TO: Every W-2 employee who's ever gotten a raise and felt insulted by it
FROM: A guy defending a 7% raise to a $23/hour employee like he's asking for a company car
RE: Why your ceiling is always someone else's decision
This week I spent more energy fighting for a raise than I did running my actual business.
Not my raise. A raise for someone on my team making $23 an hour in California. I proposed 7%. The budget planned for 3.4%. We are tracking toward record profit next year. I built the raise into that plan. I submitted a written justification in the HR tool explaining exactly why this person deserved it and why the business could support it.
The pushback came anyway. From HR. From senior leadership. Not because the logic was wrong. Not because the business couldn't carry it. Because the number was above the budgeted amount. That was it. That was the whole argument. You went above the line, so we're questioning it. The justification I wrote might as well have gone into a void.
I've been here before. Not on this side of the conversation — on the other side.
About six years ago, my first year as VP and GM of my division, I took the business from 16% operating income to 20%. Four points. In one year. In a business that had been running flat for a long time. I thought that was the kind of performance that changes a conversation. And it did change a conversation — just not the one I expected.
I got a 5% raise. And I found out about it in an email from HR. Not from my boss. Not in a sit-down conversation where someone looked me in the eye and acknowledged what had just happened. An email. From HR.
That was the moment the cap became real to me. Not a number on a spreadsheet — a feeling. The realization that no matter what I generated, I was operating inside a system that had already decided what I was worth, and the system wasn't going to bend for one good year, or two good years, or a track record. The system was going to do what systems do: apply the rule evenly, protect the budget, and move on to the next item.
I'm not bitter about it anymore. I actually think about that moment a lot now, but differently. As information. It told me something true about how corporations work that I needed to know — the sooner the better. Your performance and your reward are connected, but they are not the same thing. There's a layer in between, and that layer is made of budget cycles, approval chains, HR policy, and what someone two levels above you is comfortable signing off on. You don't control that layer. You never will.
So this week, while I'm fighting for someone else's 7%, I'm also back in due diligence on a franchise acquisition.
Same industry as the business I already operate — commercial and residential cleaning. I've been looking at this one for a while. The financials are better than they were a year ago, the revenue base is solid with strong recurring accounts, and the operations are being run inefficiently. That last part isn't a red flag to me. It's the opportunity. Thirty years of operations experience tells me exactly what inefficient looks like and exactly what it costs a business that could otherwise be printing cash.
This week I've been scrubbing P&L statements and bank data, looking for trends, looking for flags, building the list of questions I want answered before I go any further. I've already spoken with the current owner and with the franchise itself. Next week I sit down with the franchise again to re-engage formally. They want me to buy this business. Not because they're desperate to move it — because they can see what an operator like me does for their brand overall. That matters to me. It tells me the unit economics are real and the people at the top of the system understand what good looks like.
Maybe this one falls through like the last deal did. I've been here before too. But I'm going in with cleaner eyes this time, better questions, and a little more scar tissue.
Here's what I want to leave you with, because I think about this reader — the one still in their W-2, still performing, still waiting for the system to recognize what they're worth. That recognition might come. But it will always come through the filter of what the system can afford, what precedent it sets, what HR is comfortable approving. Your ceiling isn't your performance. Your ceiling is someone else's budget and someone else's comfort level.
Ownership doesn't fix everything. But it does collapse that layer. When you own the business, your judgment and your reward finally occupy the same space. You make the call. You live with the outcome. Nobody sends you an email.
Time to take action
Sean