How much, love?

The first card came out so lovely she thought about keeping it.

She had some flowers that had spent months dozing between the pages of a book, on recycled paper that had once been a newspaper and still let you make out the story, nothing new, of a man in a tie, the kind who drinks whisky at the club, who had helped himself to some public funds, next to an underwear advert and a gentleman promising to bring back your lost love or your money back. On top of that, the calligraphy she had learned during a summer holiday so longed-for that at some point it turned dull and opened the door to the hobby.

—I’m going to start my own business. I’m going to sell personalised cards, because it’s awful when someone gives you a generic card on a special day, industrial, soulless. I’m going to give people something that says “this is me and you matter to me”. But how much do I sell them for? And who’s going to buy them? I could tell my friends, but they’re even more broke than I am. Maybe my aunts, but they only spend money on wool and gossip magazines. I know: I’ll post how I make them on Instagram, and whoever fancies one, well, I’ll sell them one. But for how much? Is thirty thousand pesos too expensive? Hmm, yes, at that price you’d want it to come with a marriage proposal. What if I charge five thousand? No, that’s practically what it costs me to make one. I know: I’ll set myself a salary goal and work out how many I need to sell. Paper, ink, brushes, each card costs me about four thousand five hundred. I’ve got my student loan, I owe my aunt for some stuff I bought from her and I want to move out soon, so a completely reasonable figure would be five little millions. We multiply here, divide there, take the second derivative, so university is good for something, and yes: about one thousand two hundred cards a month. Which is forty a day. Perfect. Sums done, business up and running, and all the energy in the world. Let’s film the first video for social media. Although I’m a bit hungry, and I have to take Lulú out, and it’s a bit grey today, and I need good light if I’m going to be a professional influencer. I’ll start tomorrow.

What she doesn’t know yet, and I won’t be the one to tell her before the video, is that with five hundred pesos of profit per card those twelve hundred leave her six hundred thousand pesos. To reach the five little millions she would have to sell ten thousand. About three hundred and thirty a day. Lulú won’t get a walk until 2031.

The business dreams of this young arts-and-crafts hopeful end up in limbo, not out of laziness, well, a bit, but because she has no idea what her work is worth. And I would love to laugh at her with all due authority. I can’t.

When I was in my last terms at university, a friend, or someone I considered one, offered me a deal. I was to install, run and, in general, get a virtual learning platform up and going for a company. It sounded simple. I was a student, I didn’t have my degree yet, and the fee seemed fair for someone still scraping together coins for an empanada, photocopies and the occasional spiked drink with the young lady who, in those days, took up a good part of my thoughts. Half a million pesos. “I’ll have this done in a week, easy.”

The week became two, then three, and then four months. Without boring you with programming details, what they were asking me to do was fit a lorry engine into the chassis of a Renault 4, and have it run like a brand-new Mercedes, smooth as silk. The server didn’t work. Every time I asked the company’s “engineer” something, he looked at me as though I were speaking Sanskrit. Spoiler: I never managed the installation. I ended up letting the project go, let’s put it that way so I don’t have to say I ran off, in tears, without looking back.

My dear friend never spoke to me again.

Some time later I understood three things. First, that what I was being paid was peanuts next to what that person had charged the company. The only person in that story who knew what my work was worth was the one who had offered it to me, and they had no reason to tell me. Second, and this one was on me, that I accepted without asking anything: what server there was, who managed it, what happened if things didn’t work. I put a price on something I hadn’t even looked at. And third, that I can’t blame anyone for wanting to do business. My friend charged what they thought it was worth. I charged what I thought I was worth. We were both right, and that is what still stings.

Then comes the long-awaited degree, and with it the line “right, world, brace yourself, I’ve arrived”, which lasts exactly as long as it takes to say, because the world wasn’t waiting for you to start turning. But still, utterly convinced that you are now a real professional because a piece of paper with gold seals says so, you set off in search of the dream job: the one where they pay you to think, with a permanent contract, eight weeks’ holiday, a long-service bonus and a hamper at Christmas. And reality answers you to your face: “Oi, sunshine, want success? Join the queue.” You hop from here to there with one idea in your head, “in the next job they’ll finally value me”, and in the distance someone shouts: “Stop dreaming, you’re here to work!”

Over the years you learn to do the sums. What you don’t learn so easily is to say them out loud.

You sit down with a potential client. You talk for almost an hour. You tell them about your experience, the cases, what you could achieve in their company, and you paint some beautiful results. The man nods, takes notes, gets excited. And then he drops the bomb, no anaesthetic:

—Brilliant. And how much would you charge me to do that here?

The odd thing is that you’d spent an hour promising results with all the confidence in the world, and all it takes is a question about price for you to forget how to talk. The firm posture turns into stammering. That first there would need to be a diagnosis, that it depends on the scope, that the time commitment needs estimating. All true, by the way. But while your mouth keeps explaining, your head is in a different meeting: What if he thinks it’s outrageous? What if I charge too little? What is he paying now? Should I give him a range?

—Sure, perfect. But roughly how much are we talking?

Roughly. One word.

The man looks at his phone, stands up and tells you he has something urgent to deal with, that you should send him something and you’ll sort it out. Apparently the urgent matter was with a black hole, because it swallowed him: you called and he wasn’t in, you wrote and nothing. And you’re left with the whip, lashing yourself as you replay the meeting with forensic precision: why did I say that?, why didn’t I say this? Two weeks later you have the perfect speech. Shame there’s nobody left to hear it.

A while ago I met a woman for whom “modesty aside” came factory-installed, and you just accepted it. She talked about how she did things, about the teams she had led, about liking the administrative side but also getting her hands dirty. She had one small big but: she didn’t like taking orders. Or rather, she didn’t like how, in her field, certain dynamics that could be called abusive had become normal. No, they were abusive, full stop. So she stepped away from the place that until then had given her stability and threw herself into the sea of supply and demand, to see whether, swimming hard, she could keep her head above water.

What struck me most was what she told me about the interviews. Everywhere they praised her CV, her track record and, I imagine, that confidence she gave off. They told her she was meant for bigger things, that the post she was applying for fell short of her. She never put it like that, but between the lines you could see the questions: what if I aim higher? What if I don’t go for the sure thing and it takes me a year to find something stable? Do I really have the profile for what they say?

I haven’t spoken to her in a while, and I truly hope she found the post, the salary and, above all, a safe environment, which in her field is no small thing. But that story left me with an uncomfortable suspicion: telling someone they’re worth more is free. Paying them for it is the hard part. And between the compliment and the offer there’s a gap where the person ends up alone, deciding how much they think they’re worth, with the rent ticking.

That’s when I understood that the question was never about price. Price can be calculated: costs, hours, taxes, margin, and not doing it costs dearly, just ask the girl with the cards. Value is something else. Value is a belief: what you believe something that matters to you is worth, and the ability to make the other person believe it too. Like the story of the technician who fixes a machine with a single tap and charges a fortune: he isn’t charging for turning a screw, he’s charging for knowing which screw to turn. We’ve all heard that story. What nobody tells you is how many times that same technician, before he dared, charged a pittance and felt embarrassed.

And, to be fair, there’s fear on the other side of the table too. Whoever hires can also get it wrong, overpay, hire badly or spend a budget they’ll miss later. It isn’t always an insecure seller facing a buyer who has it all worked out. Sometimes it’s two people trying to figure out how much they dare to risk.

A few weeks ago I wondered here how much we were paid to give up what we wanted. This is the question from the other side of the counter: how much we dare to ask for what we actually do. And I suspect the answer gets so tangled because we were taught to find money distasteful. That it’s dirty, that it brings misery, that it isn’t necessary, that Eastern philosophies scorn it because it’s the child of the desire that enslaves us. Lovely. But we don’t live in a cave in Tibet feeding on dew and the energy of the earth, and we’re not going to convince the world to move into a hippie commune where what’s yours is mine and what’s mine… is mine.

That’s why, every time I see a teenager selling chocolate bars at break time, convinced they’re going to be a millionaire, I want to applaud. They won’t get rich on gummy sweets and chewing gum. But they’re getting something many of us adults still lack: losing the fear of saying “that’s two thousand” without apologising.

Because not even a yes calms us down. You say fifteen million, the client answers “done, when do we start?”, and instead of celebrating you hear a little voice: what if I’d said twenty? There are methods, tools and even courses for this, and still it seems we’re those hominids who discovered fire, rediscovering every single day how to charge.

Me included. After a fair few negotiations and quite a few battle scars, and not all of them in business, I still wonder whether I really know how to negotiate. Whether I know what my work is worth, or whether what I think it’s worth bears any resemblance to what others are willing to grant it. Some days I think I do. Other days I remember the Renault 4.

Back to our entrepreneur. Let’s suppose she finally took Lulú out, found a corner with good light, filmed the video and posted her cards. And that, after several hours checking her Instagram stats with the anxiety of someone waiting for exam results, a message arrived.

A woman wanted a card for her wedding anniversary. She loved the flowers, the lettering, the details. She read it three times. Her first customer. She had to reply quickly, be professional, inspire confidence.