Comments on: Don’t Fall for Dangling Carrot Syndrome

By: Danielle Keister

Danielle Keister — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 16:07:46 +0000

Nope, it’s a bunch of bullshit. It amounts to working on speculation without any guarantee that they would even make any money, much less enough to make it worth your while for having spent your time and energy laboring over. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this kind of arrangement fail miserably (through no fault of the service provider who provided what they were supposed to). And the service providers, despite all THEIR great work, end up footing the bill and not getting paid for what they’ve done.

If a so-called client is successful enough (and many of them who propose this kind of arrangement are not) to have something that’s worth a damn, then they should have enough money to simply pay you what you require, in full and in advance. Professionals don’t need incentives to be professional and do good work. And as independent professionals, we are not responsible for their success or failure. It amounts to subsidizing someone else’s business. Yet they are placing that responsibility on your shoulders when you work on incentive. Like I say, it’s just another bullshit way exploiters try to get out of paying us fairly and squarely.

By: Geri

Geri — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 15:29:52 +0000

I think if the incentive is big enough it could work — it would have to be MORE than what you would have made on a purely hourly basis. A large percentage — perhaps 30% of gross sales — might be a win-win. Although I have no idea if that’s the kind of percentages we are talking about here.

By: Carolyn

Carolyn — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 19:03:23 +0000

No truer words were ever spoken, Danielle. Having recently extracted myself from a ‘promising’ work relationship, I totally agree with you.

By: Danielle Keister

Danielle Keister — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 03:42:59 +0000

I totally agree with you. Far smarter to develop marketing and strategies that pull clients into your pipelines and your processes. This would also lend to prequalifying efforts and reduce the amount of time wasted jumping through unproductive hoops with no return for the effort.

By: Yelena

Yelena — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 03:34:12 +0000

Something to add to your post:

I see a lot of “dangling carrots” RFPs out there and always wonder:

1. A VA (or any freelancer for that matter) signing up for this kind of deal basically depends on the strategy and tactics developed by the client. If the strategy has holes in it or is half-baked, then it doesn’t matter how hard a VA works – there won’t be much in the way of results.

2. Unless a VA has complete access to all the analytics and tracking and time to get all the relevant stats, how would she know whether the goals are being achieved (other than relying on client’s word).