An American CEO has given up 90% of his salary in order to make sure every one of his employees takes home $70,000 a year.
Dan Price, who runs a credit card processing company in Seattle, Washington, first introduced the $70,000 minimum yearly wage 6 years ago to widespread media interest. Now, as a result of the pandemic, some of his employees have taken a pay-cut out of loyalty to get through the bad times and it looks as though the company is going to survive and thrive into the future. When the company does enter full trading again, the employees will have their salary returned to the old level.
Price said:
"6 years ago today I raised my company's min wage to $70k. Fox News called me a socialist whose employees would be on bread lines. Since then our revenue tripled, we're a Harvard Business School case study & our employees had a 10x boom in homes bought. Always invest in people. Since our $70k min wage was announced 6 years ago today: Our revenue tripled, headcount grew 70 percent, customer base doubled, babies had by staff grew 10x, 70 percent of employees paid down debt, homes bought by employees grew 10x, 401(k) contributions grew 155 percent, [and] turnover dropped in half."
"After our $70k min wage: 76 percent of employees are engaged at work—2x the national average, customer attrition fell to 25 percent below [national] average, we expanded to a new Boise office & enacted $70k min wage there, our highest-paid employee makes 4x our lowest-paid employee—down from 33x. We started our $70k min wage with about 130 employees in Seattle. It worked so well we expanded it to a new Boise office, where the cost of living is lower but people deserve good pay all the same. We now have about 200 employees."
Invest in people.
— Jennifer Bennon (@jennobenno) April 14, 2021
Dan Price, CEO of a credit card payment processing company reduced his salary from $1.1M to $70K yearly, and increased minimum employee salary to $70K.
Revenues have tripled.#wtpBLUE#Freshhttps://t.co/zzNs3ULdVL
He then revealed what the future had in store for both the company and his employees:
"We weathered the storm, paid everyone back, and are now giving out raises. What helped inspire our $70k min wage? An employee was secretly working a 2nd job at McDonald's. It was clear I was an awful CEO who was failing his employees. I gave her a raise to quit that job. No one should have to work two jobs to make ends meet."
"To help finance our $70k min wage, I cut my CEO pay from $1.1M to $70k. I don't miss anything about the millionaire lifestyle. Money buys happiness when you climb out of poverty. But going from well-off to very well-off won't make you happier. Doing what you believe is right will. People focus on the cost of paying employees well but not on its benefits. For us: Our happy employees drove record sales and we now have 20,000 small business clients. Our turnover is low and we spend $0 advertising openings since we get thousands of applicants. We're doubling down on our mission to invest in employees. Our revenue (which comes from small business credit card processing) is still down slightly from pre-pandemic. But we're handing out raises of 5-6 percent and hiring to grow headcount by 10 percent to make workloads easier."
[h/t: Upworthy]
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