By Tian DuBelko
Yesterday, distinguished Seattle entrepreneur Dan Price hosted a live Q&A session on Facebook to celebrate the two-year anniversary of his company raising its minimum wage to $70,000. Price, the CEO and founder of Gravity Payments, also addressed the importance of employee happiness and doled out some advice for upstart innovators.
In this new age of entrepreneurship, there’s a higher emphasis put on employee happiness. When employees are happy, they do better work. Nobody knows that better than Price, whose $70,000 minimum wage idea was inspired by a 2010 paper which found that people’s emotional well-being improve as their earning rise.
Price gave up his own million-dollar salary to pay his employees more. And for his daring approach, he received both praise and criticism from the entrepreneur world, as well as multiple business awards. These awards include the Entrepreneur Magazine Entrepreneur of 2014 and the Seattle Business Magazine 2014 CEO of the Year. He even accepted an award from President Barack Obama.
Join us below to see what Dan had to say:
On the inspiration behind the $70,000 minimum wage
“I have a friend named Valerie (Molina). She had a rent increase and it really was making a big difference in her life. She’s somebody that I look up to who works really hard and does a great job. To me it didn’t make sense that it should have such a huge impact, and I realized that if she was having to make such big sacrifices, then that meant everybody that works at Gravity who made the same or less than her was potentially having to make the same types of sacrifices.”
On starting a company
“Be realistic about what you absolutely need to make, and then do everything you can to sacrifice and give to others and ask for little back in return, because you’re creating a really long-term momentum. … I would say give as much as you can, ask for referrals, and really focus on growing your company, not just making money.”
On paying your employees
“Every dollar really matters when there’s low pay. So setting goals, setting targets, being really transparent with your employee about how they can help you help them is a really good thing to do. It’s a great relationship builder. Being honest and being vulnerable with them. Be honest to them about how you’d like to do more for them than what you can afford to do right now.”
On keeping workers engaged
“I actually think people want to do a good job and companies screw it up and make them less engaged. So we try to screw it up less. And our motto is ‘suck less every day.’ We actually suck at motivation and suck at employee engagement, but we want to suck less than we did in the past. We feel people are already engaged and motivated and we screw it up so we need to try our best to stop screwing it up.”
You can watch the whole Q&A here:
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