Pay them like LeBron

If one person at your company does 5x the work of someone else, sometimes 10x, sometimes 20x, what do you pay them?

I put that question on the table at a dinner I hosted for nine and ten figure operators a few weeks back. I've been chewing on it all year.

Nobody had a clean answer. But we did get three ideas.

Athletes came up first. LeBron is in his forties and still commands a superstar contract. That contract prices experience, recruiting pull, and leadership on top of minutes played.

Your most AI-fluent operator carries the same three things. But a traditional comp band has nowhere to put any of them.

Ownership came second. Profit sharing, equity, a carve-out that ties a person to the thing they built. If you can't pay them out of payroll, you pay them out of the upside.

Story units was interesting. You storyboard a product, break the board into units, then pay against units delivered. Many at the table said it's working for them right now.

Then someone described the failure mode.

Let’s say a manager has someone on their team doing the work of five people.
They go to HR and ask to move them two bands up. HR says the bands exist for a reason and we've paid this role this way for years.

The CEO agrees the person is underpaid. But the CEO also doesn't override HR over one comp request.

So nothing happens. The person keeps doing 5x work at 1x pay, and they know it, because the people recruiting them already told them what they're worth.

Six months later they're gone.

I haven't solved this at Single Grain either. I'm asking in public because many of the operators I've met haven't solved it either.

What are you doing about comp? Hit reply i’d love to hear :)

To the person on your team who broke the band,

Eric Siu