This is the very definition of a Bro move. Nevzat Aydin is the founder and CEO of Turkish food delivery company Yemeksepeti. Earlier this year, he sold the company to a German food delivery site called Delivery Hero for $589 million. But instead of being a greedy Scrooge McDuck with his money, he decided to generously pay out $27 million of the earnings to his 114 employees.
Total bonuses are worth about $237,000, with Aydin evaluating how much each employee received based on “performance, how long they had worked for the firm, and their ‘future potential in the company,'” according to CNN. Only employees who have been with the 15-year-old company for two years were eligible.
Awesome, but — ooof — think for a second about how much it’d suck if you started working at Yemeksepeti in August 2013.
Aydin explained his philosophy of sharing the fruits of the company’s labors with the people who made it all happen, telling a Turkish newspaper “we did this because if there is a success, we have accomplished it altogether.” Hell yeah, team work.
“The success of companies like Delivery Hero and Yemeksepeti is based on amazing company cultures where tremendous people always walk the extra mile,” spokesman Bodo von Braunmuehl said.
“We have in the past, and will in the future, continue to also share some of the success with those,” he said.
…
“I believe in team work and I believe success is much more enjoyable and glorious when shared with the rest of the team,” [Aydin] said.
Here’s another interesting fact about the Yemeksepeti employees receiving these bonuses, via:
Aydin’s employees are paid between $1,000 and $2,000 a month. That means the average payout is worth roughly 150 times their monthly wage, and tops the average Wall Street bonus for 2014 by $65,000.
$237,000 is a game changer for a lot of people, especially in a country like Turkey where wages are so low. Aydın said Emotional reactions via Hurriyet Daily News:
There were emotional reactions to the decision, which meant more than $200,000 per employee, Aydın said.
“Some employees cried, some screamed, some wrote letters of thanks,” he said. “There were emotions, because you affect the lives of the people. People can buy homes, cars. They can immediately do something otherwise they could not with monthly wages of 3,000-5,000 Turkish Liras. It was a good thing; I wish we could have given them more.”
That’s awesome. Hope Yemeksepeti’s employees use that money to do something meaningful and set themselves up for financial security down the road. Meanwhile, business continues to boom for Yemeksepeti.com, even after the sale. Via Hurriyet Daily News:
“Many people said ‘are you crazy?’ when we started the company in 2000 with an investment of $80,000,” he said. “But when you offer the Turkish people the right product in the right way, they adapt to changes. Now we get over 100,000 orders a day and make over 3 million transactions a month.”
The business world needs more bosses like Aydin. What a Bro.