Entrepreneurs: Dan Price and the $70K Minimum Wage
by Miki SaxonDo you remember last August when news that Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, was raising the the minimum wage at his company to $70,000, phased in over the next three years, and all hell broke loose?
Reality-show offers, book deals, research requests from Harvard, both complimentary and scathing media attention; and, hilariously, Rush Limbaugh calling a socialist.
He partly funded the move by cutting his own salary from $1.1 million to $70K.
So what happened?
So far, the results are positive.
…the publicity he’s gotten would boost new customer inquiries from 30 per month to 2,000 within two weeks. (…) customer retention rate rose from 91 to 95 percent in the second quarter. Only two employees quit — a nonevent.
The short reason Price did what he did was because he realized he wasn’t living the values he was raised with and in which he believed.
Obviously, it’s more complicated than that, so read the article.
Then think, really think, about how you can translate your values and beliefs into tangible actions, as opposed to empty words.
Flickr image credit: Gravity Payments