UVUSA Senate Speaker series invited Dan Price Thursday, Feb. 3. Price is the founder and CEO of Gravity Payments, a credit card processing company. He is an entrepreneur who found a better way to do business by putting people over profits.
According to UVUSA Price was born and raised in Idaho. While at Seattle Pacific University he founded Gravity Payments from his dorm at only 20-years-old. Since day one his mission for his company remains the same, which is to “Help the thousands of hard-working small business owners who are consistently overcharged and underserved by their credit card processors.”
Gravity Payments is all about, “Leveling the playing field for community businesses of all sizes,” claimed Price. Their aim to change the way business is done by putting purpose and people above profit. Gravity payments saw that businesses were being overcharged and underserved by their credit card processor so they lowered their costs and transformed their relationship with community business owners.
In 2015 when Dan raised the company’s minimum salary to $70,000 a year he got national attention. Since that change, he has been an advocate of income equality and consistently encourages business owners to do the same and take responsibility for the well-being of their employees.
In the beginning, “We were a terrible employer, I remember [the] first employee that we hired, his starting pay was $24,000 a year with no benefits,” said Price. “The way that business grew at the time is we signed 50 or so clients a month and we’d get enough money to hire another $24,000 a year employee.”
That was the cycle of growth for Gravity Payments for a while and that is how it grew.
“In 2008 with almost no profit margin, we lost 20% of our revenue overnight and I had 35 employees at the time,” said Price. “I joined a group called entrepreneurs organization, and the first meeting was on how to do layoffs. I thought that was awful, so I did the opposite of that.”
The company went on a budget for a while to come back from the loss and was able to make a comeback. When Price would brag about that though, some of his employees went up to him and told him that he was bragging about underpaying his employees.
“Sometime in 2015 I took a mental health day and went on a hike with a really good friend of mine. She started explaining to me that she was having a $200 rent increase and it was making her life totally unlivable and she couldn’t make ends meet anymore,” said Price. “She was making about $40,000 a year with side hustles and I realized that a third of my employees were making less than that. I was really mad at her employer but I looked at myself and thought I was doing the same thing and my employees are probably not going to run up to me and tell me how miserable I am making their life.”
“I decided I wasn’t okay with that anymore,” said Price, decidedly. “At that time we didn’t really know how to make a livable wage for everybody but I talked to a couple of people and came up with the idea that if I cut my ‘super way to high salary’ down from a million dollars to $70,000 I could lift up that bottom third to that amount.”
Price’s leadership has earned him many awards, most notably Entrepreneur Magazine’s “Entrepreneur of 2014” and the 2010 SBA “National Young Entrepreneur of the Year,” awarded to him by former President Obama.
He has also been credited by other business owners who have decided to raise the minimum salaries in their own organizations.
