Jack MolisaniOn November the 18th, about 100 technical communicators from all levels of experience watched in awe as Jack Molisani, executive director of Prospring Staffing Network and the LavaCon conference, unleashed the secret to earning a six figure income in spite of the harsh realities of the technical communication field, and hurled Hershey’s kisses into the crowd en masse.
Note the title of his presentation used the word “income”, and not “salary”. A person’s salary is considered to be the amount one makes as an employee of a company, while income can be derived from any number of streams.
His insights grew out of an epiphany he had while comparing the typical career path of a techncial writer to that of an engineer. While an engineer has been known to move up the ranks, eventually becoming the VP or CEO of a high tech firm, a technical writer rarely advances beyond the level of documentation manager. Molisani realized that if he wanted to become the president of a company he would have to start one.
His entry into the self-employed contractor world came upon him as with many in the field. After years of working full-time for a stable employer, he lost his job. After polling the crowd during his introduction, he considered the unemployed among us as “independent consultants between asignments.” It was this attitude that helped him seek out short term contract work, to the point where evetually he had more work than he could handle, so he referred it to his friends.
When he realized he was giving work away, he began subcontracting to his peers rather than turning work away. Through subcontracting he could take on more work than he was able to do by himself, and charge a commission on top of his subcontractor’s fees. This is nothing new. Employement agencies do it all the time. When I took a BCIT course in documentation project management we were advised to charge at the very least a 10 percent surcharge above your subcontractors’ rates.
Other strategies he mentioned included charging by the project and not by the hour, and communicating value rather than expense when negotiating with a prospective employer.
A surprising amount of his material came from one of 16 volumes of L. Ron Hubbard’s encyclopaedia of economic principles. As he displayed different graphs of economic conditions, he explained how many people often maneouvre erroneously. For instance, in an “Emergency” economic climate, the majority of companies set out to reduce expenses, often laying off staff. Molisani says the company would do better to promote their services, to take on the work that others don’t have resources to accommodate. Likewise, in a prosperous economic climate, most companies would invest in new equipment or physical locations, or the owners would buy new homes or vehicles. Instead, Molisani recommends they reduce expenses in order to free up money to pay down debt.
Molisani’s slides go into much further depth than this article suggests. You can download his presentation slides directly from his website. Jack Molisani’s technical communication resources contains several articles and presentations intended to help us to succeed in the field.
You can also view the meeting photo gallery.
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Karen Rempel presents Yoga for Technical Writers
