The 200% Raise I Didn’t Ask For

A week and a half into a new job over a decade ago, my boss gave me a 200% pay increase.

I had joined a small publishing company to help with marketing in the sales department. While I was learning how everything worked, I looked at the company website. This was around 2012. The site looked like somebody had built it in raw HTML around 1996 and then quietly backed away from the computer.

I knew enough HTML and WordPress to build something better, so one evening I spun up a mock-up for one of the magazines. Just as a way to be helpful.

The next day, I heard a salesperson complaining about a call. He had the customer ready to close, gave him the website address, and heard the enthusiasm disappear from his voice. I turned my laptop around and showed him the mock-up.

I was careful about it, because the owner’s daughter had been responsible for the existing site and I did not want to step on anybody’s toes. I offered to show her how to build and maintain it if the team thought it would help.

The sales manager picked up my laptop, walked me into the owner’s office, and said, “Look what Danny just made.”

The owner looked at the screen, then at me, then back at the screen. Turns out his daughter had been tasked with the original site because she had taken one HTML class in college. She didn’t like it and didn’t really want to do it in the first place.

He offered me a “Digital Director” role and named a salary that was roughly a 200% increase. I was genuinely trying to give something. I noticed a problem and had intended to teach the designer how to use WordPress to make her job easier, and the opportunity came back to me as a result.

I grabbed that role and took 7 publications digital, saving the company $40,000 per month in publishing costs, while creating several entire new marketing product lines to serve our advertisers.

What problem has somebody mentioned around you that just kind of stuck with you? What are you going to do with it?