Hey man, Torn's possibly-longest 10* AN Director here.
Just wanted to shed light on a few things about AN's specifically, for both you and other players. Now I can't speak to the "forum lottery" and some of the other BS your director pitched that definitely does smell fishy, but I can speak about AN's in general. In no particular order:
1. Most AN's offer a salary at lower stars to make them competitive with other similar-stat-requirement companies payouts and salaries.
2. AN's are one of the few company types in Torn that actually have to lose money to be "successful", which is why most AN's at 8*+ either Sell Trains, AND/OR charge an EDVD Tax on top of not providing a salary. (I'll provide the actual math down below.)
3. Per Job-Point, AN's have some of, if not THE, highest cash value for employees in their comparable work stat range.
4. I offer genuinely the most relaxed 10* AN experience for employees in all of Torn; With that though, my stat requirements are higher than almost any other AN, so my company numbers are going to be slightly (Not a lot, but slightly) different than most other 10* AN's.
The Math of running a 10* AN
(TLDR: We lose a s**t ton of money as Directors)
1. For Employees
As an employee in a 10* AN, you get 10 Job Points a day, same as literally every other company. You have 3 total options you can spend your Job Points on:
- "Blackmail". Spend 1 Job Point for straight Money. For the sake of this post, I burned 3 Job Points 1-by-1 to get you the actual numbers. In-Order, I received $4,090, $3,705, and $4,444. So you're looking at an average of $4,000 per Job Points, or $80,000 for 20 Job Point.
- "Voyeur". Spend 20 Job Points to get an Erotic DVD. At 10 Job Points a day, you get half the value of an EDVD every day with this method, which at any given time works out to give-or-take $2,000,000 a day. Again, compare that to any other newb-friendly company type's salary AND Job Points value, you're not gonna find a better offer unless someone is trying to sky-rocket their new company's growth and is intentionally MASSIVELY overpaying out of desperation or recklessness.
- "Party Supplies". Spend 250 Job Points to get a Pack of Trojans. Pack of Trojans are a novelty item with no current use, meaning they're incredibly difficult to sell. At the time of writing this, they're selling for $41,000,000. This works out to an average of $164,000 per Job Point, or $1,640,000 a day, so they're worth less than an EDVD. As a new player, you can almost guarantee you're going to be buymugged on a sale that large as well, so they're a pain in the ass to sell in the first place.
This leaves "Voyeur" for EDVD's the most profitable and logical option. So in a 10* AN, not taking perks into account, at $0 Salary, you're making about $2,000,000 a day.
2. Company Costs
So what do we make as the Director? A f**king hole in our wallet, that's what. Let me break it down Barney Style.
For those who don't know, Company Management is a PvP activity. It's not a simple "Reach X productivity, get another Star". Your company's Weekly Production is compared against every other company's Weekly Production on Sunday at 1800 TCT. You need to be at X% of the most productive company's Weekly Production to either lose, maintain, or gain a star. There's only a certain percentage of companies that can be at any star level at any given time (I don't know the exact percentages for each. You don't need to either for all intent and purposes.)
Keeping that in mind for this next part: I can't give you my hard numbers on a lot of these specifics without losing a significant advantage that took me over a year of testing to perfect against other AN's. But I can give you the end result.
Running an AN (And any company, really), you have 2 non-Employee costs.
1. Company Advertising Budget. This is by FAR the most expensive part of running a successful AN, and most likely any company type. It's well into the millions.
2. Company Stock. It costs me give-or-take $810,000 to restock my company stock per-day, while it produces a "profit" (Gross Sales) of about $2,400,000. This results in a Net Profit (Just on stock alone) of about $1,590,000 a day.
3. When you compare the Company Advertising Budget required to compete as a 10* AN, even when it's highly optimized and not bloated / you're not over-paying, against the Net Profit of your daily sales, this results in a multi-million dollar loss per day for the company.
3. As The Director
So who pays for that daily loss of the company? The Director, obviously. We make the same 10 Job Points you do, meaning we make the same $2,000,000.
I can't give you the exact number without pinpointing my exact advertising budget (Which again, I manually tested and fine tuned for over a year to get it to where it is now; Not bloated, but still highly competitive to keep us in safe territory with fairly respectable room for employee stat movement due to Drug Addiction and Inactivity), but even adding on the full $2,000,000 value of my Job Points, the company is still losing a significant amount of money every day.
That's why AN's either Sell Trains, AND/OR Charge an EDVD Tax. So what does that actually look like?
4. "Alternative Income"
(Post-message edit: After being questioned on it and testing to verify it, Employees getting a temporary EE boost after being freshly trained is no longer a thing. So disregard that. If you want the fully polished and expanded guide, scroll to the bottom of this message, I made a full company guide.)
1. Selling Trains. This can be both incredibly profitable, as well as incredibly detrimental to your company. You need to have a certain Job / Position Ratio to be able to achieve and maintain 10 Stars without having to MASSIVELY bloat your Company Advertising Budget to compensate, it's not just a simple case of "Get as many people qualified into the best position possible, which is a Sexpert for an AN." There's an actual Position Ratio Synergy that the game doesn't tell you, you have to experiment to find out (Or look at other top companies in your company type, assume they already found that ratio, and just copy theirs).
I'll save you the trouble of looking at the top twenty 10 Star AN's to figure it out since you can publicly see people's jobs: It's 3 Sexperts, 6 Sales Assistants, and 1 Store Manager. Changing even one of those positions to something else will tank your company's Daily Production by a MINIMUM of 5%, most likely closer to 10%.
The reason I mention that fact: That means that to be a 10 Star AN with a reasonable Company Advertising Budget, you will not have a HR Officer giving you extra daily trains. Therefore, you're going to have 10 Daily Trains to give away. Even my massively-overqualified work stat'd staffed company would struggle to maintain 10 Stars if we disrupted that Job Ratio Synergy.
Stat Trains sell for an average of about $350,000 each. This equates to $3,500,000 a day if you sell all 10 trains. The problem with this is, a freshly trained Employee gets a +12 buff to their employee effectiveness, which across all 10 employees is a MASSIVE difference. For 10 Star AN's running on "competitive employee stats", this can work out to as much as a 15% difference in actual Daily Production, making the difference between whether or not you keep 10 Stars unless you massively bloat your Company Advertising Budget to compensate (Which sees massively diminishing returns after a certain point, that again, I won't specify exactly where that is due to the PvP nature of this part).
Net Gain if you sell all 10 Daily Trains, minus the cost of the extra Company Advertising Budget required to offset the loss of Employee Effectiveness, you're looking at around +$1,500,000 actually gained per day for the director with a stupendously high employee turnover rate that makes it almost impossible to actually maintain 10 Stars. So I view this as a short-term solution. Which leads us to:
2. Charging an EDVD Tax. This is by-far the more sensible option for an AN. It allows you to maintain peak Employee Effectiveness by evenly distributing Daily Trains for that sweet-sweet +12 Employee Effectiveness for all 10 Employees. Now, I will say this is also the most abused option. Many 10* AN's charge massively under-qualified newbs 1 EDVD a week in tax; That's 20 out of your 70 weekly Job Points gone to Tax. So what does that actually look like? You're paying $4,000,000 out of your $14,000,000 earnings per-week. Times that by 10 employees... It's just disgustingly exploitive, even for Torn.
So how do you math that out for any / all tax cycles? Simple: Divide the cost of an EDVD by the amount of days per tax cycle.
For example, I charge an EDVD Tax of 1 EDVD every 8 weeks. So that's 1 EDVD every 56 days. $4,000,000 divided by 56 works out to about $71,500 a day, leaving my employees with a sweet-sweet $1,928,500 a day in take-home earnings, giving me about $715,000 a day extra.
5. The Final Result as Director
So what is the final result? Taking into account all of the above factors: Optimized Daily Company Costs, my own Job Points, and my very-low but still existing EDVD Tax, I make a grand total of.... Still less than HALF of what my Employees make. And again, that's with my Stock Sales Prices and my Company Advertising Budget optimized literally to-the-dollar.
If you're not charging an EDVD Tax, or selling Trains as a 10 Star AN, you are LOSING money every single day. You are PAYING to own a company. So that's why we charge tax, or sell trains.
Personally though, I'm not trying to exploit people; That's why I only charge a tax of 1 EDVD every 8 weeks instead of 1 a week; 1 a week is just disgustingly exploitive. But unfortunately, that's the standard for 10 Star AN's. If you want to earn as-much as your Employees running a 10 Star AN with employees who have the average working stats of AN Employees, you'd charge an EDVD Tax of about 1 EDVD every 3 weeks.
I hope all of that helps explain some things for anyone who wants both a deep understanding of AN's specifically, as well as a general overview of running ANY company type.
Edit: Upon hemi's encouragement, I put together a COMPLETE Guide to running a Company from A-to-Z. You can find that here:
Link to the Full Company Guide