Reading a Private Offer

The number is not the offer

Private-service offers are packages wearing a single number as a hat. Two offers with the same base can differ by tens of thousands of dollars in real value once housing, vehicle, travel, benefits, and bonus practice are counted, and the difference usually lives in the parts nobody explains. Read the whole thing before you feel anything about the number.

The parts, one by one

• Base. The comparable number, and the one every future raise compounds from. Know its band before you react to it: The Benchmark carries P25 to P90 by role and market.
• Live-in or live-out. Housing is real compensation and priced like it: in the benchmark set, live-in house manager roles pay 8 to 15 percent below live-out. Value the housing honestly against what you would actually rent, and weigh the cost that has no line item, which is living inside the workplace.
• Vehicle, phone, travel. Clarify what is provided, what is reimbursed, and what travelling with the family means for your hours and your own costs on the road.
• Health and retirement. Families vary more here than on any other line, from full family coverage to nothing. Ask precisely what is funded, because this line moves real value more than a few thousand of base.
• Bonus. A year-end bonus measured in weeks of pay is a common convention in private service, but convention is not contract. Ask whether there is one, what it has actually been, and what drives it.
• Raises and reviews. Annual reviews are not universal in private households. Ask how and when the package is revisited, because a seat that quietly grows without a review is how resentment gets hired.

The two questions before the money questions

First: what does the seat own? Get the scope in writing at whatever level of formality the family works in, because scope is what you are actually pricing, and a seat that absorbs a second job without a review is a known failure mode. The principal-side version of this discipline is a one-page role charter; you are allowed to want one too. Second: how will the package be reviewed as the scope grows? Asking this before you sign is easy; asking it after is a negotiation.

Hours, trials, and paper

Clarify the hours reality, on-call expectations, and how overtime is handled where the role is hours-based; norms differ by household and by jurisdiction, and the time to understand yours is before signing. A paid working trial before the permanent offer is standard for many household seats, with the confidentiality agreement signed before the trial begins; what those documents contain, and what is reasonable to see in them, is covered in What You Are Signing. How the packages are constructed from the family's side is public on this site too, at house manager and estate manager level; read the buyer's sheet before you negotiate with the buyer.

Negotiating without spending the relationship

Negotiate the package, not the number: the base against the band, the review against the scope, the housing against its real value. Candidates who know the band negotiate calmly, and calm is credible. Keep the conversation with whoever runs the process rather than across the family dinner table, and if the current family counters once you resign, that moment has its own guide: The Counteroffer, From Your Side.