New Report on Business Owner Perspectives on Selling to Employees

A new report by Adria Scharf and Matt Mazewski of Rutgers and Oyindamola Ijewere of Wilmington University, Business Owner Perspectives on Selling to Employees: Insights from In-Depth Interviews (PDF), chronicles 24 stories of why business owners decided to sell to an employee ownership plan. While most sold to an ESOP, there are also examples of sales to worker cooperatives and employee ownership trusts. The 46-page report also describes how these plans work. 

Thomas Ruper of NHS Northstar in Chisholm, Minnesota, expressed the most common explanation for selling to an ESOP: preserving the legacy of the company and honoring the people who helped build it. After receiving an acquisition offer, they needed to decide what to do. “We’re sitting around the table and we’re saying: all of these people that have been with us for 20 or 25 years could be gone…We’re going to sell this thing, but all of these people who helped us along the way—they could all be gone.” An ESOP was a great option.

Jane Hileman, the former owner of American Reading Company in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, said of other potential buyers that “They come in, they hand you money, and you go away. You don’t have to hear from them again. But can you sleep at night? I wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night. I would have felt like my whole life had been wasted and I had thrown it all away to get rich.”

Not all the owners set up their plans when they were ready to retire. Kristopher Amplo, owner of J.C. Steel Erectors in New York, completed a 49% ESOP sale in 2025 while still in his 40s. “Many think an ESOP is just for the 65-year-old looking to retire,” he says, “but it’s actually a tremendous opportunity for younger owners like me, too—to take some money off the table and give employees a stake in the business.” Mike Hart of EEA Consulting Engineering set up an ESOP over 20 years ago and gradually sold his stock until the company became 100% employee-owned in 2026.

The tax benefits of an ESOP helped, too. Jim Balestrieri, the former owner of 1,800-employee MyPath in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, was primarily focused on retaining the legacy and independence of his company. But he also noted that “there are some darn good financial reasons for doing this. I don’t subscribe to the idea that you get more money by not going with an ESOP.”