Employee Ownership Blog

Loren Rodgers

Finance and Valuation at the Annual Conference

I'm hearing from a lot of our member companies that as we start getting a clearer picture of the coming post-pandemic era, their planning horizons are starting to get longer again. Perhaps in March they were trying to get through the day or the coming week; by fall they were thinking a couple months ahead; and now companies are working to rethink their strategic plans and long-term goals. We've seen this pattern many times over our 40-year history, and in this year's conference we built on that long-term perspective to create sessions that fit this economic moment.

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Corey Rosen

Helping Assess ESOP Feasibility for 40 Years

When I first read about ESOPs 43 years ago as a Capitol Hill staffer, I loved the concept but was discouraged by the complexity. Employee ownership was a cause I wanted to make my own, but I was intimidated by the concept and strange (to me) language. Eventually, I started to get it, but ever since have had a lot of empathy for business owners who, like me then, love the idea of employee ownership but find the process confusing.

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Suzanne Vinson

NCEO Captive Insurance Program Will Launch This Summer

The NCEO and our partners at Scott Insurance have been working hard to launch our ESOP-only captive insurance program. So far, over 75 ESOP companies have engaged in educational sessions, with over 30 participating in one-on-one sessions, and over 20 companies have submitted underwriting data. Companies that have already submitted underwriting data range in size from under 50 eligible employees to over 600, and they are in diverse fields, such as manufacturing, insurance, and distribution.

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Dallan Guzinski

Join Me This February for the Communications Committee Crash Course

The end of 2020 and the start of 2021 has already seen several companies transition their businesses to employee ownership through an ESOP. Just this week, one of the country’s largest and most prominent guitar manufacturers, Taylor Guitars, announced to employees and the world that they had transitioned 100% of the company’s ownership to its employees through an ESOP. I am always thrilled to see such transitions come to fruition, and especially so given what the business world and workers across the country have faced in the past year. And while the notion of employee ownership is certainly exciting for many new and future employee-owners, it’s inevitable that employees will still ask, “But… What the heck is an ESOP?” Taylor Guitars’ president, Bob Taylor, shared the reaction of his employees when the company announced its transition to ESOP ownership, noting that employees said, “This is wonderful! We don’t understand what it means yet, but it’s wonderful.”

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Corey Rosen

Biden Appointee Proposes Office of Employee Ownership

In a new report, Why Aren’t There More ESOPs: Assessing Barriers to ESOP Creation, Jared Bernstein, one of the three people Joe Biden named to the Council of Economic Advisers, urges the new administration to “set up a government office, housed perhaps in the Small Business Administration (SBA) or the Commerce Department, that provides direct assistance to small businesses that want to set up ESOPs or other shared ownership plans.”  

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Corey Rosen

Biden Nominees Have Favored Employee Ownership

President Biden’s nominees to key cabinet posts have favored employee ownership in the past. In 2019, the proposed new SBA administrator, Isabel Guzman, told the California Dream (a collaboration led by local PBS stations), that employee ownership was a good way to respond to the “silver tsunami.” "As these businesses in the silver tsunami start to retire, and look for options, we need to get this information [about employee ownership] out there," she said. NCEO staff later met with Guzman to discuss ways she could use her position as head of the California Office of the Small Business Advocate to promote the idea, and she affirmed her strong support.

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