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
*Head count grew 70%
*Customer base doubled
*Babies had by staff grew 10x
*70% of employees paid down debt
*Homes bought by employees grew 10x
*401(k) contributions grew 155%
*Turnover dropped in half
After our $70k min wage:
*76% of employees are engaged at work, 2x the national average
*Customer attrition fell to 25% below nat'l 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.
At the start of the pandemic, we lost 55% of our revenue overnight. Our employees were so invested they volunteered to take temporary pay cuts to prevent any layoffs.
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.
When I've been on Fox News, the production assistants who led me through backstage confided they were making min wage and struggling to get by in NYC. I asked the hosts (who make seven figures and laughed at me on air) to talk about their workers' pay on air. They always said no.
Our success with a $70k min wage isn't some fluke.
A Massachusetts biotech recruiting firm raised its min wage and saw revenue and headcount grow 50%, while retention rates doubled. Profit held steady despite the $500,000 cost of raises bostonglobe.com/business/2017/…
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 busienss credit card processing) is still down slightly from pre-pandemic. But we're handing out raises of 5-6% and hiring to grow headcount by 10% to make workloads easier.
Does this way of doing business actually work? I broke it all down the other day with one of the best @mehdirhasan on the @MehdiHasanShow:
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Amazon cutting more employees in the next few weeks bringing total layoffs to over 18,000, more than any other tech company. Its CEO was paid $221 million in 2021. Amazon recently made record revenue & profit. Amazon is worth $868 billion. Founder Bezos net worth is $107 billion.
Amazon pays its workers so little that they often qualify for food stamps. It is among the top 3 employers (along with Walmart and McDonald's) whose employees are on public assistance in virtually every state
Context:
Amazon full-time warehouse employees make $31,200 a year. Jeff Bezos makes that every 12 seconds.
Cost to give warehouse workers 2 weeks paid sick leave + pay bumps so they don't qualify for food stamps = 0.9% of Bezos' fortune
1. Amazon workers in Staten Island just won a vote to unionize. During the union drive, the company held 20 mandatory anti-union meetings per day and had pro-union workers arrested. nytimes.com/2022/03/24/bus…
2. Amazon paid a 6% tax rate last year, which is up from 0% a few years prior.
So one of the richest companies in the world pays a lower tax rate than their warehouse workers making $31k a year.
Compared to white people:
*Black-owned homes are devalued by 23%
*Black-owned homes' property taxes are 13% higher
*Bank fees are 2x higher for Black people
*Black people w/ no criminal record earn $10k less than white people w/ a criminal record
That's just the beginning ...
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*Black college grads have 50% less wealth than white high school dropouts
*The 10 counties most audited by the IRS are 79% people of color
*The Black-white homeowner gap is bigger now than it was in the year 1900
*In the pandemic, Black-owned businesses closed at twice the rate
*All Black Americans combined have half the wealth of the nation's richest 400 people
*The average inheritance for white families is 3x that of Black families
*Relatedly, Black families have $166,000 less wealth than white families, a bigger gap than before Civil Rights