Five years ago, you might remember Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price's move to take a 90% pay cut (from $1.1 million to 70K a year) so that the minimum annual salary in his company could be $70K.

His story came up in our Laddership Circle this week, and when I read the article about it, I liked the concept in general, but it felt a little gimmicky. Was he doing this from a pure intention or was it because his company was in trouble and he wanted to cut costs and was doing this experiment as a publicity stunt to garner more customers' interests?

I know this was 5 years ago, and I also remember he got a lot of negativity for it. So I researched it and found an article from two months ago: The Boss Who Put Everyone on 70K

An excerpt:

But Price did get a lot of flak. Along with hundreds of letters of support, and magazine covers labelling him "America's best boss", many of Gravity's own customers wrote handwritten letters objecting to what they saw as a political statement.

At the time, Seattle was debating an increase to the minimum wage to $15, making it the highest in the US at the time. Small business owners were fighting it, claiming they would go out of business.

The right-wing radio pundit, Rush Limbaugh, whom Price had listened to every day in his childhood, called him a communist.

"I hope this company is a case study in MBA programmes on how socialism does not work, because it's going to fail," he said.

Two senior Gravity employees also resigned in protest. They weren't happy that the salaries of junior staff had jumped overnight, and argued that it would make them lazy, and the company uncompetitive.

This hasn't happened.

Rosita Barlow, director of sales at Gravity, says that since salaries were raised junior colleagues have been pulling more weight.

"When money is not at the forefront of your mind when you're doing your job, it allows you to be more passionate about what motivates you," she says. Senior staff have found their workload reduced. They're under less pressure and can do things like take all of the holiday leave to which they are entitled.

It’s a wonderful story; I was very moved by it. In Dan’s case, his company (and it seems his whole life) flourished. … Five years later, he still takes a 70K salary; his staff became more productive, happier, healthier, more employees started families from financial security, the staff doubled, and more -- and then one day, his staff (tired of seeing him driving his 12 year old Audi to work) surprised him with a Tesla. I love stories like these. :)