Bonus Episode: How Much is Enough?

[Music] Welcome to the Eurene Global in Conversation Podcast, where we talk about the future of Fine Wine. I am Paulin Vigard, Director of Eurene Global, and in the series we bring you conversation with some of the most interesting and influential figures in and around the world of Fine Wine. To talk about how the world is changing, how these changes impact the production, distribution and consumption of Fine Wine, and how that create risks to be managed, and opportunity to be seized. [Music] This month, I took a trip down to memory lane and listened to some of our very, very, very first podcast episodes. We started recording podcast back in April 2020, just days after lockdown began in the UK and across much of Europe. And at the time, we were recording over Zoom and had no podcast producer. So needless to say, the sound quality was terrible, to say the least. But our producer, Gillian, can work his sound magic now, which is fantastic, because this very first conversation were illuminating. And listening back, I realised I had forgotten just how interesting there were, how much they stretch my thinking, and how these insights are still relevant today. So in honour of Women's History Month, I'm pleased to share a revisited edition of a conversation we first had in June 2021, during the Bata Nash Forum, a US-based initiative dedicated to advancing women in the wine industry. Bata Nash is still going strong and doing amazing work today. So go and check them out. I'll put all the link in the show notes. And in this conversation, we speak with Jordan Cell, who at the time was the founder and director of 81 Sense, a company that helped women negotiate the contracts in the Silicon Valley. She's drawn by no other than Felicity Carter, who would become a reneglobal editorial director just a few months after this recording. And together we addressed a deceitively simple question, how much is enough? We talk about gender pay gaps, negotiation skills, and what happens when a traditionally opaque industry starts talking openly about money. This conversation had a lasting impact at Arrini. It eventually led us to explore the deeper routes of the wine world's persistent lack of profitability and the role that education might play in changing that. And the result of this in-depth study was our report, rethinking education, shaping the future of the trade, which you can find on our website at Arrini.global. But now, back to the conversation. Jordan, Felicity, thank you so much for being with us today. So, Jordan, your job is to help candidates evaluate the job offer they just had. So, they work in tech, they receive a work offer, and you look at that offer and tell them, you know, with the benchmark, with the market, what could potentially be different and should they want to negotiate what kind of lever could they pull. And you have a special focus on women in BIPOC. And the name of your company, 81 Cent, is because women still earn 81 cents for every dollar that men earn on average. And the statistics looks even more dismissal when you consider race and underrepresented, you know, gender identities. So, I guess my first question for you, Jordan, is why? I mean, why do we still have those big gender gaps that remains in the workplace? Thanks so much, Pauline, and for everyone for joining. It was definitely exciting to see everyone kind of like Russian from the waiting room. So, happy to be here. And obviously, this is one of my favorite topics to talk about, but also one that is complex and frustrating and emotional. But hopefully we can kind of all work through it together. To the question of why pay gaps exist, I wish I had like a clear concise answer I could give. You know, sadly, there's not just one reason. There are several and I'll kind of talk through a few. Negotiation certainly does play a role. For example, when you're thinking about gender, men tend to negotiate three times more frequently than women. And there's lots of reasons behind this. One example is that sort of women are necessarily taught that they can negotiate or talk that and are taught that it is potentially, you know, not proper or not professional to talk about money. One of my, I think the most illustrative examples of this is when asked to kind of compare negotiation to another activity in life, a majority of men and they were given like a few options, a majority of men compared negotiating to like playing a game, playing a baseball game, I think it was and a majority of women compared it to going to the dentist. So like very different sort of outlooks on kind of what that experience is of negotiating. Of course, how people are perceived in the negotiation process varies as well. You know, women and people of color are not expected to negotiate as aggressively as men, as white men. And so what you sort of receive on the other side of the table can be different. You know, apart from negotiation, there's also differences in how individuals are received throughout the entire interview process, which could impact, you know, what sort of level you get brought in at and your subsequent, you know, promotion and raise opportunities. And then of course, there's sort of the idea that while workforce is tend to look kind of more diverse, more inclusive kind of earlier in careers. As you see individuals become more senior, you see the ranks become less and less diverse, as you know, women tend to drop out of the workforce or, you know, certain individuals are given the same promotion and raise opportunities that others are. So those are all of some of the many factors that kind of need to like, why there are gaps. And when we talk about the number like 81 cents, they're basically averaging all men who are working against the average for all women who are working. So that kind of, you see that those differences in levels and seniority kind of play a role there too. And then of course, as you mentioned, Pauline, like the stats look even more dismal when you bring kind of race into the equation. Like black women, for example, are in 63 cents on the dollar. And then black women earn under 60 cents, I believe it's 52 cents on the dollar. So there's certainly no shortage of like work to be done and no shortage of conversations to be had around the stock. Yes. And as we also mentioned when we were prepping for this conversation, it's kind of a vicious circle as well because when you have someone who looks like you, who's been to the same school, who's always be in place in the company, then you can lie as liais with them and ask them how much they, you know, how much they make. You've got someone in the inside, something like this that you can share experience with and you can exchange on how much money they earn and how much you should ask for. Which is something that you might not have when you're a woman or an underrepresented community. So they can't date that you help Jordan. What do they need or what do they lack of the most? Is it confidence? Is it skills? Is it information? What's the first thing you work on with them? All of the above. I find that they're like confidence and information really go hand in hand. So if you're trying to negotiate and you don't have a sense of market rates, you don't have a sense of data. And then that's really going to impact your confidence. And so that's really kind of where we focus in on 81 cents is trying to get candidates. The information they need and from people who are extremely credible in their industry. And we see that that kind of in turn leads to an increase of confidence. But I would say for the candidates we support, the absolute hardest part is like the ask and giving themselves permission to ask, feeling that it's okay to ask. You know, it's actually not that hard to do. There's sort of like a formula like way that you can approach the negotiations. Very like the odds are very high. And if you just ask the question, even if you don't do a great job of asking it, even if you don't have data that you're likely going to see some increase. But so many people just get totally terrified during that process. And you know, it's really messed up. It's like not something that we're taught how to do in school. But it is like this very fundamental piece of professional life that is key to you kind of increasing your earning power. And also we see that there's lots of research that shows that when you negotiate, just your varying first job out of school, for example, that that could actually on its own lead to a million dollar difference in lifetime earnings because you not only are like making more money. So you have more money to invest. But then your promotion is typically a percentage of your earnings. So your next pay increases higher compounding interest. All of that like that alone is enough to kind of separate candidates by over a million dollars. Wow, that's really huge. And I like getting the permission to ask and also accepting to be rejected. But we'll talk about this maybe a bit later when we'll go a bit deeper on negotiation and what it takes to negotiate. But Felicity building on this and building on what Jordan says for employees and why they are gaps. You want to talk to me and that really stick with me because for so many months and I keep thinking about it. But one of the you want to tell me that one of the biggest mistake we let freelancers in wine do is that they consider themselves as wine people first and not seeing themselves as journalists or communicators or educator first. Could you elaborate a bit on this please? - Yeah, so where were the course of my career? I haven't just reported on wine, I've also reported on things like the arts as well. Is the best way to get yourself stuck in a really poor paid position is to be in love with this thing. What I'm trying to say is a lot of people are so grateful to be in wine that they don't stop and think of themselves as business people or as freelancers. In fact, last, and this is a really important distinction. So in 2019, I happened to be involved in a conversation about the number of people who were working for free in the wine industry and the level of volunteering that was expected. And I was at the time I was editor of the business magazine, so I thought, oh, this is a really great topic for business article. Let's look at just what the expectations are around working for free in the wine industry. So I put a call out for people to tell me their stories and I was absolutely inundated. I got more than 125 people within 24 hours contacting me both mainly from the UK and the US and a little bit from other countries as well. And the thing that I didn't go ahead with the article because the thing that I discovered wasn't that the wine trade was demanding that people work for free or that people volunteer. It was at the level of small business skill in the wine industry was extremely low that people were accepting jobs or they were accepting things without thinking along the lines of things like, can I afford to do this? What's this going to cost me if I do it? What will it contribute to my career? And the way too many people were thinking, I'm so honored to have this opportunity or I should do it because it's part of my social life. And that's another thing, not being able to distinguish the difference between your social life and your work life. And of course the wine trade is very convivial. You go out and you drink together, you spend a lot of time together. And so there's this collapse of the understanding that you're actually here to be employed or as a business. And that distinction between being social and being business like is really costing people, it's literally costing people money. So what I found is that because people felt very friendly towards people and then been out drinking with them and stuff, they weren't able to negotiate what they needed. And so people would accept jobs without, they'd accept things like they'd agree to do tastings. But they wouldn't factor in how long it took them to drive to the place, they wouldn't factor in how whether they needed to stay overnight, they wouldn't factor in the preparation time, don't simply ask for two hours worth of pay. And then they were sort of shocked and surprised at the end to discover that actually they weren't making any money at all. So I think one of the first things is the small business skills. If you are going to go out as a freelancer, you have to think of yourself primarily as a business person and learn what is social life and what's not. But the other thing that I saw over and over again was women particularly agreeing to do something because they felt they were team players if they did it. A lot of men were just, I spoke to a lot of men as well. A lot of men would just walk away. They'd go, "No, I can't afford to work for that. No, I'm not going to accept that money. No, that rate's not good." And they would walk away. Whereas women would try and make it work. They would feel like, "Well, I understand their point of view. I understand that they don't have a lot of money. I understand that they are this, this, this. Whereas men don't think like that at all. They go, "What if you can't afford it? You can't afford it. You can't afford to hire me." And they walk away. And that walking away is really important in being able to command a market price. And one of the other things I should say that I've seen a lot over my career is that women particularly are very diligent. And I think it's because at school, if you look at schools, boys often don't perform very well at school because they're restless and they don't want to do stuff and whatever. And girls teach, it's really love girls because girls sit still and they do their homework and so all the way through school, girls are rewarded for being diligent. They may even literally get prizes at the end of school. And then they go to university and they get great marks and they might get prizes again. And so what happens is they go into the workforce and they have this pattern of be quiet, working really hard and waiting for the prize. And when you're in the workspace, the prize never comes. The work for being diligent and competent and not speaking up, is they give you more work to do? Whereas guys have learned that they don't have to do the things that they don't want to do, that they can still kind of skate through on those things and concentrate on the things they're really good at. And so what I've seen is over and over and over, women get overwhelmed with work because they're being kind of punished for clear competency. And then they get to middle management and I've seen so many women who refuse to take promotions because they think, well, every time I go up the ladder, all it happens is I get way more work and I don't get to see my kids. So if I take this promotion, then life's going to be miserable. Without realizing it's when you get to the top that life becomes right because now you're in control of your own diary or in control of your own budget. You can delegate the things that you don't like to other people. So this consequence of being diligent and taking on lots of work really kills women when there comes a point where they just burnt out on their sickle bit and they don't get to the thing that they've worked towards. - Well, that's certainly rings a lot of bells with me at so many different levels. Jordan, one of the questions that we had from the audience before the session, we're talking about negotiation today, but we're also talking about negotiating in 2021 when it's been such a hard year for so many people. So my question is, can you negotiate in 2021? I mean, this year in particular, can you and should you with the same kind of strength and expectation when so many companies are not doing that well or have been suffering for quite a while? - Yes, definitely. And just to sort of echo what Flussi was saying, I think a lot of times, women view negotiations very emotionally, very personally. Like I know the people that I'm working for, I'm part of their family. I don't wanna put pressure on them by asking for more money. I don't want to, we're all a team here and men generalization, but probably a true one, tends to view it much more rationally. I'm just like, this is business, this is my livelihood. And so therefore I'm going to ask for more money. And so what I worry about with a year like the one that we've been having is that women are the ones who are like, you know what, it's been tough for everyone. I'm not gonna ask, we're all struggling here. Like I don't wanna impose on anyone. I don't wanna put a burden on kind of these, these business owners and things like that. And while women may be doing that, like men often certainly aren't. And so I guess to answer the question directly, like yes, you can still negotiate. The labor market's are super weird right now, but there's a ton of demand. There's certainly short supply for talent in a lot of industries. And that should benefit all employees and all candidates. And so you should absolutely ask. It doesn't mean you should be like insensitive to the bigger picture. I think if anything, try to use it to your advantage, you know, is there an opportunity to negotiate for a higher potential bonus if you kind of help the company kind of whether the storm can get out on the other side? What can you learn from everything that's happened from the past year and kind of use it to your advantage? If the company is saying, you know, we're tight on cash then how can you set up the structure so that it ends up being really advantageous for you in, you know, six months from now or something like that? And Georgian, there's something that you advise your candidate to do to acquire that negotiation mindset, some exercise that you advise them to include in their preparation. And that actually includes getting used to being rejected, for example, and learning that you will survive even if people can send no to you. I found that quite fascinating. Can you tell us a bit more about this and how those kind of mental preparation and real life experience can help you be at a better place when you go for a negotiation, when you enter that room? Definitely. So there's sort of a famous TED talk about kind of getting used to rejection and what this person does in the TED talk is they decide to go out and they get rejected, I think it's every day for a year. And they go out and they ask people for wild things, you know, they go up to someone on the street and say like, can I have your cell phone? Or they went to a university and walked up to the dean. And was like, can I teach a class here after never having met the dean? And just every day they went out and they asked for something kind of ludicrous. And every day, certainly, they got many knows. And within a few weeks, rejection didn't sting anymore. And then interestingly, some of the things they started asking for happened to come true. So they asked that dean three more times. And finally, the dean was like, who are you? What's your deal? Like, why are you not afraid of rejection? And like, come in and like teach a seminar on this. And so they like did end up getting what they wanted. And so it's sort of an extreme example, but this idea of like trying to get yourself sort of comfortable with what might happen, I think is really important. I mean, my favorite kind of mindset shift I like to tell people is thinking about it as cost benefit. So yes, these conversations are super uncomfortable. I mean, the whole reason I started 81 cents is because I don't like confrontation. And I was bad at negotiation. And I just thought that it was ridiculous that after having a lot of education and opportunity that this was still so painful. But so one of the things I like to think about is yes, these conversations are terrible. Maybe it's a 20, 30, 40 minute conversation. But what's the potential upside? If you negotiate and you get an increase, like you could be making $5,000, $10,000, $30,000 more at the end of it. So I just-- I started to think then about the hourly rate and what industry, I mean, I'm not aware of a legal or a legal industry where your hourly rate could be like $30,000. That's sort of what I like to think about. Yes, this is uncomfortable, but I have to do it because if I could make $10,000 for doing something uncomfortable, most likely I would do it. Again, I really like that comparison with being in the mindset of going to the dentist for women or being in the mindset of playing a game because actually when you play, you might lose, actually you lose more often than you win most of the time. I mean, everyone who's doing sports, I think I'm not the only one in the audience to play sports. And that's something that you learn. You can accept to lose a game and you still learn a lot from that defeat. So why shouldn't you expect to lose in the negotiation as well? That's something that you can digest. Sorry, one more thing to add to it that you reminded me of is a lot of times, like I'll tell people to think about, if your friend came to you and they weren't negotiating, like what sort of advice would you give them? And we think very differently, women in particular think very differently when it comes to ourself versus when it comes to thinking about others. And so anything you can do to kind of like put yourself in someone else's shoes and think about like if someone came up to me and asked for advice, what would I tell them? I would tell them to negotiate, I would tell them to negotiate. You worth it. Yeah. So kind of reminding ourselves of that. And then another thing that tends to work well for women is thinking about like what will you do with that increase in money? You know, women are tend to be caretakers, providers. We think about others. So if you had $15,000 more dollars, like what would that mean for your family? What would that mean for the people you love and care about? Like I hate that we have to think that way. I don't like it. I wish that we just felt good enough to just be like I should make more money. So like yeah, I'm gonna make more money. Sorry for her scene. But you know oftentimes like it takes us thinking about how we're going to help others, how we're going to help the world. And then that starts to feel more motivating. Hey listeners, just interrupting the conversation for a few seconds. First, to let you know how grateful we are that you are listening to this episode. Thank you so much. And also to kindly ask you to subscribe to our podcast channel on whatever platform you are listening this episode on and to give us a cool rating. It's such an easy way to support us and it really makes all the difference. Thank you. Now back to our conversation. We also had question when we prep the conversation. We had a question from the audience about the importance of the industry that you in and that the impact of that on the negotiation because you know, Jordan you work in tech and it's a bit like finance. We're like oh so much money so big salaries but we in the wine industry we're in a passion industry and for us in particular it also means that we are dealing with a lot of smaller players that have lower margins, lower budgets. So do we have to consider this negotiation and to have a different negotiation because of the industry that we're in? Do we need to approach things differently in wine versus in tech of all finance for example? I'll jump into that. The answer is yes and no. So first of all, the most important thing is to get information. Things cost what they cost and if you're capable of doing a job and earning more money on the open market then you're donating money to the company if you allow them to underpay you. That's really, really important to know that you may be subsidising their company if you're if you're worth something in you know if you could take your skills to the open market in another industry earn 40 or 50 thousand dollars more than you're earning a small winery then you should you should realise that you're donating 40 thousand dollars to that winery and as soon as you realise that you think well that changes the equation do you want to donate that much money? Do you want to spend you know every year donating that money to a small business however much you like them? So first of all number one is this ability to walk away is to actually say you know what if you love wine you might be better off going and earning more money and using the extra money to buy more wine then subsidising the industry but secondly quite often all you need to do is just to show your value. I can't tell you how many times that people have got really angry at upset because they're underpaid and the employer had no idea about it they literally had no idea because the person never said anything and when and when somebody went in and they said look I've done this for you if you can show that you're making money for them is another thing if you said you know I've increased revenue by this quite often people will come to the party and give you extra money and if they can't give you extra money then think about asking for something else instead like you know if you're in the wine industry because you love wine can they you know can you take part of your salary and something else in cases of wine or in time off or whatever but the most important thing is to bench mark where you are in the open market and to realise that if you can earn a lot more money than somewhere else and that is money that you are donating to the company you work for and then you have to think about whether you really want to do that or not. Yes and again bench mark with someone else which which is not in the wine world so that you've got an idea of what's happening out there and yeah I like I like your point of being ready to demonstrate your worth we also had and and thank you by the way for too many of you who send us the stories ahead of of this and the questions ahead of this and we had a testimony of someone that was on the employer side and and actually told us well there's so many times people are coming to me to ask for a raise but they're not prepared they can't demonstrate how much they're allowing the company to make more and if I can't see that then there's literally no way even if I lag them that I can give them the rights they want because I'm in charge of making more money for the company and that's that's what I need to do and and she said that you know that person who send us the testimony well when a negotiation is actually prepared when the candidate is here demonstrating how much they've helped us grow financially then it usually works and so I thought that was a very powerful piece of advice as well and an experience tells us that people still come not prepared to the negotiation room and there's also been a question that I've heard so many times and and that's particularly a question for you Felicity because there's so many freelancers out there in the audience today but also in the wine world when it comes to communication education sometimes even marketing design there's a lot of freelancers there as as an industry and we talked about how you know we talked about the lack of business skills and also how it could be a bit more difficult for freelancer to benchmark and to know how much other people are making so that they can know how much they should ask because it's kind of a grey area and having context and comparison can be difficult and the questions that I've heard so many times is how much is enough how much should I ask when I do you know when I charge for a webinar when I run an education series what kind of criteria should I use to draft my quote when I'm a freelancer it's always it's always what you've got to think of as first is how much is it costing you to do that and why are you doing it so there's only three reasons why you should ever do something one because you're making good money from it two because that thing is going to be important for building up career and you can't overlook that sometimes it's worth doing things for free for that reason or the other is just because you really want to because you just in love with the thing and you want to do it and you've got to leave you've got to leave room for some of that in your life as well but if you're doing it because you need the money then you don't ask how much they can pay you you ask what it is going to cost you if you if you're running a freelance business and you you look at how much work you've got to do is it going to cost you time and therefore money away from your other things to do this and that's your rate I will say though what's happening in so I know most about freelance writing is outside of wine writers what's happening in the larger wine the larger journalists and community at the moment is people are starting to come together and compare rates there's lots of people putting together um French sheets about who pays what in other areas there's this huge sort of Christ transparency happening um and and actually that's one of the best things you can do is to band together with other freelancers and be really open and honest about what you're being paid I think the master of wine are actually doing this they've got a Facebook page where they compare what they're earning from from different things and and the act of doing that is actually beginning to raise rates for some of them because some of them didn't realise they were underpaid so so transparency is it just finding out what other people are paying it's also telling each other how much people are getting paid yeah and one of those things that I've started thinking also and advising to some of the people around me is you know you've got to the level three of the diploma you might want to go to level four or you know to the mw course um but maybe before you do that uh you want to get a business degree if you don't have anything in your curriculum before uh that will help you work on your entrepreneurship skills um and could be interesting you know an interesting way to balance how much we know about wine and how much we know about making making money selling wine, which is quite different. But there's also a question that I've been asking myself for both of you Jordan and Felicity, is what we've seen over the last 18 months is people are working remotely. So they are working from lots of different places. They can be in the countryside, versus urban centers where they were before. Or they can also have moved to cheaper country where life is more affordable than they can work for five dollars and an hour because that covers all the expenses for the day or the week. So how do companies, maybe Jordan, for you first, how do companies deal with that rise of working remotely? And how do you make sure that you pay people fairly when their economic context within one team can be very different? - Yeah, it's a great question. I'd say it's definitely still early days in a little bit of the wild, wild west when it comes to companies thinking about how to pay talent remotely. There's sort of two main frameworks that I've heard talked about. One is cost of living. So how much does it cost to live somewhere? And you obviously want to make sure that when you're bringing on employees that they can afford to live where they live. And that's different, obviously, if you live in San Francisco versus a small town in the Midwest. And then there's cost of talent. And so cost of talent is not always lined up with cost of living. They tend to be somewhat correlated, but there are places where you can live pretty cheaply where talent is actually expensive and the inverse is true as well. So I think I see most companies thinking about some hybrid where they're taking into consideration both the cost of talent and both the cost of living to create their offers. And obviously, as a candidate, you want to be in a place where the cost of living is low and the cost of talent is high because then you get to capture that difference. But very few people think about living that rationally. Most people want to live where they want to live. They want to live where their families are. And so I think what's important to understand is what is your cost of living. I mean, I see candidates make this mistake all the time. They're living in a smaller town, earning a certain amount. They get an offer to move to San Francisco, for example. That offers 40% higher than what they're earning today. They're excited about what a massive increase. But then they get there and they realize like they're actually taking home less at the end of the day because the cost of living is so much more. So I think one of the best things you can do is make yourself very, very aware of what those costs of cost of living differences are. And I think that this is where, sort of for those conversations and transparency comes into play. There was very awesome conversation in the chat about what would it look like to be transparent with other freelancers in the line industry. And I mean, this is something that we're really passionate about at 81 cents. And I'd say those conversations are very awkward for people to have. It's very awkward to say, what are you earning? But there's a couple of things that I just wanted to quickly share that I think can make those conversations a little bit easier. One is you can start by acknowledging that it's awkward. You can say, you know, like, I know it's uncomfortable to talk about money, but it's important. Let's do it. You can talk about sort of the mission piece and like kind of connect it to the bigger cost. Why is it important that we talk about pay? Why is it important that we're transparent? You can share first that tends to make other people more comfortable. And then instead of saying, like, what do you or and you can say, like, can you give me a sense of what others are charging for this sort of work or what others in similar positions are earning. And usually people will just end up telling you what they're earning, but it's just a little bit less direct than like, what do you-- what kind of money do you make? If it is to say I'm kind of questions for you, you're based in Europe and you're from Australia originally and you work a lot with the US. And I mean, in the wine world, when you speak English, you can work from different countries and from different continents. How does that work? Do money cross borders the same way? Do European people charge the same way? You know, this is a really important point. If you're going to work internationally, you really have to know about something called p-p-p-p-p purchasing power parity. So something that might seem like a lower wage overseas that-- or a job that's overseas that seems less money may actually be more money when the local cost of living is factored into it. And likewise, I've seen people in horrible situations for the reason that Jordan was talking about that they've accepted overseas postings within their company or they've accepted overseas jobs and they haven't understood what the local cost of living is or the local taxes that will kill you. When you're talking about freelance work, you do have to be aware of p-p-p functions as well when you're doing contract rates for other people. That there are some countries that will just pay you less money, but it might be worth doing for the prestige of the contacts. So it always comes down to this, why are you doing this thing? Where does it fit in your-- is it a love job? Is it a career booster or is it money? And you have to ask yourself that. Yeah, and if it's a career booster move, then you might want to be ready to build on this and to be ready when you do a wine tasting for free. But then being ready with your business guard, being ready to contact people after that, being ready to have enough room to follow up all of that, because I've seen so many times people coming up doing these things for free and just expecting new business to turn up and never contacting, never working on those contacts. And then you lose time and resource as well because of that. Twice in my life, I've actually-- for salary jobs, twice in my life, I've actually accepted less money to go to a job, because I knew that that job was going to be a really good career move. And I've never regretted that. But I was very clear about why I was doing it. The other thing that I really know, and I notice this a lot as an editor, there's how many people are really cavalier about money. Even people who really need money, a lot of righteous, are really-- they think that if they don't get paid, and like if the money does the turn up, they don't come and check out where the money has gone, because they think, well, this person will get upset. And then they won't give me any more work. It was an actual fact quite often if the money didn't turn up, it's because something went wrong somewhere. And it's important to check. But people feel like the number of people who don't chase up payments really astounds me. It's really important. And if you're doing free arts work for somebody who's consistently not paying you, then don't do any more work for them and get it in writing and take them to small claims court. That's the other thing. That things go wrong. But there were lots of among people to hold people to account for contracts that they've signed is quite incredible. Don't let people steal from you, which is what it is when people don't pay their invoices. Unless they've come to you and said, we've got a business problem and whatever can we hold off, which is a different matter. But if somebody just takes your labor and services and doesn't pay the bill, take them to small claims court. Make, you know, do it. Don't let it go. Think of them on Twitter. All right. I think it's time for our last big question. But I mean, that's a very big question because it's, is transparency a good thing? Should we advocate for more transparency when it comes to money, when it comes to salary? Is there any risks of having more transparency and any downsides? And so if I were to rephrase this, maybe another question could be, what do you think more financial transparency can bring to the wine world? So question is for both of you, Jordan and Felicity. I can jump in here. I'm a huge proponent of transparency. I think transparency almost always benefits candidates. And a lot of employers are very opposed to it. The most significant argument I've heard is that, oh, well, if people find out what other people are making and they don't have that context for why, they don't understand differences and experience differences and location that they'll jump to the wrong conclusions. I think candidates are smart enough to figure that out. I think people don't want to necessarily get mad at their employers. They know and wants to feel like they're being underpaid. If you find out that someone's earning more, then you, the questions that come up are why, how did this happen? And you start digging and maybe you get answers that you're satisfied with. And it feels OK. And maybe you don't. And then you ask for more money. But I think information asymmetry, like not having enough information available to candidates, really just benefits employers. And at the end of the day, it's like it's a business transaction. And candidates are-- they provide the supply. And businesses are in the business of trying to see how low they can pay people as ethical or as moral. And employer may be if they can get away with paying you less, most often they're going to try to. And I think that as candidates, having more information out there, only benefits us. And it's not just like, oh, I'm hearing numbers and that informs what rate I'm going to ask. But just having conversations with other people in the industry talking about pay is very personal. And so you're going to end up more deeply connecting with others. You're going to learn more about what work people are doing. You're going to build stronger connections in other parts of the industry that might help you down the line. And so I'm a huge proponent of transparency. When it comes to freelance, I think transparency is good in a way. People sharing information. But you also have to realize there are lots of situations where the price is fixed and you can't negotiate. So for example, if you're a freelance journalist, at the moment working with digital publications, you'll get probably 50 cents a word, maybe up to a dollar a word if you're wearing for the New York Times and good luck trying to negotiate that up. You've got no chance of doing it. So what you need is you need a sense of what you can afford to work for. And that's where small business skills come into actually sort of instead of trying to get more money out of the source is to actually think to yourself, can I afford to work for them? What's in it for me? And that's a really, really big question. And for that, people have had a very good sense of this is if you're working for yourself as small business. Number one is to know how to use spreadsheets and number two is to know what your actually out what your hourly rate is and whether you can afford to do the work or not. And on that, well, thank you so much, Jordan and Felicity. I for one learned a lot preparing that conversation with you. So I hope that would be the same thing for our audience. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to this episode of A Rene Global in Conversation. A Rene Global is a think tank dedicated to the future of fine wine and when we're not podcasting, we publishing reports, white papers, articles and marketing sites. So if you are interested in the global conversation around fine wine and what the future holds in terms of production, distribution and consumption, add over to our website www.rene.global. Let's get AR EMI and subscribe to our newsletter for all the links in the show notes because whether you are producing or selling fine wine, you need to know what's happening in the world so you can make informed decisions. Until next time, cheers!