Catherine Bell brought millions to a deal but was paid only $10,000 because she didn't negotiate or get a written contract. She now has Tommy handle negotiations on her behalf, and they're teaching other creators how to protect themselves from getting swept in deals.
Are you in the deal room?
I mean, I've been doing this for over 20 years, and part of the hard truth and hard lessons that I've been learning for myself in this journey is that I have sucked at being my own personal negotiator on behalf of myself. So I've been doing an obscene amount of work bringing millions of dollars to the table, and people have said that to me, yeah, I'll take care of you. But at the end of the day, like literally this last deal, they made $1 million in profit and they promised me that they'd share in that. I got paid 10 grand. That was nothing. Like, yeah, no, that doesn't work. So the point being is that being new to this industry is that people will take advantage of you. And to being your own negotiator, you're probably going to suck at it. So Tommy is a brilliant negotiator on my behalf. And so he has actually been stepping into these deals and negotiating that piece of the contract. And it's been uncomfortable for me because I've just had to shut my mouth and sit back and let happen whatever is happening and, you know, trust the process. And so the point being, I think we're going to be definitely helping mentor and step in and work with all of you to make sure we're helping negotiate on your behalf and make sure that you're protected on, you know, so that somebody can't swoop in and steal the deal from underneath you.
So with that deal where you only made 1%, so the $10,000, when you work with somebody and they say like, oh, we'll take care of you, do you create a contract that specifies everything beforehand? Or—
So this is somebody that I had done lots of deals with and I just, I trusted that we would work it all out and we were working on getting it all in writing and it just didn't happen. Because again, I got so consumed with doing all the things, you know, I naively trusted. And the reality is it does need to be in a written form, written contract, everybody signed before we move forward. So anyway, so yeah, that, that, those were some—
you want to believe the best in people and sometimes they don't live up to it, which sucks. You know, you want to be that type of person that believes the best in people and the handshake, you know, a handshake deal and your word is good and people don't always operate like that. A lot of people don't live by their word anymore.
