He took a massive pay cut to give his staff pay rises.
A CEO who raised his staff’s minimum wage to $70,000 was gifted a Tesla by his workers as a thank you gift.
Dan Price is the founder and CEO of credit card processing company Gravity Payments, a company that used to have a starting wage of around $35,000 (£25,000).
However, as the company went from strength to strength, Price decided it was important that all of his workers had a good enough wage to look after themselves.
He therefore took a cut from his own $1 million (£720,000) salary in order to raise the company’s minimum wage to $70,000 for all 120 of his employees.
He told Insider that in the years after the wage rise for his workers, revenue soared and his staff had more babies and purchased more homes.
Price said: “The media in general said we would fail. Or even in some cases, rooted for us to fail.”
“It’s been over six years and we’ve had really fantastic results. We’ve had a 10 times increase in the number of first-time homeowners every year and 70 per cent of our employees were able to pay down debt.
“Our employees had a 10 times boom in terms of the number of babies they were having.
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“We went from having between 0-2 babies born per year among the entire team, to over 65 born or announced over the last six years.”
His staff were clearly extremely grateful for Price’s work, and bought their boss a Tesla car as a token of their gratitude.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CRVIG9ItO0Y/
Speaking about the gift, he said: “That was a really beautiful gesture and any day I drive to work or a client meeting, I can just feel the amazing relationship we’re able to have.”
Gravity Payments lost 50 per cent of its revenue in 2020 because of the pandemic, but this was the first year in its 17-year history that it didn’t report revenue growth. Price said that they were able to recover from this, with staff volunteering to take pay cuts to prevent layoffs, which they were later reimbursed for.
