Part 1: How I Got A 33.33% Salary Increment Every Year

This information may be the most important you will ever read in your career because it can literally 10x your earnings the way it 10x’ed mine, in just a few short years.

It will work for employees in situations similar to mine. NOTE: You do NOT have to be a lawyer to be able to do this.

I started working as a lawyer in my brother's law firm way back in 1992.

During the time I was working here, I literally DOUBLED my starting salary by the end of my 3rd year.

That's a whopping salary increment of 33.33% a year, or well over 6x (600%) the usual 5% a year increment any fresh lawyer would get.

Now before you say that my brother is the reason why I received a higher increment every year compared to my peers, I didn’t really have any advantage.

The reason is because my brother's firm then was made up of him and his business partner who was unrelated to us.

They made decisions together as equal partners.

So if there were no good justifications for my salary being increased beyond the usual 5% a year, there would be no increase — period.

In fact, my work would be under greater scrutiny because of my family connection, to be sure that I was not entitled to any special treatment.

With that said...

Not only did I get a 6x salary increment compared to other lawyers, I was also offered to share in the profits of the firm at the end of my third year (taking effect in my 4th year).

This would easily 10x my starting salary in the firm.

I didn't accept the offer because -- well, I had another offer to join another company as its General Manager in another industry. But that's another story for another day.

So what was it that enabled me to get a higher salary increment than my peers by a factor of 10x (including profit sharing)?

It's simple.

Beyond just being technically competent in my legal work, which was EXPECTED of me, I added SIGNIFICANT value to my firm in 2 ways, at the same time.

They're simple steps that some employees in some industries in some positions can follow, which will put them on the path for a higher salary or a quicker promotion (which should come with a higher salary -- don't accept a promotion in title only).

Here's what I did. I simply helped my firm:

1. Save a significant amount of money they didn't expect me to do; and

2. Make significantly more money than is expected of me to do.

Either way will make the firm more profit.

It's even better if you can do both together.

That's it.

Now, of course I was hired to make my firm more profits. I wouldn't have a job in the first place otherwise.

But if whatever new profits I'm making for the firm is EXPECTED of me, then my salary increment per year would just be the usual 5% a year.

Since I received a 33.33% increment every year, whatever I had done was way beyond what was expected of me.

It isn't about working long hours, or going the extra mile in my job.

Again, that would be EXPECTED of me, or any young lawyers starting off.

To understand what I did that made the difference, we need to understand why a business exists.

The reason for any business to exist is for it to make a profit.

(Like the reason you have a job is for you to earn a salary.)

That's it. It doesn’t matter what the purpose of the business may be.

And a business makes a profit by providing good value to their customers in some way, in exchange for the customers' money which should total more than what it costs the business to provide that value.

And so...

1. By helping a business SAVE a SIGNIFICANT amount of money, with revenues remaining the same
- A business will make MORE profit.

2. And helping a business MAKE SIGNIFICANT MORE money after any increase in expenses to make that extra money
- The business makes MORE profit again.

So if you're a business owner, and one of your employees did either or both of the above for your business at no extra cost to you, which results in a HUGE INCREASE IN PROFIT for your business -- is he not an asset to your business?

If he is, and you're a smart business owner -- are you not going to:

1. Reward him for his efforts; and

2. Retain him in your company for as long as possible?

Because if you don't, it won't be long before he leaves your business and does the same thing for your competitors who can reward him better.

In my case, I actually had not thought of leaving for another company while working for my firm.

I was very comfortable there, I got along great with my amazing colleagues, and my bosses (my brother and his business partner), aside from being great mentors, were also good to me.

And I was also too busy to think of moving on.

Especially so when I was working for my brother, because I didn't want our Dad to think I was goofing around and feeling entitled to a job without putting in my fair share of the effort.

So what did I do?

Now it so happened that when I joined the firm, we had a sudden influx of work coming in from the banks who were our main clients.

The economy was booming, and property sales were picking up significantly.

As a result, the banks' customers were borrowing lots of money to buy properties.

My division in the firm was creating and attending to the agreements with borrowers for the banks to provide loans for their clients.

These agreements would safeguard the banks' interest and ensured the loans would be paid back in full eventually, with all legal protections in place.

Now, thanks to the efforts of my brother and his partner, the law firm was on the panel of almost every bank in the country.

And every bank had their own terms and conditions for their loans beyond the standard.

Not only that -- there would be different parties to the agreement other than the banks:

1. Some purchasers of their properties would be the borrowers, and other purchasers would not be.

2. Sometimes there would be a single borrower, other times there would be 2 or more borrowers.

3. Sometimes the title or deed to the property would have already been issued, other times they wouldn't be.

4. Some loans would be released progressively (for properties under development), others would be released in full immediately (for properties that have been completed) after the paperwork were done.

So there would be HUNDREDS of different loan agreements in total due to the various combinations of factors and the different number of banks.

My secretary, who was tasked with the preparation of the loan documents, was simply amazing. She would stay until well past dinner time every night to prepare them in readiness for the borrowers' signatures in the following days.

But the amount of work we had were overwhelming.

The loan agreements had to be prepared with documents from the Land Office. Those documents would be in a certain format. They would be loaded into a typewriter for the borrower's details to be typed in.

These Land Office documents were in addition to the specific loan agreements we had to create and print out in multiple copies, using a PC and a laser printer.

We were using a word processor software to create the loan documents, but it lacked many functions that would have made the process much quicker.

Because of the manual work and the different types of documents required for a single loan agreement, it would take each borrower's documents at least 1 hour to produce.

Thus we were working till late in the night most days, doing background checks on the borrowers to be sure they are credit worthy, explaining the terms to multiple borrowers when they do show up, and overseeing their signatures on multiple pages of the documents.

Because of the volume we had, we ended up leaving the office only after 9pm most nights.

I knew I had to make the process more efficient for the sake of our physical and mental health.

And it turned out, I had learned to use another word processor software called WordPerfect 5.1 (for DOS) before I joined the firm.

I did this for no other reason than learning something useful when I had some free time.

I bought a book of a few hundred pages teaching me all the ways WordPerfect 5.1 could create documents and books quickly, in many appealing formats and designs that other word processors could not do.

I started at page 1 of the book and worked my way to the end of the book, as I could follow its instructions and see the results exactly as the book had said I would.

I didn’t know it then, but what I learned here would change the trajectory of my law firm significantly for the better.

WordPerfect 5.1 was the greatest word processor I had used up until then, being miles ahead of the-then leading word processor called "Wordstar", which was used by most law firms then. Microsoft's "Word" had not even been created yet.

So when I started to think how I could make my work processes more efficient for me and my legal secretary, I thought about WordPerfect 5.1.

And I found the processes that I could use this word processor on to prepare documents much quicker.

It literally cut down the time we took to prepare and create loan agreements and other legal documents by over 75% — from 1 hour, down to only 15 minutes.

That was a HUGE savings in time and effort any which way you look at it.

We still use it today (the latest Windows version) -- more than 30 years later!

I'm pretty sure that we were one of the most efficient law firms in the country then, if not the most efficient, in producing a complete set of legal documents for borrowers.

I know this because I could use WordPerfect 5.1 to mimic EXACTLY the official legal documents from the Land Office like private caveat applications -- down to the exact width of the margins, and the exact font types and sizes -- so that the Land Office had no idea we were even printing our own versions of their documents.

It would take someone with a deep interest in doing this, to do so -- and most lawyers are not interested in tech to this extent, even today (I have hundreds of friends who are lawyers — none of them have any deep interest in tech or software).

Note that it's not illegal to print our own version of the Land Office's documents as we could get them for free. But if a law firm started printing its own copy of the documents from their computer and they looked different from the Land Office's version, they would be rejected.

When we could print our own version of the Land Office's documents, we could then have a single process of printing out all the Land Office's documents already filled in with the borrower's names, together with the bank's loan agreement also already filled in, with a single push of a button on our computer.

The documents would come out on a laser printer and looked exactly as if they were processed separately using electronic typewriters by different workers to fill in the blanks on certain pages with the borrower's information.

With our processes now the most efficient among the law firms in the country, we could process many more documents than our competitors but in a fraction of the time, and with just a fraction of the number of staff.

Our savings were IMMENSE.

And because our turnaround time was so quick, this increased the speed the banks could disburse their loans to their borrowers which in turn sped up the interest they could earn on the disbursed loans, which increased their own profits!

This major benefit to the banks has another welcome side effect:

Our clients (the banks) started to give us EVEN MORE work to do.

Which, of course, then increased my firm’s earnings significantly.

And so, with a single improvement in our processes, we achieved 2 things simultaneously.

The 2 things that a business needs to do -- significantly reduce costs and increase profits -- to both stay in business and thrive.

So if you're in a position to help your firm implement either one of the above 2 objectives, you will increase your chances of a higher salary, and/or get promoted quicker, and/or offered a profit-sharing arrangement, and/or offered a partnership or shares in the firm.

And the best part?

You don't even have to ask for a higher increment — it will come on its own — and it will be higher than what the market would pay.

And thus I was also offered a profit sharing arrangement at the end of my 3rd year and the beginning of my 4th, which would 10x my starting salary in Year 1.

Best of all?

I achieved all this without having to do a side hustle to try to make more money.

When all you need to do is to just focus on a single thing to do which will then lead to multiplying your earnings as result, your job gets easier (more efficient), you will have less stress, and you will be appreciated by your bosses who may eventually be your partners or fellow shareholders.

So that's it.

The concept is a simple one -- but most employees only think of one thing:

"I'll do whatever is within my scope of work, and that's it."

Guess what? Almost all employees think this way.

If you can think of what your company needs and wants -- in other words, you're an "Intrapreneur" (which describes an employee who thinks like his boss for his company) -- you will STAND OUT and be both rewarded by your company AND sought after by headhunters to move on to other companies!

Now there are other aspects to this (the human element) which I will cover in another post, to stack these odds in your favour.

For now, let’s distill the concept of how I did this.

It's all down to one thing:

LEVERAGE

1. Use leverage to reduce your firm's costs.

2. Use leverage to increase your firm's profit.

3. Use leverage to increase your firm's productivity.

There are many ways to get leverage.

The way I — and YOU — can achieve leverage is from knowing how to use a piece of software in detail, and then implementing it properly in the company that you work in.

Note that you don't have to be a programmer at all.

You just need to be good at USING a piece of software, as a USER. You don’t ever have to touch computer code at any time.

I used WordPerfect 5.1 because it was the most relevant software to my needs at my law firm then.

Knowing how to use its most powerful functions maximised my firm's profitability, and minimised my firm's costs, SIGNIFICANTLY.

If you're in a position where you can help improve your company's processes, you could try mastering a piece of software (or a few of them) to produce the leverage your company requires.

You have this opportunity because MOST business owners have no time to dive deep into any software to extract the leverage it can provide, because of the many roles they need to play on a day-to-day basis.

So once you know how a piece of software or a few of them is/are going to make a huge difference in your company’s profitability, you have a great opportunity to multiply your earnings significantly working as an employee without having to do any side hustle.

Of course, this won't work if you're working in the kitchen in MacDonald's, or on an assembly line, or in a huge company that has its own processes that require a lot of paperwork and multiple levels of permissions for new software to be installed in the company.

These places would have certain processes already in place that nobody but an entire department can change.

But if you're in a smaller company, or a start up, or working with the founder(s) or partner(s) directly, or you have some autonomy to improve on your efficiency and effectiveness even if you're in a big company, you have this opportunity.

In my next issue, I will talk about the different types of software you can implement to both decrease your company's costs, and increase your company's profits.

It will also open your mind up to the possibilities of an alternative career to your current one which may both be more rewarding in terms of compensation, AND make you happier, all at the same time.

Watch out for it.

Cheers

P.S. Do share the above with your bosses, your siblings, your children, your employees and the people you care about. The more everybody is on the same page, the better the 10x factors will work for everybody to 10x their earnings.