Dan Price rose to celebrity in 2015 after he reduced his CEO compensation by 90% to pay for an increase in his staff members’ pay to at least $70,000 annually. Price’s behavior drew, to put it mildly, a range of responses. He received praise for being “a capitalist with a conscience” and was compared to Robin Hood, on the other hand.
The majority of the commentators on Fox News and Fox Business, on the other hand, referred to him as a socialist. Additionally, some clients stopped doing business with his payment processing company Gravity, and he lost staff members who believed the compensation increase was unreasonable. His brother also filed a lawsuit against him.
But Dan persisted, and it appears from a recent Twitter conversation that it has greatly paid off. In this essay, Dan’s selflessness will be examined along with the difficulties he has encountered and his response to his ex-abuse wife’s claims.
Dan Price decision to cut his salary by $930,000
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Dan cut his salary by $930,000, and it paid off because the amount of payments his company processes has almost tripled.
Then Price’s father acquired employment in the credit card sector. Price’s father taught him more about the business, and he and his brother Lucas created Gravity in 2004. When Dan took over as CEO in 2006, the business was on the verge of failure. At a time when Gravity was just marginally profitable, the financial crisis took a heavy toll on the business.
But the business managed to survive, and in 2012 Dan began giving his employees pay raises. He saw that increases in profit followed each wage increase. Dan’s compensation increased to almost $1 million in the same year.
After learning about the difficulties of having low pay from a buddy who had substantially less education than he did, he chose to reduce his compensation by 90% for the benefit of his staff. Dan recalled a 2010 study by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton that found that people’s emotional well-being increases with income up to a point around $75,000 where it plateaus.
Dan decided to increase his employee’s pay to $70,000 as a result. Dan’s buddy Valerie Molina reported this in an email to Bloomberg: “Dan remarked, ‘I’m going to pay all my staff at least $70,000. I need to run the figures first, so I’m not exactly sure how I’m going to accomplish it, but I am. Is that absurd?
Dan Price is benefiting from his investment in his staff
Dan described Gravity’s exponential rise since 2015 in a series of tweets, all of which he made sure to include the names of his toughest detractors. The clientele has increased by double, and the company’s revenue has tripled. Added him:
With roughly 130 employees, we launched our $70K minimum wage in Seattle. It was so successful that we took it to a new location in Boise, where the cost of living is cheaper but people still deserve a fair salary. Currently, we employ roughly 200 people.
The coronavirus epidemic caused difficult times for Dan’s business, but things are improving now.
Dan lost two employees as a result of their complaints that the uniform pay raise was unfair to higher earnings after he announced it. He also lost clients who believed the wage increase would increase expenditures. Most of the cost would be covered by Dan’s salary, while the remaining sum would come from business revenues.
Although there was no assurance that Dan’s strategy would be successful, the statistics indicate that it has been a resounding success. The progress of the corporation was in danger of being halted by the coronavirus epidemic, but the stakeholders made sacrifices to keep Gravity operating.
According to Dan’s article in The Washington Post, Gravity continued to operate despite the employees’ temporary wage reduction since there was enough cash on hand. He stated:
“Instead of viewing our people as costs that might be reduced, we recognized their value to our company and their humanity. Our revenues decreased in March and April, but even then, we’ve beaten our performance from the previous month. The absence of layoffs helped our business get through the downturn.
Dan Price ex-wife claimed that Price had abused her while they were married
After Dan’s Christian parents insisted that they get married or quit their relationship, Dan and his ex-wife, then known as Kristie Lewellyn, got married at the age of 20. According to accounts, the couple’s divorce in February 2012 was amicable.
When Kristie, who took the last name Colon, disclosed that Dan had mistreated her frequently, it raised questions about how amicably the couple had divorced. Kristie read from her notebook in an unpublished TEDx talk about the advantages of writing to deal with trauma at the University of Kentucky in late October 2015:
“I was worried he was going to body-slam me into the ground again or waterboard me in our upstairs bathroom as he had done before,” Colon recalled locking herself in a car. Dan responded to a Bloomberg reporter who read him the claims, “The events you described never occurred. Price also responded to Kristie’s charges in a letter to The Guardian:
“Unfortunately, those who are in the spotlight are targets of rumors and judgment. It’s fair some of the time but not all of the time. Unquestionably inaccurate allegations and irrational speculations were made in a recent Businessweek article.
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