. I’d like to help you with the latter.

This article focuses on the role of your annual performance review in negotiating a salary raise in your current job. I won't go into negotiation tactics in this post as I'm saving that for a separate article coming up in the next months.

Why performance reviews matter

How you structure your performance review — which usually takes about an hour — has a direct influence on your potential salary raise. Generally speaking companies will provide anywhere between a 1% - 10% annual raise depending on how well you've performed. That makes your review one very important hour.

To put that into context: if you were to pick up an extra 3% salary increase on a median Dutch salary you're talking about an extra €1100 per year in direct gross income, increased employer contributions to your pension and next year's salary raise in percentages will equal a higher number in absolute euro's. All I'm trying to point out is that it's worth investing some effort into that one conversation.

My advice is based on two assumptions:

• You are indeed great at what you do and a top-performer

• You're not moving into a new job/position. If you've been promoted or taken on materially different responsibilities you shouldn't settle for a regular raise

Follow these guidelines and by the time you have your next performance review, your negotiation skills will barely even matter. The decision to give you a raise will have slowly and surely been made over the course of a year.

#1 - Don't accept a mediocre review

We've probably all had a manager in our life that turned reviews into awkward monologues filled with vague and hollow statements about your performance.

Just because your manager has difficulty conducting a structured review shouldn't withhold you from adding a bit of structure to it yourself. There are two things I recommend making sure take place as part of your review process:

• Ask your manager to provide concrete examples when feedback is given.

• Document the feedback and the outcome of the review conversation somewhere.

Poor managers have a tendency to prepare for reviews in the 15-minutes prior to the meeting, which means they're likely to provide feedback based on recent events only, or worse, provide feedback based on their own subjective feelings.

Asking for concrete examples will help separate the feedback that has merit from the random and unsubstantiated assumptions, which will help you:

1. Understand better what to actually improve about your performance

2. Nudge the goal-setting part of your conversation in the direction of the improvement points that have clear examples of what to change

It doesn't really matter where the review is documented just as long as it is. Part of the strategy is referring back to the goals in your next review which is why it's imperative they were documented and not verbal commitments only.

For this article I decided to run a performance review with myself to show you an example of what minimum documentation could look like.

#2 - Set clear goals for the next 12 months

Here's the key to the game I want you to play.

Once you and your manager have reviewed your current year performance and start looking at the next year ahead, ask your manager this:

“What goals can we set in order for me to achieve an outstanding performance review in 12 months and the maximum salary increase?”

Practice that sentence out loud in front of the mirror if it makes you nervous, because it shouldn’t. What you’re asking for is perfectly normal. How are you supposed to deliver exemplary performance if you don't know what that performance looks like?

The goals you set together need to be documented or else you'll never be able to prove 12-months down the line that you did everything that was asked of you.

Secondly, every goal you put on paper needs to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound). If your goals don't match these criteria, you're going to leave room for ambiguity and discussion as to whether or not you completely achieved the goal. Let me give you a quick example to illustrate:

POOR goal: help other teams work together more effectively with the marketing department.

SMART goal: help other teams work together with our department more effectively by organising four company-wide one hour workshops on successfully collaborating with the marketing team.

The POOR goal leaves it unclear at what point you've done enough to complete it. The SMART goal leaves no room for discussion; either you achieved it or you didn't.

#3 - Revisit your goals once a quarter

Goals are like Pokémon, you gotta catch ‘em all.

The tactic here is to slowly but surely add a checkmark behind every goal that you had set up together with your manager. All you do is ask:

“Looking at the goals we set up earlier this year, how do you feel I'm doing at the moment. Can you tell me which of these you feel I still need to work on?”

Don’t wait for your midterm review to start asking this question, but ask regularly so you receive a more constant loop of feedback. Monthly one-on-one meetings are a great opportunity to do so, but at minimum make sure to check in once a quarter.

As a side-effect of reviewing your goals, your manager will slowly get into the mindset of acknowledging you are doing exactly what he/she confirmed would earn you the maximum salary increase at the end of the year.

#4 - Add value to core company goals

Every commercial business has one metric that all managers answer to: profit.

Find creative ways to contribute to the bottom line of the company and you'll find that you'll be making it much easier for your manager to give you a raise. Remember that he/she is probably negotiating team salaries with the CFO, so it helps if people in leadership recognise that you understand what the business is ultimately about.

I hear you thinking: “but I'm not in a sales position Wytze”. Well, you don't have to be.

In fact, the further removed your position is from sales, the more relevant this point becomes. You'll probably need to step outside of your job description to make a meaningful contribution and that makes it easier to get positively noticed.

You could contribute to the bottom line in so many ways:

• Introduce a new lead from your personal network to the sales team

• Review the online tooling your team uses to save costs for the company

• Join a sales team meeting to ask how you in your role could help them achieve better results and inform them of relevant information from your work domain

• Use your personal LinkedIn to share news about company products

If your company's leadership team works with OKRs or a similar goal-setting framework to outline the company strategy for the year — take notice. They'll probably list other core company goals besides revenue/profit that you can integrate into the personal goals you set with your manager.

#5 - Great performance needs to be seen

Everybody dislikes ass kissers, but the reality of life is that you need to claim credit for the great things you achieve. This is your own responsibility.

I used to be disgustingly good at this while in school studying to be a hotel manager. During our practical course in the Housekeeping department I'd use the walkie-talkie to casually inform my manager that I noticed a mess in the hallway on my way back from cleaning one of the rooms, decided I would clean it up and might be back later because of it. My actual cleaning skills were nowhere near perfect, but I received the highest grades because my manager kept thinking “this guy understands it”.

The easiest and most under-utilised way of keeping the right people informed of your achievements is to volunteer to present an update on the project you're working on during an all-hands company meeting. I can tell you first-hand that leadership is extremely grateful towards employees stepping forward, so you'll effectively be doing yourself two favours: helping them out and reminding everyone of your achievements.

#6 - Treat your manager as your friend

It can be tempting to try and play hardball with your manager about salary raises you feel you deserve, but I speak from experience when I tell you: be careful.

Your manager is the person defending your salary raise to the manager above her. She's going to fight harder for you if you give her the impression you're both on the same team trying to accomplish the same results.

Consider your manager an ally in helping you develop the best career possible under your current employer.

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Investor Update #1

Dear investors,

After several weeks of preparation I finally pulled the trigger on December 1 and launched The Hatchet with a Linkedin post that went viral (97+ comments).

I knew I would be jumping off the deep-end, but it turned out somebody gave me a welcome to entrepreneurship gift in the form of corona, which meant I had to default to the sofa for the entire launch week of my new company. What a way to start.

Despite not having as much time to work on outreach I'm happy with the numbers so far: a total email list of 439, of which 29 paid subscribers, an average email open rate of 62% and a gross annual revenue of €2.670.

Thank you so much for your support already Rachelle, Pieter Paul, Lotte, Gianluca, Freddy, Markus, Lana, Padraig, Nelly, Thomas, Bart, Marnix, Doruk, Stan, Catrin, Sharon, Daks, Guido, Linda, Ruben, Marck, Jan, Kathryn, James, Saina, Robin, Alexander, Matthew and Jons. Your 2020-karma points are in the pocket.

I thought it’d be nice to share insights into my first 25 days of being in business and to look at some of the things I've encountered, positive or challenging, in the first weeks.

1 - Social strategy

The most challenging aspect of running a newsletter is that you need to develop and acquire your own audience. A natural first place to do so was to start with my own social media channels to promote the newsletter as well as the content I create.

As an introvert (surprise), it's made me realise I really need to step outside of my comfort zone and engage much more regularly on social platforms like Linkedin, Reddit, Twitter or in Facebook Groups. The fact that I had only ever done that on Linkedin shows significantly in my ability to reach new subscribers; while my posts there get quite the engagement, posting on Twitter with my 217 followers is about as effective as trying to tell my 1-year old to stop eating food that's on the floor.

After playing around a bit with all of these various social media channels I've set my sites on some short-term marketing goals I want to focus on this quarter:

• I want to maintain writing 2 high quality posts per week on Linkedin and Reddit; together these channels account for 37% of my website traffic.

• I plan to personally reach out to 10 friends each week to ask them to recommend my newsletter on a social media platform of their choice.

• I am considering to reinvest a part of my budget towards getting parttime marketing help to build out my social media presence and subscriber base.

2 - Paid strategy

I've been reading up a lot on what other newsletter writers have done to build out their audience of subscribers. One of those avenues is leveraging paid advertising.

I am quite on the fence about whether or not this is the best way for me to spend my budget right now, but then again I do like the idea of experimenting to see for myself whether it makes sense and to brush up on my Facebook and Google ad skills. I got off to a great start already since I managed to get my FB ad account suspended yesterday.

With Google I've already initiated a first display advertising campaign that has been running for a few days now. I'm curious whether this will yield relevant results, since I left the targeting up to Google's magical self-learning algorithm. I'm obviously no designer, but I am pretty happy with the banner set I managed to create (below).

My goals for paid advertising this quarter are:

• Experiment with €150 on display advertising on Google.

• Experiment with €500 on boosting my articles on Facebook.

• Spend a day learning about search marketing and find out how to run a first campaign to target relevant keywords for people using Google and Bing.

3 - SEO strategy

Another interesting challenge is that my website domain does not get much recognition yet from search engines like Google and Bing, making it hard for new people to find me when searching for information that relates to my business. For example: if you enter ‘the Hatchet’ into Google, you currently need to reach page 5 of the search results to find a link directing to my website.

Longer term, I want to make sure that my company is both visible in direct search results, as well as having my articles surface when people search for relevant questions like “advice on negotiating a better salary”. An important aspect of achieving a higher ranking in search engines is through the process of link-building: getting other credible websites or social media accounts to link back to your website.

I've come up with a few strategies I'll be trying out this quarter:

• I've contacted three reputable media outlets to write a guest post. This exposes me to new audiences while also having a link included to my own website.

• I am trying out a barter deal where I consult a company for free in exchange for them promoting my newsletter and linking to it from their websites.

• I plan to turn one of my issues into a keynote presentation and apply to speak at a virtual event in Q1-2021. This would be a test to see if it helps me reach a new audience and whether promotion about me as a speaker helps my SEO.

4 - Sales strategy

I’m currently at a gross annualised revenue of €2.670 and my target is to reach €19.836 within 10 months to prove the business has commercial viability.

While I see opportunities to bring in future revenue through advertisements or events, I really do first need to establish a revenue stream from subscriptions. Converting readers to paid subscribers takes time though, and I'm noticing that even close business contacts need personal messaging to convince them to subscribe.

While sales outreach might feel like a burden to some people, I genuinely love approaching my network to see if I can convince them to pay for the full service. Selling is a game of patience and numbers: as long as I can make sure to consistently reach out with relevant messaging to people in my target audience, I'll get there.

One thing I'm desperately missing is a referral program. Currently I'm waiting for Substack to implement this feature, but I have hope it'll come soon since I've seen them implement it for some high-profile writers already. Ultimately something like this could really boost the reach and subscriber growth in a way I alone could never.

For the upcoming quarter I want to focus on:

• Selling at least one group deal to a company.

• Reach 100 paid subscribers (which feels like a stretch goal right now).

Future investor updates

What's working? What isn't? How much money are you making and what is left of it after paying for expenses? You might wonder why I am sharing this much information.

The reason is that it's exactly what I would want to read about from others trying to start a new business. Full transparency feels like the most genuine way to share what lessons I learn in this next phase of my career.

The financial results of The Hatchet don't exist in a vacuum though; they belong to the bigger picture of my personal financial situation. For the next investor updates I will start giving you insight into the choices I make between consultancy, contract-work, and building The Hatchet — and share the top-line results across the board.

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Convince clients to work with you

I started my first job in tech at twenty-one. By age twenty-six I was managing a tech conference with 20,000 attendees generating €3 million+ in annual revenue. There’s one skill in particular that helped me get there: being able to sell.

Whether you work in the sales department or not, chances are that at some point in your career you'll join a sales conversation. I'd like to prepare you for that moment.

The strategy I use is a combination of experience, intuition and books I've read. It's not meant to be a complete guide, but rather a solid starting point.

#1 - Preparing your psychological mindset

How are deals closed? It's definitely not just because of a smart-articulated question at the end of your sales-process to trick your client into signing on the dotted line.

You start closing a deal the moment you initiate first contact. Every email, meeting or phone call, however insignificant you might think it is, subconsciously contributes to the clients perception of you, the product you're selling and the company you represent. That’s why I like to think carefully about the person I want to be.

You're essentially starting a new relationship and in that relationship I want my significant other's perception of me to tick all of the following boxes:

• I want them to see me as an expert in my field of work

• I want them to see me as someone here to help, not to sell

• I want them to consider me trustworthy

How I act in every part of the sales-process is rooted in this impression of me I want to bring across, because I've found that ultimately it's these values that will help convince a client to work with me.

Let's take Marketing Manager Lisa from Google as a hypothetical prospective client of the Hatchet to understand why these values matter. Lisa wants to advertise the Google search engine to a business audience of managers under 35.

As I convincingly try to tell her running an ad campaign with the Hatchet will be a solution to her problem, she's going to wonder:

• Do you actually understand enough about my industry and business to know whether your product solves my problem (ie. are you an expert)

• Are you just pitching me the highest price product in your catalogue, or are you thinking along with me about my specific needs (ie. are you here to help)

• Can I trust you with my (marketing) budget? Are you going to deliver the results you promise? Are you honest about what is achievable? (ie. are you trustworthy)

I'll give you concrete examples of how I showcase these values in the next sections, but for now, understanding why they matter and being mindful of how you present yourself during your interactions with your client is half the battle.

#2 - Building up your product expertise

I come from the world of consultative selling, which is a fancy term for saying the products we sold were too complex to buy directly off of the shelf.

Consider buying a bike online. You could reach out to the sales manager of VanMoof to inquire about the product, but ultimately it's a straightforward product and the features are all listed on their website for you to review before buying. The simplicity of the product directly affects the scope of the role the sales person has to play.

That process changes as the complexity and the customisation possibilities of your products increase.

Let's take Lisa and the Hatchet as an example again.

Her request to advertise the Google search engine to a young business audience of under 35 is clear as day, but the available variations of solutions I can propose are virtually limitless. We could run ads above my existing posts, we could co-write new posts, she could write guest posts, we could do a webinar together, we could do a combination of all these things at once or we could come up with a schedule of when to run what kind of advertising.

Reality is, I can only consult Lisa on the best possible solution if I can demonstrate:

• a deep understanding of my own portfolio of sales products (i.e. how they work, why they work and the nuances between the various products)

• a deep understanding of the challenges she and her industry peers face (i.e. what problems is she running into that my product could solve)

Mediocre sales people will take their product knowledge from a predefined script or from copying what they hear other sales colleagues say. You can do better:

1. Start by talking to the executing team. If you're selling sponsored posts for a media publication, ask the editorial staff for advice on what works and what doesn't. Selling software? Ask the development team. Selling a webinar? Ask the events team. You get the idea.

2. Get insights directly from the delivery team. The project managers that handle client contact after a deal is signed usually own a wealth of information about the pain and satisfaction points current and previous clients have had with the product in the delivery phase.

3. Lead your first deals from start to finish. Get involved with the delivery of the product and ask to shadow your co-workers in this part of the process. Your clients will value the commitment you have to seeing the deal through and you'll learn so much from experiencing the entire lifecycle of the deal.

4. Interview 10 previous clients about their current challenges in relation to the domain you operate in. You'd be surprised how many people skip this part of the process, yet it's so valuable. You'll develop a deeper understanding of their needs and how your product could play a role in addressing those.

Clients aren't looking to talk to a salesperson, they're looking to talk to a subject matter expert. Make sure you become one.

#3 - Running a problem-led conversation

If you've seen the movie The Wolf of Wall Street you might remember that in two separate scenes Jordan Belfort takes out a pen from his pocket and asks a salesperson to ‘sell him this pen’. It’s a powerful question, because the answer you receive reveals which of the two most common types of sales techniques that person has learned to use: product-led selling or problem-led selling.

Product-led selling is the practice of highlighting features of a product and what makes them desirable. In the case of a pen you might argue that it has excellent grip, lasts longer than other pens and that the diamond version makes you look like a boss. 

People that don’t have any experience selling often choose this method. The flaw in using this technique to structure your conversation is that you demonstrate a lack of knowledge of what your customer feels is important. You’re just shooting off features in the hope that one of them will stick.

The Wolf doesn't do product-led selling, he does problem-led selling. He’ll first ask you (1) what you look for in a pen and (2) whether you have any problems with your current writing mechanism. He will then use that information so he can build the case for why this pen is the solution to solving all of your needs.

Problem-led selling is all about extracting as much information as possible through questioning your prospective buyer first. Only then will you have the proper background information to start talking about your product and make a sale.

The primary goal of a sales conversation should be for you to ask the necessary questions to reveal, at minimum, the answers to the following questions:

• What problem/pain point is your client trying to solve? i.e. Lisa's challenge might be that organic growth of users for the Google search engine is too slow.

• What is your clients’ (marketing/operational) goal? i.e. Lisa might have a personal annual target of attracting 10.000 new users based in Europe to the platform.

• What's held your client back from reaching that target so far? i.e. Has she tried other platforms or competitors and why has that worked or not.

• What would make our partnership successful from the clients perspective? i.e. Which KPI's will Lisa look at to determine whether the partnership is a success.

• Does the client have a budget or a range in mind? i.e. Whether Lisa wants to spend €10K or €100K will have an impact on what you can propose.

It is not uncommon for me to go into a sales conversation with a pre-conceived idea of what product I might be able to sell, only to find out that they need something completely different based on the needs revealed during the meeting.

#4 - Matching solutions to client challenges

What I love most about running a problem-led conversation is that it offers you a natural way to transition from a clients’ pain points to talking about the solution you could offer that best fits that particular challenge. For example:

Lisa: Currently my biggest challenge is that I need more users from the Dutch, UK and Spanish markets. Those audiences have been harder for me to attract so far.

Wytze: That's interesting, because one of the ways we've been really successful reaching smaller markets is by hosting webinars where I interview several local influencers on what helped them progress in their career.

You can even mentally prepare most of these transitions ahead of time since you're likely to find that clients have a pool of similar challenges they face.

In my previous work at TNW we identified six challenges, specific to our company and business, that summarised 90% of all the conversations we had with clients:

1. Client needs help innovating as a company.

2. Client needs help selling their product.

3. Client is looking to attract digital talent.

4. Client wants to generate awareness for their brand.

5. Client needs help growing their tech ecosystem.

6. Client wants to be seen as a thought leader.

We managed to align our entire sales catalogue of more than 100 products with these six challenges, making it easier to identify what product to present as a viable solution when you're having your sales conversations. You should run through this exercise yourself to make it easier for yourself to transition from problem to solution.

An additional benefit is that connecting a clients’ challenge to a solution specifically designed to solve that particular problem is directly going to help you tackle two of those client worries I mentioned in chapter #1.

Do you actually understand enough about my industry and business to know whether your product solves my problem (ie. are you an expert)

Are you just pitching me the highest price product in your catalogue, or are you thinking along with me about my specific needs (ie. are you here to help)

#5 - It's not just what you say, but how you deliver it

Our brains don't just process actions and words; we also process the feelings and intentions of the person speaking them.

Subconsciously we're able to understand what other people are feeling, not because of what they say, but how they say it. That's why it's important not just to focus on what to say or do during a sales conversation, but also how you deliver it.

In his book “Never Split the Difference”, FBI-hostage negotiator Chris Voss explains this concept in the setting of a negotiation:

“Think of it as a kind of involuntary telepathy - each of us in every given moment is signalling to the world around us whether we are ready to play or fight, laugh or cry.

When we radiate warmth and acceptance, conversations just seem to flow. When we enter a room with a level of comfort and enthusiasm, we attract people toward us.”

The most powerful tool in delivery is your voice.

When I start a sales conversation I'll switch to using a positive/happy voice that allows me to sound like a spontaneous, easygoing and warm-hearted person.

Your first minutes at the coffee machine or during introductions are ideal for showcasing this voice. An entertaining anecdote or a light-hearted conversation about anything but work can help you convey this subtle message that says: “I'm relaxed.”

The key is to genuinely relax and smile regularly while you're talking. It'll help bring your counterpart in a positive frame of mind.

When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think more quickly, and are more likely to collaborate and problem-solve instead of fight and resist.

#6 - My favourite structure for a sales conversation

In bullet points and order of sequence.

• Use the first minutes for casual conversation

• Start the conversation by recommending both sides do a short introduction of their company (e.g. the Hatchet helps clients connect to it's audience of young professionals interested in fast-tracking their career).

• Always have multiple variations of this pitch (30 sec - 2 min - 5 min) prepared for yourself and start with yours so you can seamlessly proceed with asking questions after they are done with their introduction.

• Run your problem-led conversation. Find out who they are, what challenges they need to solve and how they would define a successful partnership.

• Suggest and elaborate on solutions that might address their challenges. It's still an explorative phase, but gauge their response to see if you're making sense.

• Ask if they have a budget in mind and suggest to follow up with a proposal within a short timeframe as a next step.

• Thank your prospective client and get to work!