Advice for Presidents (Little Upsilon)

Some presidents are facing declining FI's and other issues that are tempting them to screw with their patron CEO's.

Demanding higher salaries is one of these temptations.

Unless you specified salary requirements upon intitial request of CEO participation, demanding higher levels later is a breach of agreement.

Among with the many idiotic decisions of W3C, was the implementation of relocation fees. Many CEO's simply refuse to pay them.

If you want to run our corps, buy them out. I have no problem with that. I will build and sell corps all day long.

The bottom line is that you reap much benefit from private corps without trying to maximize every aspect. Certainly, 1500 salaries would benefit you greatly, but why would any CEO run his corps at break even or losses for your benefit?

If you want to maximize your country's income, IPO your own corps and manage everything yourself. I do it. You can too.

But DO NOT start making demands on veterans based on your whims. The response might just be nuclear.

Considering the mess that a lot of country's employment are in, CEO's have been more than patient throughout this ordeal.

Think before you start notifying CEO's of your demands. You will more than likely come across at a whiny little punk, only concerned with your own interests.

CEO based economies are a symbiotic relationship. There must be benefit to both parties for it to work. A president relieves himself of the time required to manage more corps when hosting CEO's. If you changed your mind. Fine. Buy the corporations and have at it.

But, I would think twice before making snotty demands.

You made a decision that requires that you make trade offs with the interests of others. Don't expect those others to just bend over when you decide to change your interests.

If you do, man up, pay the fair market prices, and move on.

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But DO NOT start making demands on veterans based on your whims. The response might just be nuclear.<!-/Quote-!>

Why waste such nice countries with messy nukes?

if he bids on mine its WAR.

LOL Sam.

Look kids. Benefits of privates:

1. Country resources used. The largest outlay for private corps.

2. Additional workers from BTW facilities.

3. The time you aren't spending managing additional corporations and markets.

4. A measure of security from other players having a financial stake in your country.

What does a CEO get?

A little, and declining, profit.

Hell. I am scaling back my CEO's and internalizing more of my operations as it's getting impossible to find stable countries among the declining active player base.

Thank you W3C, for f@#*ing up yet another central aspect of the game, you incompetent jackasses.

Well there are those CEOs that pay soooooooooo low that workers would rather take welfare payments.

So rather than log in every game month to convert workers tearing my hair out to get enough of a Welfare Bum buffer to keep THEIR employment at 100%, I quietly let it ride. Especially in my slaves.

Making demands of CEOs after they've relocated the corps is probably a bad idea for reasons enumerated by FarmerBob but my view is that CEOs that pay below your country's welfare payments are asking for a little bit of salutary neglect. Whether they leave is up to them but in this environment there are also enough CEOs looking for places to relocate that they can be replaced with corps with a higher salary.

For the record, I don't ask for 1500 salaries; I "advise" 300 which I think is a reasonable balance between low expense and the president not having to convert workers every month because the CEO fails to pay enough to attract them. Shortages that start affecting corps 300 and above (or even more than 200), I do try to fix, but I'll tear my hair out if I try to fix every 10,000 workers shortage.

As with many things in life, there is a balancing test...

all this came up cuz of me my bad guys lol.
i recently had purchased another country and it was ridden with ceo corps and a 30% tax rate so i tried to make a switch drop taxes to 0% as i do in all my countries and in return just ask for those paying less than what i wanted to either raise to around 600 or let me buy them out or they were free to move ofcourse. was giving 2 weeks real time notice. it became a big deal. i have since decided to not bother with it will settle for what it makes which honestly is good enough i just like to squeeze as many corps as i can into my own ceo lol. so close to 1k corps darn. anyway i think dragoon was offended most harshly by my wishes but there were a few other players him included offering me some advice and i decided to just leave it as is or maybe toss in a few state corps to just drive down anyone paying below 300. but its a lot of corps to look at each one anyway i should focus on looking for a job lol.

First, this isn't about Shaun . I'm sure he isn't the first president, and he won't be the last, to instruct CEO's to meet certain. I responded to his message the way I always do when a president instructs me to do something. I moved all of my corps. Problem solved.

Anyway, I do have a point to this post:

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If you want to run our corps, buy them out. I have no problem with that.<!-/Quote-!>

I completely disagree, and I view the bidding on any of my corps as a hostile action. As a CEO with over 750 corps, I take bidding very seriously. I would much rather pay the moving fee. All new players make note of this.

I remember shaun giving me a message about moving or he would nationalize. This was about two months ago. I jokingly dared him to nationalize it, and to my surprise he did actually do it. At first I was pretty upset because i didn't actually think he would(I thought he got my joke) do it. As i was about to declare war upon him, I realized that I told him to nationalize it if he wasn't happy, and saw tha6t he didn't pick up on the sarcasm nor understand that he did something that would anger another ceo. SO, I let it slide deciding he doesn't really know what is what. It was only a pluto corp too, so it was only costing me anyways, I have over 60K pluto so it wasn't any real loss, I just made some money back on all that production. I was kind enough not to debt bomb him too.

The reason I took offense on this matter is the country in question Shaun, DGoE and Myself worked hard to get those CEOs in there. Now it has fallen into disrepair I won't deny that fact, but hostile bidding is considered an act of war by many, especially when you declare the intent to do so if a CEO doesn't run his corporations to your standards. I personally have my salaries set in the 400 to 500 range and they do just fine, occasionally I jump in and adjust strategies if I feel like spending the time.

With Regards,
Dragoon

Let me clarify something here. The previous standards for salary/production increases was altered at least a year ago.

In previous configurations, there was a sweet spot around 860 or so where increasing salaries increased profitability. Profitability started to deline after that point.

That has not been the case since my latest return to SC. Not long after setting up shop, it was brought to my attention that higher salaries were no longer profitable.

I counducted several experiments with different salary levels within the same countries and different products to verify this.

It is in fact, true, that increasing salaries directly decreases profitability.

The likely explanation for this is that staffing requirements have been increased over the years to the point that as a percentage of total costs of production, increased production fails to generate sufficient additional revenue to offset or exceed increased payroll costs.

I encourage anyone to experiment with this to confirm for yourselves.

My CEOs pays 400 salaries, which I consider to be a fair compromise between my profitabilty and your tax revenue.

At the old 860 level, most products barely break even or lose money.

A further note for presidents is to consider the fact that higher overall salaries increase your costs for military and infrastructure. Remember that W3C automation overrides your government salary settings.

Therefore anyone with large standing miltaries and/or high ed/health indeces may be shooting themselves in the foot.

ya i figured 40 and 400 were probably peak ceo profit salary wise either strategy paying nothing for 90% work done or paying well to get the 125% production and 900 was probably the break even lose a bit point and after that ur just subsidizing the country at ceo cost. but a 30% tax on profit i thought was harsher than a increase on salaries but i guess situations depend on markets or something idk. i look at procifica on GR Q's country and hes owning all his own corps paying ridiculous wages over 1k so idk do what you want ill keep starting up new countries from c3s and building em up myself to get my own ceo bigger.

wendy the plut thing was when i was totaly newb about strategic corps and i didnt understand those things were not traded on the public market i thought it was just a horribly unprofitable corp and i was doing u a favor paying u to close it down. why is it by the way that plut is full green bar? that seems kind of odd shouldnt be any production on market ? and some nuke things are full red others mid yellow its odd. should just allow it to flow on the public market in my opinion.

There is a wide range of "sweat spots" for salary. It will depend on the product, the quality of raw materials, and the production quality.

Raising quality and production also increases the country resources used. Since presidents also get returns on income taxes most corporations will do better with very high salaries.

The largest variable is the cost of raw materials. Compare aircraft fuel and services. The raw material cost of aircraft fuel is so high that you have to have maximum production quality in order to run any profit. By the time you have paid for all the raw materials and maintenance, you need to get production up around 150 to 200% in order maximize profits [currently Aircraft Fuel won't make much at any salary]. Services have lower raw material costs which makes it economical to pay lower salaries.

Thank you for elaborating, PS. The further difficulty is that these numbers are constantly in flux as W3C fiddles with every factor from staffing requirements to base pricing.

It might be noted however, that Willard has made several comments over months past regarding official "suprise" that many of us continue to maintain high slaries, indicating, to me at least, that W3C is pressuring for lower salary levels. As their crusade to reduce numbers escalates, likely, changes to costs of productions will become more pronounced to force salaries lower.

The situation will bear watching.