I've been working as a consultant for a jewellery store. My pay has been 100% commission-based, but the owner wants to bring me on full-time.
The salary he offered me is $40k + 10% commission of the store's profits. Based upon his estimations (and I met with him and his accountant, so I feel this is accurate) I would stand to make an extra $1000-2000 or so from the commission. So then it looks like $52k - $64k.
At my current other job, I'm making $42k plus bonuses, which rolls out to be around $50k. I would really like the jewellery store to pay me a salary of $45k. However, when the jewellery store owner starting talking to me today, he asked if $40k + 10% commission sounded good, and I told him that it sounded competitive (because when he explained it to me, it sounded like $60k.) He has not yet drawn up the contract. I would like to go in tomorrow (or email) and say that I've slept on it, and crunched the numbers myself, and I think that $45k base salary would be better. But how to rationalize?
One thought is that my current job is 35hours per week, and this new job he mentioned something like 40-45 hours. Given that, I could say, "I realized that I wasn't comparing apples and apples. Given that this job has slightly more hours, I'd like slightly more compensation."
OR I can scrap this whole plan and just ask for a raise in six months. But I would prefer to practice my negotiation skills. My brain went into auto-pilot "I'll do this job for anything" mode. :/
How can I handle this?
TL;DR: How do I negotiate a better offer when I already said that "based upon my research this looks to be competitive". I have not yet received anything in writing. Ack!