Culture
Employee-Owned Spotlight: Big Sandy Superstore
March 8, 2023
Big Sandy Superstore is a furniture and appliance company that has been serving customers in Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia since 1953. The company has grown significantly over the years and today, operates 21 stores and employs over 550 people. This formerly family-owned business decided to sell the company to its employees, establishing their Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) in 2006. The ESOP was established by the company's founders as a way to give back to the employees who helped the company grow over the years.At first, there was skepticism about the benefits of the ESOP and employee ownership in general. Over the years, employees have seen just how impactful an ESOP can be. “Creating the ESOP was a win-win for everyone. This was a way to grow the company and take it to the next level,” CEO Trey VanHoose said. “Over the past few years, we’ve had employees surpass $500,000 in their ESOP accounts and some are on their way to $1 million. When people can see that the ESOP can be life-changing, it really puts things in perspective for them. That’s when it became real.”Commitment to Ownership Culture Employee ownership has created a culture of dedication and commitment among their employees, who take pride in their work and the company's success. Employee owners are invested in the success of the company and are motivated to provide excellent customer service. They are knowledgeable about the products and services offered by the company and work hard to ensure customer satisfaction.“Our employees proudly wear their name tags that identify them as being an owner,” Trey said. “By identifying themselves as an owner, customers understand that they have skin in the game. They can expect a higher level of customer service. ”Establishing a strong ownership culture can take time and repetition. From day one, employees are engaged in education about the ESOP and employee ownership. During their three-day new hire orientation, new employees can expect to learn about how the ESOP functions and the benefits of working for an employee-owned company. By partnering with us at Certified EO, Big Sandy Superstore has been able to take advantage of our extensive educational library to complement their own educational materials.“We try to tie everything we do back to employee ownership and how things will benefit the ESOP, which in turn benefits our employee owners,” said David Smith, Director of Sales and Operations. Regularly engaging with employee owners throughout the year keeps employee ownership top of mind. “There are lots of times throughout the year we engage with our employee-owners. From our annual ESOP meeting, to EO Month celebrations, from new hire orientation, we do our best to share knowledge throughout the year. ”Dedicating time and resources to educating the company’s employee-owners can have a real impact on how they work. Trey expended on this idea, “Having buy-in from the employee-owners helps everyone to be unified behind a common goal. Employees have a better understanding of how their actions can affect the bottom line, so they are able to identify things like cost savings opportunities. ”Big Sandy Superstore is a unique employee-owned business in that they have more direct interaction with the public than most employee-owned companies (a majority of employee-owned companies operate business-to-business with clients and customers). Big Sandy Superstore has done a great job at marketing themselves as an employee-owned company not only with their employee name tags, but also things like store signage and social media. To learn more about Big Sandy Superstore, visit their website.
Read More ▶What Does “Employee Ownership” Mean?
September 20, 2022
Employee ownership is in the spotlight. State and federal legislation has recently advanced to promote the model. Articles discussing the advantages of employee ownership have appeared in Forbes, Nonprofit Quarterly, and Harvard Business Review. Mainstream investors are even starting to take notice with large private equity firms exploring how employee ownership could enhance their acquisitions.But what exactly does “employee ownership” mean? The big idea behind employee ownership is to distribute the rights and responsibilities of business ownership more broadly. Generally these rights and responsibilities fall into three categories.1. Ownership & MoneyAll forms of employee ownership involve expanding financial opportunity. Workers build wealth through participation in capital accounts and/or profit sharing. Common examples include stock granted through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), shares bought through an Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP), equity upside accessed through grants of stock options, and cash received through profit sharing distributions from an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT) or Worker Cooperative. Regardless of the structure, employee ownership creates alignment by ensuring that employees benefit financially when their company is successful. A key feature across all forms of employee ownership is that participation must be ”broad-based.” Access to ownership must be open to everyone at the company and the concentration of ownership must be limited. In some cases employees are expected to pay for their ownership stake, but more frequently it is a benefit of employment. The broad-based nature of employee ownership is critical to creating the environment of trust and respect that characterizes successful examples of the model.Stories of workers building life-changing wealth present an inspiring case for employee ownership. Two examples covered in a past post illustrate this well. First is WinCo Foods. After 40 years as an ESOP, the 130 workers at a single store in Corvallis, Oregon had a combined $100M in ownership wealth, and across the company, over 400 front-line employees were “millionaire grocery clerks.” Second is Springfield Remanufacturing Company (SRC). From 1983 through 2017, the company paid nearly $100M in distributions to its employee-owners. SRC’s CEO, Jack Stack highlights one person who “started here in 1983 making $7.50 an hour [and] has now got $1.2 million.” While the plural of “anecdote” is not “data,” most of the ESOPs I have spoken to that are at least 25 years old have created front-line millionaires. To demonstrate that these stories are not one-off examples, but instead point to the transformative potential of employee ownership, I teamed up with Professor Ethan Rouen of Harvard Business School to answer the question: what would happen to wealth inequality if every American business became employee-owned? We found that this shift would reduce wealth inequality to recorded lows and the wealth of the median household would nearly double from $121,760 to $230,076. The potential to build broad-based wealth is the common thread connecting all corners of the employee ownership community. 2. Ownership & Operational Decision MakingThe second major aspect of ownership is operational decision making. Many employee-owned companies set up practices that expand employees’ voice in setting day-to-day processes, encourage them to generate new ideas, or even increase their role in setting the company’s overall direction. Increased involvement in decision making often goes hand-in-hand with education about financial literacy and open book management. The idea is that providing workers with increased agency, access to information about the business, and the knowledge required to use this information can help them better think and act like owners, which will then improve company performance. These practices are often implemented as part of a comprehensive system such as The Great Game of Business, GRITT, or the Entrepreneurial Operating System. As an added benefit, these systems can create a more engaging and enriching environment for employees, which can also increase retention. Academic research has found substantial benefits associated with high-involvement decision making practices at employee-owned companies. Studies over the past few decades have observed higher sales growth, profitability, and survivability. A key takeaway from this work is that financial ownership alone is not enough to alter company performance. These research findings align with intuition. A company's performance is the result of all the actions taken each day by everyone at the company. Because of this, changes in behavior are necessary to see changes in outcomes. Giving employees shares of stock without creating the conditions for behavioral change seems unlikely to impact company performance. That’s why many see employee involvement in decision making as going hand-in-hand with the financial aspects of employee ownership. 3. Ownership & GovernanceThe third major aspect of ownership is governance. At some companies, workers play a role in nominating, electing, and potentially serving on the board of directors. The most common way to implement employee involvement in formal governance is through a worker cooperative. While details vary by company, the key feature of a worker cooperative is that worker-owners elect the board democratically, on a one-person, one-vote basis. In theory, this creates a situation where workers control the organization, and management is formally accountable to the workforce. Based on our list of employee-owned companies, I estimate that currently around 7% of employee-owned companies have some employee involvement in governance.Employee Ownership in PracticeIn practice there are as many different approaches to employee ownership as there are employee-owned companies. For many, employee ownership is purely about wealth-building. But others see the financial aspects of ownership and the day-to-day involvement in decision making as inseparable. The specific meaning of employee ownership can even evolve within the same company over time. For example, a company might begin their employee ownership journey through a succession plan for a departing founder and with an initial focus on long-term wealth building. But as debt is paid down, shares are distributed, and employees start to see what’s at stake, leadership might become interested in increasing financial literacy and opening up the books to help employees become even more engaged as owners. Once we recognize the different facets of employee ownership, a new question arises: what does it mean to say a company is “employee-owned?” This might seem like the same question we asked at the beginning of the article but, as we’ve discussed previously, having some employee ownership doesn’t necessarily make a company employee-owned. Consider a company that distributes a small portion of its stock to executives, or a company that provides increased voice without providing any sort of financial benefit. Are they “employee-owned?”Creating a simple and clear definition of employee-owned was the first major challenge we faced when launching Certified Employee-Owned. After speaking with roughly 250 members of the community, including trade associations, service providers, and of course companies, we arrived at a definition that focused specifically on the financial aspects of employee ownership. We felt this big tent view would maximize our ability to build support for the model while ensuring that employees at companies we certify have the opportunity to build life-changing wealth. You can read the full account of how we set a standard meaning for “employee-owned” here.
Read More ▶Employee-Owned Spotlight: Al. Neyer
June 1, 2022
Certified EO is excited to spotlight Al. Neyer, a 100% employee-owned and Cincinnati-based real estate development company. With offices in Pittsburgh, Raleigh, and Nashville, Al. Neyer has over 125 years of experience delivering commercial, medical, industrial, mixed-use, and residential construction projects throughout the Eastern U.S.Founded in 1894 as a carpentry and contracting company, Al. Neyer — named after the founder’s grandson, Alphonse — steadily grew with each new generation of family owners. By the fifth generation of Neyer family leadership, the firm had added licensed designers and architects to its team and began work developing several industrial parks in Greater Cincinnati.Al. Neyer was an early adopter of the “design-build” approach to completing construction projects, an alternative to the more traditional “design-bid-build” method. Design-bid-build requires project owners to separately contract an architect and general contractor, which can complicate communications between the three parties, or even force the owner to mediate disputes between designers and contractors if they arise. Design-build firms, on the other hand, allow owners to sign a single contract, streamline communications, and often complete projects in a more timely fashion. Al. Neyer implements this approach across its portfolio of clients, which includes REI Co-op and Vanderbilt University..In 2014 the company made the transition from family-owned to employee-owned when it established and funded its Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). The following year, the company appointed its first female president, Molly North, to oversee its expansion into Nashville, its third market, followed by Raleigh in 2019. Now with over 140 employees, all of whom are eligible to join the company’s ESOP and share in the success of its growth, Al. Neyer has its sights set on continued expansion into new markets.The onset of the pandemic in 2020 brough unique challenges and opportunities to Al. Neyer. Following construction shutdowns, a sudden ramp-up of activity in the second half of the year led to an 86% increase in total square footage of construction signings from 2019, followed by another 30% increase in new activity from 2020 to 2021. Since 2014, Al. Neyer has recorded impressive share price growth in its Annual Reports, including a 27% average annual increase between 2014 and 2019. And with the surge of new construction activity in 2020, the company’s share price spiked from $56.42 to $119.55, more than doubling the value of the shares held by employee-owners.Beyond Al. Neyer’s financial success, the company has shown steady commitment to its communities, including over $450,000 in donations and sponsorships granted in 2021. Al. Neyer has also received several awards for its workplace culture, including multiple designations from the Cincinnati Business Courier’s Best Places to Work award and a Top Place to Work award four times since 2017.Al. Neyer became a Member of Certified EO in 2022. If you are a Certified EO Member and would like to see your company’s story featured in a future spotlight article, please contact your Membership Manager.
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