I work for a small business and the owners are pretty cheap. Every year we get bonus and a small raise, but compared to the profit they makes, it's pretty negligible considering the fact that there are only 4 employees to distribute the profit among. But compared to my prior jobs working for bigger firms with several thousands of employees, I get a better chunk here obviously.
This year we had several clients upgrade to a later version of our application and thereby there has to be at least a million dollar revenue/profit for our firm. In that case, should I ask for a better bonus/raise? In the past, we received like 10k(bonus + raise) per employee when the owners clearly made well above half a million dollars profit.
I am not sure how bonuses/raises are calculated especially for small businesses. 10k is a good amount, but for a small business making million in profit, is it reasonable to ask for more?
Adding some details to clarify certain issues raised by the comments.
It's an IT firm which has been in the market for over 25 years. The current owners bought the company a little over 10 years or so. The firm was already successful and a leading competitor on the market for our specific domain. So, the current owners didn't do any leg work to set up/establish the firm to begin with. They did cut down the resources after acquiring to increase profit instead of investing more in the firm. Their idea was always to invest less and make profit somehow out of it. We(the employees) comes up with new ideas for functionalities/features that can be added to the application to make it more marketable as the owners are more like sales people who don't have much clue about the application and just worried about making profit.
So, the answer is yes, we do play a significant role in making the product more marketable, do demos for clients and so on.