How A Company Pays Every Employee $80k A Year With Full Benefits & A 4-Day Workweek But Still Remains Profitable
People say it can't be done, but they're proving that it not only works, it works better.
Sonya Passi, Chani Nicholas / chaninicholas.com; Blazenka Babic, Dzmitry Dzemidovich / Canva When we talk about the need for living wages and better work-life balance in our jobs, the debate always seems to boil down to a single issue: profitability.
Many believe it's impossible to still make money while treating employees fairly. But one company is proving that the opposite is true.
Astrology media company CHANI pays every employee $80k a year and is turning a profit hand over fist.
Chani Nicholas is the creator of tech and media company CHANI, named after the wildly popular astrologer of the same name. Nicholas had been a prolific online and private astrologer for years, as well as the author of the book "You Were Born for This: Astrology for Radical Self-Acceptance."
But in 2020, she decided to take things to the next level, forming a media company and launching an astrology app, CHANI.
From the get-go, she and her partner and CEO, Sonya Passi, made it a priority to create a workplace where employees were compensated in a way that might seem revolutionary to many.
CHANI not only pays every employee $80k a year, but also gives other benefits like menstrual leave and stipends for 'growing wealth.'
Recently, a screenshot from a job posting went viral because the compensation package it detailed seemed almost too good to be true.
The irreverently named X/Twitter account "[Expletive] You I Quit," which focuses on work culture and issues like fair compensation and unions, hailed it as "what a good company looks like" and said, "this needs to be the rule instead of the exception."
Photo: Twitter/X
A sleuth in the comments quickly uncovered the screenshot as having come from one of CHANI's job postings. It lists a downright utopian compensation package: $80k a year, a four-day workweek, full benefits, and 7 weeks of company holidays plus unlimited vacation.
That alone is enough to make most of us drool, but as a "queer, feminist-led tech and media company," CHANI's compensation offerings also include benefits like "unlimited menstrual leave" and "gender-based violence leave," as well as stipends for tech upgrades, "personal growth," and investing in order to "grow wealth."
CHANI has remained not just profitable but extremely successful, and its CEO says its generous compensation is precisely why.
CEO Sonya Passi, who is also Nicholas' wife, is also the founder of a non-profit called FreeFrom, which focuses on financially assisting victims of gender-based violence and consulting with companies to create workplaces that are more inclusive of survivors.
She and Nicholas leveraged this experience in creating CHANI, and 5% of their profits go to supporting FreeFrom as well.
Still, the point of CHANI is, like any company, ultimately to make money, even if its goals are altruistic. Passi and Nicholas have found that their revolutionary compensation not only doesn't stand in the way of profit, but Passi says it's the key to their profitability in the first place.
“The quality of work that [an organization] can do in the world when the people who work with you are taken care of — and when you are generating abundance for more than yourself — is so much greater than when you're driven only by the bottom line,” she told Forbes in a 2023 profile.
Passi said that what keeps the business world from fairly compensating employees is a 'scarcity mindset' she and Nicholas refuse to accept.
“If we didn't have the numbers to back [our compensation] up, I think a lot of people would roll their eyes and say, ‘Well that's cute,’" Passi told Forbes, "but every single month since the app launched our numbers have grown."
Indeed, CHANI isn't just profitable, it's a downright gold mine. Since its founding, the company has grown by 50% every year, its app has surpassed one million downloads, and its staff has grown from three people in 2020 to 35 today — and counting.
And at the recent Lesbians Who Tech conference, where Passi and Nicholas were invited to speak, they revealed that they earned back the money invested in launching CHANI in their first month of business.
Passi said she and Nicholas' refusal to buy into the notion that a company must be run as cheaply as possible in order to make money was precisely how they've been able to succeed.
"I think living in a capitalist world, we are so indoctrinated with a scarcity mindset, and I refuse to invest in a scarcity mindset," Passi told Forbes.
She elaborated on this philosophy at Lesbians Who Tech, saying that CHANI is proof that "it’s not good for business to exploit people, to extract labor, to have turnover with people burning out and leaving and having to rehire and retrain.”
It seems like creating environments where workers' bandwidth can be focused on work instead of survival, and a workforce that wants to stay at their jobs instead of constantly bouncing to the next trying to get a leg up — you know, like how things used to be — might be a better business model after all.
Here's hoping more business leaders take notice.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.