I do not know the stats, but within my circle of friends that have businesses most of us have profit sharing plans of some sort. I try to share the profits as often as possible. We have had bonuses for weekly output for 10 years and now I am trying to change to more of a Nucor style pay system. See http://www.nucor.com/story/prologue/ . In comparison I have a friend who has a 401K profit sharing program and all the bonus goes to that. He has had a couple of guys retire (mechanics who serviced the trucks) and they had over $100,000 each in their retirement accounts. It was the only savings they had, beyond the value of their tools and 10 year old trucks.

I disagree with my friend a little - I want my people to see the efforts of their work immediately. So they get the bonus immediately, even if I don't get paid for 60 days. Someone should disrupt the setting up of 401K for small business, make it a 5 minute sign up. At this point I have not taken the time or effort to set one up for my team. That is in the plan for 2015.

Our business is in a war for talent, just like Silicon Valley, it is just that the stakes are smaller. My fastest welder easily puts out more than triple what my slowest welder (former) ever did. The robot is three times faster than the fast guy. So I need to find someone talented enough to program a 7-axis robot, as well as a talented enough welder to understand jigging, metal expansion, automated clamps, can make a nice appearing weld (much harder than you think, #weldporn), and this has not been easy. In fact it has not been possible, so I use an in-house fabricator for the jigs, and an outside consultant to program the robot ($75 an hour). In order to interst a person with that much talent (they always have MANY job options) I have to have a program that they can see how they can earn an outsize salary. This is the motivation to go Nucor.

Nucor pay is 66% team incentive and 33% salary. I am going to a $320 per week base, with a percentage of total weekly sales of all parts of the company (some people work on all products, some on half). Half of the net profit at the year end will be split, and we already have a health benefit for all employees full and part time. We also offer up to 12 weeks vacation a year, but nobody has gone over 4 weeks ever. I hope that my people who make $600 a week now will be earning $1000 a week next year. The way the pay is structured, if we can increase output without increasing head count then this will occur. We have invested in automation, and I am currently working on a way to use cheap Arduino/Beaglebone CNC on our manual equipment. Most of our competitors manufacture in low wage countries, while I would like to stay in the US.

Wages are low in Tucson and if I could offer blue collar jobs for $50K per year then I would have a thousand applicants for every job. My little company is no different than any other. There is lots of talk of the 10X developer on HN, but really I think the discussion should be more about 10X PEOPLE. I need the 10X people too. I have had 20+ people over the years work in my office for me and three of them were 10X people. I only have one like her now, with a 21 year old who looks promising as the other. These are the kind of people that you can throw a new hairy problem to with no explanation and they can get it done. The Valve Handbook would call them T shaped people. Paul Graham would call them relentlessly resourceful. To me they are the "I got this" people. I tell them the problem, the tell me that they got it, and I can go on to the next issue with faith that the problem will be resolved come hell or high water. These people are rare in every discipline and the difference they can make is transformative. Your world changes as soon as you hire them. When they leave, your business just seems to run less smooth. Talent matters in every business.

I also realized that I would not work at my place. There was no possibility of a large enough upside to be interesting to me. There is as an owner of course, but I did not have a defined clearly explained program for my people telling them how to get to a 6 figure payday. So that is on the agenda. To create a job that I would want to apply for in the sense of future upside in pay, personal growth or something. It seems a silly thing to have overlooked for 10 years but that is the way things happen in business.

Like I said, I don't know the stats. I don't know if I am an exception or fairly common in my thinking. It doesn't matter though, I am merely trying to solve the pain of finding good people. Share the upside and the talented ones want to work with you. Keep it to yourself and watch them leave to your competition or to become your competitor themselves and take your best staff.