Getting Compensated in a Family Business
During my time as assistant manager with my father’s business, I was vulnerable to being overworked because I was family. This often caused me to feel unmotivated because no matter how hard I worked my compensation didn’t increase. And it also took time away from hanging out with friends. At the time I was very passionate about cars so I didn’t care how hard I had to work to earn every dollar. But what was the point of having a nice car, if I never had time? Sometimes it even caused me to cut corners during job tasks because I didn’t feel like I was being compensated fairly.
But to my immigrant parents that was my way of doing my part. It was very frustrating because I did want to help my family’s business but I also didn’t want to be underpaid for my work. So I thought of scenarios in my head of how I could increase my value and exchange get compensated more. To spend more time with my friends, and enjoy my car. I then had a conversation with my father and asked “If I can help or implement strategies that increase the business’s revenue, may I earn more” His answer was “if you can prove to me that your action or ideas are causing sales to go up, I’ll pay you more”. I quickly jumped on youtube and listen to various authors, entrepreneurs, and business owners on strategies they had already implemented.
After a few weeks, I came up with the idea of implementing a marketing component to the restaurant where service providers, could list their names inside our restaurant for a monthly cost. This includes real estate agents, salons, landscape businesses, and others. My idea was to use one of the many TVs we had in the restaurant to promote business info through a repeating slideshow I created, and inserted via USB. For a small fee businesses were paying the restaurant money which helped increase our revenue by 5%. He then realized what I had done and was very gracious and happy to compensate me for my efforts and behavior that I had done. I believe compensating employees is important because it allows employees to work harder and smarter to improve businesses. So there must be a system in place where employees get a reward for doing things not just in their job but outside as well.
