Two weeks ago an entrepreneur was asking me about the amazing employee benefits offered by Pardot. Specifically, he wanted to offer more benefits in his startup, but couldn’t afford all the ones Pardot offered, so he was interested in how I would prioritize the Pardot benefits based on how much value they added. Now, we didn’t survey team members to get a precise understanding of the value of each benefit, so this is an educated guess.
Tier 1 Benefits (most value)
- Health insurance
- Dental insurance
- 401k profit sharing plan
Tier 2 Benefits
- Healthy snacks and drinks
- Short term disability
- Long term disability
- Tuition reimbursement
- Vision insurance
Tier 3 Benefits
- Catered Monday lunch
- Catered daily breakfast
- Full-time on-site massage therapist
- Wellness bucks (e.g. for a gym membership)
Note: Check out Liazon as a service to offer a marketplace of benefits for employees (e.g. standard health insurance as well as more unusual offerings like pet insurance).
Finally, amazing benefits should be icing on the cake of an awesome corporate culture. It’s important to build a strong culture first as a priority over great benefits. Once the team is in place, find out what benefits matter most to them.
What else? How would you prioritize different types of employee benefits?
David Cummings on Startups 
Stock options?
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I just spent a week in Silicon Valley meeting with entrepreneurs and investors. One perk we saw whether at a 30-person startup or Google was in-house chefs. Healthy, communal lunch without wasted travel time. Another one gaining popularity was no vacation policy, or, in other words, unlimited vacation time. Turns out people don’t abuse it and the company no longer needs to carry accrued vacation time as a liability.
David – I would like to introduce you to our firm if you are interested in learning more about us.
Here’s our website: http://www.empoweredbenefits.com Thanks, Ed
[Description: Macintosh HD:Users:Brad:Documents:Marketing:Logo:eb_logo_mark.eps]
Ed Thomas. Chief Distribution Officer.
Empowered Benefits
ethomas@empoweredbenefits.com | (o) 704.369.0187 | (m) 704.968.8649
From: David Cummings on Startups <comment-reply@wordpress.com> Reply-To: David Cummings on Startups <comment+c34ql38v-spy9hj2nlk_x0@comment.wordpress.com> Date: Wednesday, November 13, 2013 11:18 PM To: Ed Thomas <ethomas@empoweredbenefits.com> Subject: [New post] Prioritizing Amazing Employee Benefits
David Cummings posted: “Two weeks ago an entrepreneur was asking me about the amazing employee benefits offered by Pardot. Specifically, he wanted to offer more benefits in his startup, but couldn’t afford all the ones Pardot offered, so he was interested in how I would prioriti”
I am glad you mentioned building a good organizational culture first!
Those are very cool benefits that are bound to make employees happy, only if they were offered at my company.