How To Negotiate Your Salary

You deserve more money from your employer. Here are some tips to get you there.

Hi friends! I’m on a reporting trip right now (I’m working on a podcast project that might see some crossover on this platform—keep an eye out for more). Instead of a long-form piece, I’m sharing the slides from a presentation I gave about asking for more money at work.

But before we get into that…

Last week, I sent out a post where I included a preamble about transparency, with the goal of being open about the number of subscribers I have and how much money I generate annually. Unfortunately, I forgot to update the placeholders (TK) to put in the final numbers. To make up for that oversight, please find the current state of paid subscribers and revenue for Boss Barista below:

Now that we’ve cleared this up, here are the slides for my salary negotiation talk. I’m sharing it as a video file, but you should be able to pause to look at each slide.

I was encouraged to give this talk by Go Fund Bean, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting hourly coffee workers, based on an article I wrote in 2020 about how much money you should ask for when you move jobs. This talk was about quantifying your salary when you work a variable, hourly job based on tips—and how to use that as a baseline when asking for more money:

I have to admit, this talk was weird to give. First of all, there were only two people in attendance—which ended up being awesome, because we got to get into the specifics with one particular attendee about their salary situation.

But what felt especially weird was telling workers to do something employers should be doing already. This talk really made me think about the theoretical ideas I write about here versus the practical implications. Because of course you should have gotten a raise when the cost of living in your city went up, but that likely didn’t happen. Of course you shouldn’t live in fear when talking about money at work, but perhaps you have a scary boss who discourages any discussions of pay. It’s those things we should be solving—but in practical terms, workers need knowledge now to make their own situations better. Surviving under capitalism is weird.

New episode next week! See ya then, friends!