High Earners: Negotiating a job offer in the next 2 weeks? I’ll help you earn more.

I guess this is good news, @ModeledBehavior? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I just published "My 2025 Year in Review: Ten years in"! Hard to believe it's been 10 years, and I'm thrilled that the business has rebounded to where it was before the Big Tech layoffs in 2022. Plus some pickleball stuff and travel pics. https://t.co/c74aYiqfyq

Yep. I have been doing year-in-review posts since I started my business in 2015. I now have a decade of annual reflections on what I was building, changes I was making, strategic direction rumination, etc. Invaluable to me. Just last week, I encouraged a CEO friend to start.

I should also say that @delk and @joshkaufman were instrumental in encouraging me to write Fearless Salary Negotiation and helping me see exactly how to do it. @patio11 inspired the entire project and has vocally supported me over the past decade. Thank you all for everything.

The business has evolved and grown since then as I've moved to exclusively coaching high earners through high-stakes compensation negotiations. I had no idea this is where I was heading when I wrote the book, but I'm grateful for these 10 years. Can't wait to see what's ahead!

So I changed my business from "Author who sells books and courses and occasionally coaches people" to "Salary Negotiation Coach who also sells books and courses." From burning through my runway to running a profitable business pretty much overnight. That was 9.5 years ago.

This was NOT like pushing a boulder up a hill. It was like a snowball rolling downhill. I told my friends that people were asking to hire me, and a few said, "You should do THAT. People want help, and it could be much more lucrative than selling books." They were right.

A month or so later, a friend I had not talked to since middle school messaged me: "I saw you wrote a book about salary negotiation. I have a job offer. Can I hire you to help me negotiate it?" "Sure, let's do it!" My second coaching client. Another good result.

After we finished our work together, I asked her why she had hired me when she had a copy of my book, and her husband had already been through the process. "I just wanted you to tell me exactly what to do to get the best result." A lightbulb went off. 💡

@joshkaufman About six months in, a friend reached out: "I have your book, but can I just hire you to do this for me?" I had coached her husband through a negotiation as a proof of concept while I wrote the book, getting a good result. I said, "Sure! Let's do it!" My first coaching client.

@joshkaufman So I closed it and turned my full-time focus to building a business around my Fearless Salary Negotiation book. At first, that meant trying to find ways to sell maximum copies of the book, creating accompany courses, partnerships, etc. It was like pushing a boulder up a hill.

@joshkaufman I liked building the technology, but not operating the business. That could be a long-term problem since I was running it solo. On the other hand, I LOVED helping people negotiate job offers and navigate career moves. I decided that my heart wasn't in the software business.

@joshkaufman I had about 18 months or runway in the bank because that was the sort of commonly accepted minimum runway to build a software business that might work. But I had hoped to extend that runway by selling the book. What to do?

@joshkaufman But I quickly realized that was totally unrealistic. To sell that many books (and add-ons, courses, etc.), I basically had to build an entire business. There was no way I could build a software business and a business around the book at the same time. I had a choice to make.

I self-published Fearless Salary Negotiation on Amazon on December 8, 2015. I put it in the categories that @joshkaufman recommended and earned a "#1 Best Seller on Amazon" status. Initially, the plan was to sell enough books to pay my bills while I built a software company.

To be honest, I was very lucky. In hindsight, I was naive to think I could just create something like that from scratch. As far as I know, nothing like it existed at the time. But what I created was very good and is still just as useful today as it was then.

It took me another six months or so to finish the book. I rewrote the "How to negotiate your new job offer" chapter three times to make sure I got it right. That was the hardest part because I had to create a universally applicable, step-by-step way negotiate job offers.

He then spent the next hour writing a playbook for me. I didn't have anything to write on, so he gave me one of his branded note cards. I still keep it in my office. I followed this to the letter and it worked better than I had hoped.

(Heavily paraphrasing from memory here...) "Nobody will read that. It's an interesting idea, but you're basically writing a career textbook and it won't sell. But this salary negotiation stuff is interesting and valuable. It's an easy pitch, 'Buy my book and make more money.'"

@AnnieDuke @delk My first idea was called "Take Control of Your Career: A career management guide". BORING. 🥱 I started writing and had ~30% of it written when I fortuitously found myself having pizza with @joshkaufman in Las Vegas. I told him what I was working on and he had some thoughts.