Hourly vs Salary?

[riptides]

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On the cons it would be healthcare... a lot of my early retired friends are paying $10,000 or more for Health Insurance and the California market is very high... so this is a consideration.
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Healthcare costs did me in on my early retirement. How the heck can one budget for close to 25k a year for "insurance". And then the deductibles kick in. ROTFL.

I returned to the workforce just because of "age" and the "insurance" dilemma.

 

[Egon]

Financial Advisors depend on you for an income.

 

[ultrarunner]

You will not be in a strong position to negotiate after the transition.

The real problem is that you are not really in a strong position to negotiate now either. When one company buys another one, there is wholesale turmoil, and it is very hard to get the attention of anyone senior enough to really make a decision. My sense of it is that a hospital is going to consider facilities as a necessary evil and not in their mainstream business, even though it is vital to their business. Negotiate too much and you will be labeled a troublemaker, and a highly paid one at that, by the new management.

All that being said, the best negotiating tool you can have is a current resume. They are going to be fitting you into an existing job description. Your value to the new management comes in two areas. First you have both the experience and the expertise they need to fill that job description. Second, you have been doing much, much more than that job description entails and that has been very beneficial in controlling costs for the old management.

Get someone with experience and expertise to help you write a resume. You will have to pay someone with real expertise, to get the best help, but don't cheap out on this. It is a specialized skill, and most people will sell themselves short. You will be dealing with someone who has read thousands of resumes, and even though you might read a book on this, you need someone who has written hundreds of resumes for clients. Contact a firm that specializes in outplacement and pay them for a resume. Don't hesitate on this.

Plus, a really good, professional resume will put them on notice that you have other options without you ever having to say a word about it. Threatening to leave does not go over well -- making yourself as attractive as possible increases your value to them and others.

* * * * * * *

About 10 years before I stopped working for a company, there was a shakeup at the company and my boss was fired. No one had the stones to fire me, although I felt that I was on shaky ground, and no one really wanted me either.

I made the conscious decision that instead of putting in extra hours at work, I would develop a money making sideline and put more time/effort/money into the rental real estate business. This had two effects:

(1) My income increased, and in a way that was not dependent on the company. This gave me more personal security, and the confidence to stand up for what was right at the company instead of what management wanted on a short term basis. I was careful to express things in a positive way, and not just disagree with poor decisions.

(2) In turn, this increased my value to the company, and my position became more secure. Pay increased also, but I quickly saw that working for myself, I got 100% of the benefit of my efforts, while working for someone else I got very much less.

So, even though I was putting less time in at work, my job became more secure, and my total earnings became much better. Between salary and side income I was doing better than managers two levels above me. Another benefit is that when I stopped working for the company the side income came with me.

Fast forward to the present and today I sign paychecks on the front instead of the back. I have relationships with vendors for the same reasons you did at your work. I get better deals and better support. It costs me less, it is faster, and if something breaks a week out of warranty, they come & fix it just to keep my business. I make policy instead of having to follow it.

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In addition to TBN, I spend some time on personal finance websites. mostly aimed at retirement planning.

One of the big paradoxes I see there is that they tilt heavily toward investing in equities (stocks & mutual funds) and bonds. With some amount of attention/recommendation to real estate and then primarily as publicly traded REITs. (Real Estate Investment Trusts), and lots of bias against rental real estate, because owning it is like having a job.

OTOH, very frequent advice is that one way to stretch your retirement assets is to either work longer, or take a part-time job.

Not very many supposedly smart people make the connection that they are right, owning rentals is like having a part-time job, and that this part-time job is exactly what they tell you to do in the next breath after they tell you it is a big disadvantage of rentals.

I suspect the real reason is that financial advisors make commissions when people buy mutual funds, and when people buy bonds, but they don't make anything when people buy rentals.

Very profound on so many points... especially the point about making policy instead of enforcing it... I have always been careful to explain the why we do things and part of every new hire is spending time with me during the first 72 hours touring the facility and going over how important their role is in making us a viable facility based on what we do... and our history.

Bought my first rental in 1982 at a time when industry here was not hiring and things were looking rather bleak for a new engineer. About 20 years later it was starting to pay off and now my "Other" job generates more income than my Hospital Job not to mention equity which currently is rather spectacular as compare to even 4 years ago when my area was still 60 to 80% down in price.

Our new Administrator is well aware of what I do as we worked together here for almost 12 years and our then Founder and CEO said both of us needed to work out our schedules to make sure we are not on vacation at the same time... even though we had totally different areas of responsibility.

During our 20 minute talk on Friday I mentioned the last thing I want to do is make things difficult and my uncertainty comes from not yet being able to see how all these changes would make us better and more efficient and the last thing I want to do is be a problem...

My Sister in Law's father was operations manager for a refinery with 3,000+ employees... he very much mirrored what you said and cautioned me about being labeled difficult...

 

[ultrarunner]

Financial Advisors depend on you for an income.

I don't have much interaction with advisors but the ones I do have always suggested Real Estate ownership of individual rentals is highly speculative and risky even before the melt down a few years back...

Most of the people I work with would NOT be a good candidate to operate residential rentals... they hire everything out on their own homes and would have little patience for after hour telephone calls and the people skills solving tenant issues, plus my market has layers of regulations like Rent Control, Business Licences, Evictions... that make it easy to screw up...

None of my colleagues own rentals... outside of a few of the Doctors and they have mostly set up someone full time in the family to oversee that side of their investments.

On a totally off topic note... yesterday at the Christmas Tree Farm there were 36 for dinner... it was casual with 10 of the 36 ranging in age from 6 months to 15 years... the Kubota RTV and the Buggy were most popular as was the new cemented area with the basketball hoop...

It also was one of the first times it was NOT a Christmas spare the air day so I kept the LOPI stove fired from 1 to 8 pm... a lot of the younger ones were fascinated having never never seen a wood stove which brought a lot of questions all the way to can we get one?

The girls driving the Kubota RTV came back with collected wood for the stove but I had to show them it was much to wet to use now but we would put in in the wood shed so it could be used later... around that old wood stove sure was the popular place to be... and gatherings of family and friends sure put things into perspective. I was the first to leave as I needed to go into to work to check the boilers and cryofreezer... 20 minutes tops and I will be in tonight for several hours to make sure all is ready for tuesday's surgery schedule.

 

[NY_Yankees_Fan]

Ultra,

I was on the insurance end, you know the person that would spend a day at your hospital looking at the fire pump, roofs, boiler rooms etc. I handled about 25 hospitals in NJ and developed a relationship with many of the facility managers. I saw what you are going through several times. Some would keep the manager on staff and have them do a brain dump on the facility "for the records" and then let them person go. The dumb ones would fire all of the managers and bring a third party management company in to run the facility. Both were terrible as everything went downhill from a preventative maintenance point of view. Some hospitals it got so bad we did not renew the account because of so many outstanding recommendations. I tell you this as warning signs to look for. I would see the fired mangers at other hospitals and I would hear what they went through, was not fun.

 

[jmc]

Is your new owner a publicly traded company? If so, Wall Street firms' research reports might give you a sense of corporate culture, like their labor problems. Stuff you won't see in the owner's annual report- at least in readable print size. Those WS firms need to advise their clients on the risks as well as rewards. Brokers and financial types can get them for you if they aren't available on the net. Sorry if you already checked it out.

 

[ultrarunner]

Outside of the Nursing Staff the overall plan is to outsource and/or decentralize as much as possible off site.

This "Can" work "If" you still have enough staff on site that know the facility intimately otherwise you pay for the lack of knowledge and you have management that only knows there is a problem but doesn't have a clue other than to start calling around looking for help and it is like fighting fires... everything is an emergency.

Simple things become a big problem and resources are diverted plus the cost of calling in help sometimes becomes a blank check.

It is the trend industry wide and I expect it to continue... short term savings in exchange for sacrificing preventative maintenance and reliability over the long haul.
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[ultrarunner]

Is your new owner a publicly traded company? If so, Wall Street firms' research reports might give you a sense of corporate culture, like their labor problems. Stuff you won't see in the owner's annual report- at least in readable print size. Those WS firms need to advise their clients on the risks as well as rewards. Brokers and financial types can get them for you if they aren't available on the net. Sorry if you already checked it out.

No it is a Not for Profit with some locations Union and others not...

One of the nearby facilities has had 9 labor strikes/disruptions over a 36 month period... granted some were only called for one day but still required outside staffing... policy is if a strike is called it is followed by a lockout for the week.

My facility has Never had Strike or Lockout or any labor strife going back to the late 60's.... of course individuals have been let go for cause but that has been it.

 

[Trillium Farm]

Just to clarify: What you are asking doesn't exist ! ANY form of payment IS A SALARY, this can be hourly daily weekly monthly or yearly for a certain number of hours a day. This hourly offer can be construed as part time work even if the number of hours are the same, they do it so that they can make you work as long or as little as they wish without legal consequences Lay-off or personnel reduction or overtime. It can work at your advantage sometimes and sometimes not. Not good for career or long time potential.

 

[Howling]

Outside of the Nursing Staff the overall plan is to outsource and/or decentralize as much as possible off site.

This "Can" work "If" you still have enough staff on site that know the facility intimately otherwise you pay for the lack of knowledge and you have management that only knows there is a problem but doesn't have a clue other than to start calling around looking for help and it is like fighting fires... everything is an emergency.

Simple things become a big problem and resources are diverted plus the cost of calling in help sometimes becomes a blank check.

It is the trend industry wide and I expect it to continue... short term savings in exchange for sacrificing preventative maintenance and reliability over the long haul.
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I do factory automation consulting and have seen the cutbacks and re-organizations as various clients. The core management focus is reducing operating costs. Seems to happen in two ways, either focusing on short terms goals or by trying to reduce the per widget cost.

The switch to short term goals typically cuts the engineering and indirect staff in the plant. The results in R&D, new product development and production upgrades put on hold. Long run these companies become static as their competition improves. And aging facilities and production lines have more panic repair costs. One of my clients is trying to pull out this hole by staffing their engineering department back up.

The per widget cost focus is a drive to lowest bidder. This creates a faster knowledge and brain drain. There is a lot intangible knowledge and details that are lost and must be relearned when changing to vendor or facility. Couple years ago a client's corporate parent 'reduced it global footprint' and closed a local plant and moved the production lines to other facility. A lot of institutional and process knowledge got lost in the move. In January they are flying me to CA for another week because it is clear I have product and equipment knowledge that the new manufacturing engineer is missing.

Look in to which mind set your new management is taking. Are they putting off the longer term expenses or are you considered a resource equivalent to the next resume on the pile?

I've already have that feeling... I have the personal phone numbers for the guys that own key companies we work with... never have abused but I know if I have a real problem they will come through for me.

It's taken years... to cultivate in an industry where turnover is common... the corp has already said if we can save a penny we will switch... and it is not like my people are not very competitive especially when I work with them on a time and material basis.

If new management switches to new vendor maintain your connection to the old vendors (personal email, linked-in). If you decide to find a new job, those vendors you have treated professionally will be a good source for prospects. You are a know good person they can work with at other customers.