When you think of employee benefits, you tend to think of “traditional” things like health and dental insurance and retirement plans, but some employers get pretty creative with their benefits package.
Ger Ronan owns Yankee Home Improvement, a residential contractor in Chicopee. Here’s a link to their website: https://yankeehomeimprovement.com/
I’ve known Ger for a number of years, and he’s always been a guy with outside-the-box ideas. Over lunch a couple of weeks ago, he told me how a local employer had purchased a very expensive car for a long-time employee that was retiring. “I got to thinking,” Ger said, “I wonder what I could do for that same $80,000…not just for one employee, but my whole company? What if you share the wealth with everybody?”
He came up with a sales contest for the entire company. The contest is simple: if everybody works together and increase sales to $10,000,000 in 2019 from $7,000,000 in 2018, he’ll take the whole company, spouses included, to Mexico. The Race to the Riviera was born.
That got the attention of his employees. Who wouldn’t be motivated by a free vacation? Better still, it’s not just the salespeople that are involved, it’s everybody. Ger said, “If we do this, we’ll all fly together on the same plane. Almost the entire plane will be filled with Yankee employees and their spouses.”
So far, things are going well. Ger and his team do video updates with progress toward the goal each week, and sales for January and February are double what they were for the same time period this year. “We’ll see if we can keep up the momentum,” he said.
Good luck to everybody at Yankee, and kudos to Ger for coming up with such a great idea to motivate the whole Yankee team.
If you’d like to talk about creative benefits ideas, give us a call at 866-724-0008 or click the link below.
