The Holy Grail of Slaying the Turnover Dragon: Retention and Performance Bonuses

Episode 047 Full

Ben Walters: [00:00:00] Signing bonuses suck. They are not an effective tool to slay turnover. But referral bonuses are a really great tool to bring new blood into your business and reward those high performing employees that are already doing the good work in your business.

Ben Walters: But today I wanna talk about my absolute favorite type of bonuses. This is the retention and performance bonus. This is the holy grail of slaying the turnover dragon. And let me tell you why. You are paying people to be retained to stay in your business, which is the opposite of turnover right? You're keeping them, so you're paying them to stay.

Ben Walters: But not only that, you're not just paying them to stay, you're paying them to perform, to do the very things you want them to do. So in our particular businesses, we were not only paying for longevity, we were paying for your work attendance. Are you there on time, every time? Those two metrics are key. If you're not there, you don't do us any good.

Ben Walters: Then we [00:01:00] were also looking at, what's your work quality? What are your customer scores? What's your work rate? If you're someone who can just tear it up and do the work of one and a half people? Well, by George, we ought to be paying you a big old retention and performance bonus, right? So we are incentivizing the heck out of you to do the work at a very high level.

Ben Walters: So we're tying it to staying, we're tying it to performance, and the third thing we did, we spread these bonuses out. We didn't do just one big bonus a year, 'cause we know a lot of people, particularly at the lower end, if they're making. $20 an hour or less, there's not a lot of extra money in the business. So we gave them bonuses at three distinct times.

Ben Walters: We did one in May. Our thinking was, for a lot of families, if you've gotta put kids in summer camps and day camps and all that, that's expensive and you've gotta put those deposits down, right? Or maybe you're planning a family vacation, you wanna rent that Airbnb up in Michigan or wherever that is. Put your deposit down, so that May [00:02:00] helped families get through the summer and have something to look forward to.

Ben Walters: We gave one in August. Again, we had a lot of families working for us, so man, back to school costs have just gone through the roof. It's crazy how much all that goes with it, these supply lists and so forth. So give the families money then, or if not, just give 'em a nice bonus.

Ben Walters: And then the third time, of course at the holidays. Everybody needs more money at the holidays. So by spreading those retention and performance bonuses out three times a year, our employees knew three times a year, I'm gonna be rewarded for my high performance, they're gonna give me a boost of my pay, and I really wanna stay with this company. That's how you slay the turnover dragon.

Ben Walters: Thanks for joining me today on the SuperPumped Business Podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, I have two quick next steps for you. First, subscribe or follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. And second, jump on over to [00:03:00] superpumped.com to find out all the incredible ways we can help you launch your SuperPumped Business.

Ben Walters: Keep well and I'll see you next time.