The HR Decoded: Episode 9
The Exit Plan Nobody Give You (How To Stop Negotiating From Desperation)
You and I have been here before.
You are sitting in an interview or reviewing a contract, or renewing a client brief, and you can clearly see something is wrong.
The salary is too low. The scope is too broad. The non-compete clause doesn’t make sense.
The red flag is right there, visible, and undeniable.
But you take it anyway.
Not because you were fooled. But because you ran the numbers, and the alternative was worse.
Rent, school fees, loan repayments and the quiet weight of people who depend on your next credit transfer.
Against all of that, a bad deal beats no deal.
That calculation is not you being stupid.
It is rational decision-making under irrational pressure, and the system that created that pressure has no interest in resolving it.
But here is the thing, the system (goes by different names: capitalism, Nigeria, the way we do things here, etc) does not want you to understand that the desperation that makes a bad deal feel necessary is not permanent.
It is a season.
And what you do inside that season determines whether you spend the next three to five years building your way out, or explaining to yourself why you are still there.
This edition is about the exit plan.
Not the emergency exit, this is about the long game.
The one that requires moves that feel too small to matter right now.
They matter.
Start with the money (because everything else depends on it)
You cannot execute a long-term career strategy if month-to-month pressure is destroying your decision-making.
Every bad deal you feel forced to accept is a direct consequence of not having enough financial runway to say no.
Here is how I do it personally.
At the start of every month, I move my allocated spending into a dedicated account (I use Opay). Every expense comes out of there and nowhere else.
At the end of the month, I upload the transaction history to Claude and ask for a full expense report: what I spent by category, how it compares to the previous month, and where the leaks are.
Takes me about 15 minutes to produce clarity, and one number I check constantly is how many months of runway I am sitting on.
Oluwaseun Akinlembola named the target directly: three months of expenses saved before you negotiate aggressively with anyone.
Personally, I think six months is more ideal.
Three to six months of runway means a bad client is a problem you can walk away from, not a crisis you are trapped inside.
Living below your means is not a virtue exercise; it is a strategic move.
The colleague spending everything they earn cannot afford to push back when a promotion is denied, because they cannot afford the risk of leaving.
You, with six months sitting quietly in savings, have a completely different relationship with that same conversation.
Beyond tracking and saving, actively look for ways to raise your income: a side consulting gig, freelance projects on weekends, teaching, or training.
Any legal stream that widens the gap between what you earn and what you spend.
And on job hopping: done correctly, it is the fastest salary reset available to you.
The average internal raise in most companies sits between five and fifteen percent; the average jump when you move companies is between twenty and fifty percent, sometimes more.
Loyalty to capitalism is not a financial strategy.
Now, about the spending.
There will always be something to spend on (new clothes, shoes, someone’s burial, a child in the hospital, a birthday).
And someone will tell you: you are young, enjoy your life.
But you do not have the luxury of living inside a fantasy when poverty is your waking companion.
You can complain about being broke; that is allowed.
But complaining and building must happen at the same time.
Every naira spent on an obligation that does not serve your actual life is a naira borrowed from the version of yourself that needs options.
The goal is not to become a miser to yourself and those you love. The goal is to stop funding other people’s milestones while sinking into despair.
Practical steps:
Open a dedicated expense account and move your monthly budget there on the first of every month
Build a simple Excel or Google Sheets tracker (date, amount, category) and update it weekly, not monthly
Set a six-month runway target and treat it as non-negotiable before anything else
Review subscriptions and recurring expenses every quarter; cut anything not actively serving you
Set a specific income growth target for the year and map two or three concrete ways to get there
One more resource: you cannot negotiate toward a number you cannot see.
Afolabi Sokeye is building a salary index specifically for Nigerian professionals so you walk into any compensation conversation already knowing what companies pay for your role contribute anonymously.
Please click this button below:
It takes two minutes to fill it.
The more people contribute, the more useful it becomes for everyone who negotiates after you.
Mentorship, sponsorship, & your career growth
Mentorship and sponsorship get used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing.
A mentor gives you context, perspective, and honest counsel. They help you think. They do not decide for you.
Wamide Animashaun is precise about this:
“I talk about some of my decisions before I take them with my uncle. I ask him: I’m doing or thinking of doing this. Do you think it’s a good idea? Not major deliberation. I don’t give them my life problems.”
Mentors are not decision-makers. They are context-providers. The best ones sharpen your thinking without replacing it.
A sponsor is different and rarer; they put your name in rooms you are not in and advocate for you when decisions are being made without your presence.
Kim Rohrer made this point clearly: no amount of excellent work compensates for invisibility.
If the people making decisions about your future do not know who you are, your track record is irrelevant.
A mentor helps you grow. A sponsor helps you move.
You earn both by doing work genuinely worth talking about, showing up to industry conversations, and taking on leadership roles in professional communities.
Active participation is how you become someone whose name already means something before the opportunity arrives.
Write publicly, engage leaders, start conversations
Oluwaseun spent a full month posting on LinkedIn before he sent a single DM to a potential client.
Not because he had all the answers but because in a crowded market, invisibility is its own kind of poverty.
“Make enough noise that people can’t avoid you.”
You do not have to be an expert to start. You have to be honest, curious, and consistent.
I did not start this newsletter as an HR professional. I’m not one.
I started it as someone who had watched broken processes damage people I know, and who had questions nobody else was asking loudly enough.
The questions came before the answers.
Write about the problems you are watching.
Name the structures that do not make sense. Start conversations about trends your industry is not yet discussing openly.
Engage with leaders in your space, not to flatter them, but to add something genuine.
A well-framed question that opens a real thread does more for your long-term visibility than most certifications.
Oluwaseun does not write for a target audience or buyer persona. He writes about what he knows, what he is learning, and where he is going.
“People can smell from far away if you have what you are not. With time your reservoir runs dry. Just come as you are. Keep talking, then learn.”
Writing publicly builds a body of work that demonstrates how you think, signals that you are a serious practitioner, and creates inbound.
People coming to you is the only negotiating position that fully removes desperation from the equation.
Wamide has not applied for a job since 2014; every opportunity since then came through recommendation or referral.
If You Are in a 9-to-5 or Corporate Role
1. Design your career before you urgently need to. What does your career need to look like in five years for you to have real choices? Work backwards from that answer and make specific moves toward it today.
2. Build your reputation on excellence, not tenure. Wamide’s principle: “If you put something in my hands, it is going to do well.” That reputation (built early and consistently) is what makes you recommendable. Not how long you stayed. What people say about your work when you are not in the room.
3. Pre-agree on your raise before the review. Ololade Odunsi is clear: “As you’re telling your manager you need a raise in 12 months, ask: what do I need to do to get that raise? It’s already agreed before the time comes, so there are no surprises.” When the moment arrives, you are closing a deal you already structured, not opening a negotiation from scratch.
If you’re a freelancer:
1. Build the three-month runway before you negotiate. The urgency that makes a bad client feel necessary only has power if you cannot afford to lose them. Three months of expenses in reserve changes every rate conversation you will ever have.
2. Make your personal brand your primary job. “My LinkedIn personal brand is my number one job. The client work is number two.” — Oluwaseun. Post consistently and document your results. The compound interest on six months of visibility is worth more than any single client you could chase.
3. Define scope in writing before the first deliverable. Oyinkansola Edem learned this when “one landing page” became an entire site’s worth of copy while the client insisted it was “the same thing.” Scope, timeline, revision limits, and rate — all in writing before you start. A contract is not paranoia. It is the only document that protects you when someone’s memory conveniently shifts.
Be Long-Term Greedy
In late 2024, I wrote down what I wanted my life to look like.
A content role with an international brand doing work that actually matters, while building a creator brand and side projects on my own terms. 10-year goal: return to writing poetry and novels full-time, maintain my creator work, and build a life in which I am in full control of my time.
No mandatory meetings (I HATE long meetings that should be emails).
The work I choose, done the way I choose, on the timeline I set.
I wrote that down before I had any of it.
Within 8 months, I began working with an international brand (goal 1), started writing this newsletter (goal 2), and building toward everything else on that list.
This is what being long-term greedy looks like.
Be ruthlessly clear about where you are going and willing to make every decision, including the uncomfortable ones, in service of getting there.
For fifteen months straight (Jan 2025 to March 2026), I worked Monday to Sunday, every week with no off switch.
I averaged 14 to 16 hours a day.
My Dad called me “Mr. Work” and my friends thought I had gone insane.
In early April this year (2026), I took my first full week off in those fifteen months, and cut back to 10 to 12 hours daily for six weeks to let my body recover.
Those fifteen months multiplied every area of my career by a factor I cannot fully quantify but can feel.
The opportunities, the skills, the relationships, the body of work, none of it would exist without that commitment to the direction I had already written down.
I also want to be clear about what I was working with.
I do not come from wealth and there’s no family safety net waiting quietly in the background.
It’s Isaac versus the world, and the only currency I have ever had to spend is time, effort, and an absolute refusal to accept anything less than excellence in everything I lay my hands on.
I call it: “embracing your madness.”
If you are in the same position (no inheritance, no connections, no one to call when shit rises from the toilet and hits the ceiling) consistent, insane hours toward your purpose is not a suggestion.
It is the only logical response to the gap between where you are and where you are determined to go.
You are trying to bend reality to your imagination’s will. That does not happen on a comfortable schedule.
The principle underneath all of it: there must be no space between what you want and what you are willing to do to get it done.
Wamide journaled in 2008 about the career she wanted before any of the circumstances existed to support it: a reference point, not a rigid plan.
A compass, not a contract.
Here is the exercise: sit down and write where you want to be in ten years. Not a job title, it’s a life description.
What does your day look like? Who controls your time? What are you working on?
What have you stopped doing?
Then walk it back. Ten years to seven. Seven to five. Five to three. Three to one.
Your path to your destination might change in certain areas, that is fine.
What the map does is give your daily decisions a north star.
When you are choosing between the higher-paying job that leads nowhere and the lower-paying one with a better trajectory, the ten-year map tells you which one to take.
Uncertainty is not an argument against planning. It is an argument for it.
The person with a direction has an enormous advantage over the person who is simply reacting to uncertainty.
Be long-term greedy. Plot your future even when the present is messy.
Then pursue it with the kind of quiet, sustained intensity that does not need to announce itself, because the results will do that eventually.
The Honest Timeline
This takes three to five years minimum.
Early signs may come much sooner in your journey, but to build the kind of professional gravity that means you never again have to take a deal because you had no other option will require an average of three to five years.
That is not a discouraging number, it is a clarifying one.
Because those years are going to pass regardless.
The question is not whether you will spend them. The question is what you will have built by the end of them.
Ruth Adelakun said it simply:
“Sometimes, something has to give. Go for the career choices that place you in a better position long-term. It may not feel like rescue. But rescue isn’t the goal. Growth is.”
Desperation is a season, not a sentence.
Build during it.
The exit is at the other end.
I’ll Be Back in 14 Days.
See you then.
Best regards, Isaac, son of Adewumi.
P.S. To the person currently in a bad deal, seeing the red flags clearly, and staying anyway because the math doesn’t leave you a choice: this edition was written for you. The move is not to leave today. The move is to start building today so that in two years, you have the option.
P.P.S. If you have found your way out of the desperation cycle — through community, visibility, financial discipline, or sheer bloody-mindedness — my DMs are open. I am collecting stories.
Because silence is permission.
And I’m done being silent.
Are you?