Eva Lianos
Nobody came to Detroit to sit back and listen. When NCEO members from across the country filed into the 2026 Repurchase Obligation Workshop, presented in partnership with Chartwell Financial Advisory, they brought their distribution policies, their plan documents, and a stack of questions they'd been saving up. For two days, the room worked.
Timothy Garbinsky
It’s a refrain that’s worth repeating: the strength of employee ownership isn’t in valuation methodologies, repurchase obligation studies, succession plans, or finance terms. It’s not found in plan documents or committee meeting minutes or proactive governance. The strength of employee ownership is found in the way all those things work in concert with the workers themselves and the work they do to change lives. And the best way to make that impact, that strength clear to people, be they potential new hires or local business owners or economic developers or to family around the dinner table, is through storytelling.
Kimberly McCourtney
CEO succession planning is one of the most important responsibilities of an ESOP board of directors. But how prepared is your board for a transition you don’t see coming?
Corey Rosen
A new report by Matt Helmer of the Aspen Institute, Employee Ownership: An Economic and Workforce Development Strategy for State and Local Governments, provides a comprehensive look at how state and local governments can encourage more employee ownership. Ideas include outreach programs, funding for technical assistance, revolving loan funds to help finance transactions, worker training programs, contracting preferences, and removing regulatory barriers that make it difficult to form employee-owned companies in certain kinds of businesses.
Corey Rosen
The Massachusetts Center for Employee Ownership, part of the Massachusetts Office of Business Development, now offers partial stipends for pre-conversion technical assistance to explore or structure a transition to ESOP or worker cooperative ownership. The program will cover “50% of approved costs for services provided by a MassCEO-approved technical assistance provider, up to $25,000 for an ESOP project and $12,500 for a worker cooperative project.” The state has approved a very limited number of providers under the program: currently three for ESOPs and four for worker cooperatives. The funds are not just limited to feasibility studies. They can be applied to any of the legal, trustee, financial, or appraisal services a company chooses. Details are available on MassCEO’s website.
Corey Rosen
Bill would provide outreach support and feasibility funding
On a 48-1 vote on October 5, the Pennsylvania Senate passed Senate Bill 478. The bill establishes an Office of Employee Ownership in the Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED); creates an advisory board with representatives from business, labor, finance, legal, academia, and government; and establishes a grant and loan program to help fund feasibility studies and other preliminary activities. The bill requires the appointment of an Employee Ownership Advocate with the DCED to oversee the program. The bill does not authorize any specific amount of funding for the program but authorizes funding from several sources, including the Pennsylvania Small Business First Fund.
NCEO Events & Webinars
Young workers bring fresh energy, high expectations, and a strong desire for purpose to the workplace. In a recent NCEO Community Conversation, four panelists from varying perspectives explored one question: what helps employee-owned companies recruit and retain people early in their careers? The panel featured Laura Isaacs, ESOP administrator at Rosendin; Liza Shifrin, NCEO senior researcher and data analyst; Andrew Skidmore of 4Creeks, who offered the view of a younger employee-owner; and moderator Tim Garbinsky, director of partnerships at the NCEO.
Corey Rosen
Teaching employees to understand business is an important part of ownership culture. One way to do this is through business games. This member-exclusive article explores how Renée Mundell of ESOP-owned Radian Research worked with artificial intelligence to come up with this business game. The documents describe how the game works and include a scoring sheet. The basic idea of the game is to present a business scenario and then let employees choose between four different ways to spend money, including growth, employee bonuses and compensation, infrastructure, and paying down debt. The game is played in multiple rounds with a dedicated metric to keep score of the effectiveness of each employee's investment decision. The employee gets a positive or negative score to carry on to the next round based on the prior round's decision.
Even if you choose not to use this game, the approach Renée uses here may give you ideas on how to create your own game.
The game documents include a more detailed description of the game, the scenario, and score sheets. They are available to NCEO members in our document library's section on ESOP communications.
Corey Rosen
Most owners who sell to an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) are focused more on legacy and values than price. They have spent much of their lives building a great business and want to see the people who have helped build it carry it forward. Other owners, however, want to consider all their options and may be concerned that selling to an ESOP means giving up significant value. They may have heard that selling to an ESOP means giving up some of what they could get by selling to another buyer. A new NCEO paper coauthored by NCEO founder Corey Rosen and by Regina Carls and Eric Zaiman of J.P. Morgan, How Proceeds from ESOP Sales Compare to Those from Other Buyers (PDF; also see the embedded version below), shows that selling to an ESOP can often match or exceed the financial benefits from selling to another buyer.
