The Drumbeat
Employee-Owned Spotlight: Venturity
April 18, 2022
Certified EO is excited to spotlight Venturity Financial Partners, a Dallas-based firm providing outsourced accounting and CFO services to small and growing companies. Since establishing its Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) in 2020, Venturity has embraced the long-term endeavor of building an ownership culture by practicing open management and aligning the success of the company with the well-being of its newly-appointed employee-owners. While the company’s ESOP is relatively new, Venturity’s leadership team has taken key steps in establishing early momentum towards the sustained success of its employee ownership program, both in terms of company culture and wealth building potential for its team members. As a practitioner of The Great Game of Business, Venturity has implemented open-book management and offers ongoing accounting training to its staff, all with the goal of improving the company’s performance and deepening employee engagement (Certified EO previously spotlighted the pioneer of The Great of Business’s practices, SRC Holdings Corporation). Venturity launched in 2001 after the company’s founders identified a critical need among a potential base of clients for outsourced accounting services, especially for smaller, dynamic teams where functions like bookkeeping, reporting, and forward-looking financial planning can be difficult to perform internally at a high level. Having grown significantly over the next 20 years, Venturity took its first step into the community of employee-owned companies by transferring 20% ownership of the company’s shares to its newly-formed ESOP with the goal of moving to 100% employee ownership over the next 10 years. Now with over 45 team members eligible and enrolling in the ESOP, the company’s growth will stand to benefit each individual’s retirement savings, rather than accumulate to a more concentrated group of owners or a third-party ownership group. With a growing demand for outsourced financial services, Venturity offers its clients ongoing support for financial management, as well as more time-bound projects. The company is part of an increasing trend to offer fractional CFO services, where a qualified CFO may be engaged on a part-time or retainer basis as needed. A fractional CFO can offer flexible support to small companies for key decision making areas, including long-term growth planning, strategic troubleshooting, and overseeing an audit or financial reporting process. Beyond the day-to-day work, Venturity’s team is also frequently involved in volunteering time to local schools and charities. The Venturity Cares Committee organizes these efforts, similar to how a communications or cultural committee might organize educational, social, and other programming to build engagement with and understanding of employee ownership topics. The Venturity team has logged nearly 2,600 volunteer hours since 2016, and team members have made nearly $25,000 in charitable contributions over the past five years. Venturity has received additional recognitions for its workplace culture, performance, mission, and impact, including Best and Brightest Companies to Work For, the Dallas Business Journal’s Best Places to Work, and Forbes Small Giants. Venturity became a member of Certified EO in 2021, soon after it launched its employee ownership program. To learn more about the company, visit their website or find them on LinkedIn.
Read More ▶Employee-Owned Spotlight: Mountain Hardware and Sports
March 22, 2022
Certified EO is excited to spotlight Mountain Hardware and Sports, a 100% employee-owned hardware store that offers clothing, home decor, sporting goods, fishing gear, rental machinery equipment, and just about anything to fit a mountain lifestyle. Mountain Hardware has four locations tucked in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northeast California, including two hardware stores and a small equipment rental store in Truckee, just north of Lake Tahoe, and a hardware store in Blairsden, on the southeast edge of Plumas National Forest. Three long-time friends opened the first Mountain Hardware and Sports at the old Gateway center in Truckee in 1977, and in 1991 the store’s owners moved to open a store at one of its current locations right along Donner Lake. In 2001, Mountain Hardware began its transition to becoming employee-owned. Initially 49% employee-owned following the establishment of its Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), the company became majority-EO in 2005, a few years after it opened its Blairsden location. By 2013, the company had acquired Truckee Rents, its equipment rental business, and it had achieved 100% employee ownership. Now with over 100 employee-owners, Mountain Hardware and Sports ties its core values to its shared ownership structure. The company encourages employees to think and act like owners, understanding that daily and weekly contributions can positively impact the company’s performance and the growth of individual ESOP accounts. Last June, Mountain Hardware and Sports celebrated the 8th anniversary of becoming 100% employee-owned (and the 18th anniversary of the team’s first entrants into the ESOP). The company created a video acknowledging the benefits and impact of the ESOP, which won the team an award at The ESOP Association’s 2022 Annual Awards for Communications Excellence. “I think the thing I appreciate the most about being an employee-owned company is now after 18 years of being an ESOP, we’re starting to see accounts mature, and we’re starting to see balances that really are going to have a positive effect on people’s lives,” said one employee-owner in the video. “And that’s the whole concept, that it’s really a redistribution of wealth.” On its blog and YouTube channel, Mountain Hardware and Sports posts about everything from DIY home and garden tips, to camping and hiking guides, and even installing tire cables for snowy terrain. The company remains active in volunteer and charity efforts in Truckee, including an annual memorial golf event held in honor of one of the company’s founders, Dane Skutt. Mountain Hardware and Sports became a Certified EO member in 2017. To learn more about the company, visit its website.
Read More ▶Defining “Employee-Owned”: How We Set Our Certification Standards
March 21, 2022
At Certified Employee-Owned, our mission is to accelerate the creation of an employee-owned economy by building support for employee ownership. Inspired by Fair Trade and Great Place to Work, Kramer Sharp and I started Certified EO in 2016 because we thought certification would coordinate and amplify the voice of the employee ownership movement. As we have grown to over 500 Members, we have seen how employee ownership is an idea that takes many different forms at different companies. Given all the nuance, it’s important to articulate what it means to certify a company as “employee-owned” and how we set this standard. This article walks through our journey to create a specific and clear definition of employee-owned and details what we learned along the way:Why it’s important to define “employee-owned”Themes from over 250 community conversationsWealth building unites our communitySetting a standard that people know and trustWhy it’s Important to Define “Employee-Owned”The idea for Certified EO grew out of my work as a PhD student at Stanford Business School. I joined the Organizational Behavior department in 2013 with an interest in understanding alternative business structures. In my first year, my advisor pointed me in the direction of the academic work on employee-owned companies. I was excited to learn about the model and thrilled that research demonstrated the potential for increased firm performance and better outcomes for employees. While absorbing this work, I had frequent conversations about what I was learning with a long-time friend, Kramer Sharp. The more we talked about employee ownership the more interested we became in this unique business model. We were delighted to find that many companies we knew and loved were employee-owned. We were also inspired by the passionate service providers powering this transformative model. But we kept coming back to the same question: Why had we never heard of this before?Reflecting on our experience, it became clear that a major obstacle for the employee ownership community was lack of visibility. Finding employee-owned companies was a challenge. Some employee-owned companies were talking about it, but many were not. Worse, some companies were saying they were employee-owned when clearly they were not. There was no official list and the closest thing we could find required digging through government fillings. But even that list was incomplete. There simply was no easy way to find employee-owned companies.Kramer and I began thinking about ways to create a bridge between employee-owned companies and the general public. Looking at Fair Trade and Great Place to Work, we realized that certification is a proven model for coordinating and amplifying the voice of a movement. Combining the reach of employee-owned companies would make them the employer of choice for millions of job seekers and make being employee-owned a major differentiator with clients and consumers. But creating a certification program means creating a standard that people know and trust. So before we could start building towards our vision we had to define “employee-owned.”Themes From Over 250 Community ConversationsAt this time, the ESOP model was already over 40 years old. Kramer and I knew that we had to ground the definition of “employee-owned” in the practices and views of the community. We started by connecting with the major trade associations including the National Center for Employee Ownership, The ESOP Association, Employee-Owned S-Corporations of America, and the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives. We attended conferences to speak with service providers including lawyers, accountants, bankers, and consultants who create and administer employee ownership plans. And of course we contacted as many employee-owned companies as possible. Over the course of 2016 we had over 250 conversations about what it means to be employee-owned. It’s no surprise that we heard a variety of perspectives. For some companies employee ownership is about giving everyone a financial stake in the success of the business. WinCo Foods, for example, has had broad-based employee ownership for over 30 years and in the process has created millionaire grocery clerks. Other companies see employee ownership as encompassing both share ownership and employee involvement in operational decision making, for example open-book management. A few companies even see employee ownership as including a say in important governance issues. For example, Worker Cooperatives give their worker-owners equal votes in electing the board of directors. These three aspects of ownership - money, operational decision making and governance - were the common threads running through our conversations with companies and advocates. Wealth Building Unites Our CommunityIt took about five conversations for us to see that it would be impossible to come up with a single definition that would include everything that everyone saw as important. While money, operational decision making, and governance were the common threads, everyone had a different opinion on their relative importance. So we started looking for a baseline. What were the aspects of employee ownership that would be broadly seen as essential? If a company did everything BUT one particular practice, would they still be viewed as employee-owned? With this shift in perspective, one element stood out: wealth building for working people. Everyone we spoke to mentioned wealth building as a critical aspect of employee ownership. We heard many stories of long-time employee-owners in front-line roles building substantial wealth. Companies with diverse employee ownership structures including Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), Worker Cooperatives, Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs), and the various Direct Share Ownership Models all include some combination of profit sharing and capital accounts that help employees build wealth. Others pointed out how broad-based wealth building aligns with the fundamental promise of America as a land of opportunity. While operational decision making and employee involvement in governance can be positive, the wealth building for working people stands apart in importance for individuals as well as our country. Setting a Standard That People Know and TrustWith our direction focused on wealth building, we arrived at a set of standards that captured the common practices and was aligned with historical legislation:Ownership: at least 30% of the company must be owned by employees. Shares held by company founders do not count towards this threshold.Access: reasonable access to ownership must be open to every employee.Concentration: the ownership held in line with #1 and #2 must not be over-concentrated. This is controlled either through a cap on the maximum distribution or a maximum ratio between maximum and median distribution.It’s important to acknowledge that some things get lost when you simplify a complicated concept like employee ownership down to a binary of certified or not. For example, we’ve spoken with a company where employees hold a 10% stake that meets the access and concentration components of our standards. They were quick to point out that it might be much better to own 10% of a successful company than 100% of a failing business. There is merit to that point, but at the same time, 10% is not enough to call a company “employee-owned.” Others have told us that they felt our standards were too low. Why not set the bar at a majority ownership stake? There are a few strategic reasons for an employee-owned company to keep ownership below 50%, for example maintaining government purchasing preferences. The 30% threshold is also aligned with historical legislation, for example Section 1042 of the Internal Revenue Code. Our research shows that if every business became 30% employee-owned, wealth inequality would decrease to historic lows and the wealth of the median household would increase nearly four times. While 30% might sound low to some, it’s a very high bar. According to the U.S. Census Bureau there are roughly 1.3 million firms in America with at least 10 employees. We estimate there are approximately 6,000 companies that meet our certification standards. That means fewer than 1 in 200 businesses met our definition of employee-owned - less than half of one percent! Ultimately the goal of Certified Employee-Owned is to accelerate the creation of an employee-owned economy. Creating a standard that people know and trust is a means to an end. What matters most is that our standard is clear, easy to understand, and applied consistently so that it creates a bridge between the companies and the community. Uniting our voices through certification will help millions of Americans see the value of this model, create a resource that benefits our community, and increase the number of employee-owned companies. There has never been a more important time to build an employee-owned economy, and we’re thrilled that we can do our part through certification.This article was originally posted 3/21/22. It was updated on 1/5/2023.
Read More ▶The Difference Between “ESOP” and “Employee-Owned”
February 16, 2022
If you’ve spent time learning about employee ownership, then you’ve certainly heard of Employee Stock Ownership Plans, or ESOPs. In fact, ESOPs are so common among employee-owned companies that many people use these terms interchangeably. You might be surprised to learn that, while ESOPs are certainly the most common type of plan used by employee-owned companies, there is actually quite a bit of daylight between the two concepts. Not all ESOPs are employee-owned, and not all employee-owned companies have an ESOP. This article walks through the differences between “ESOP” and “employee-owned” including:Quick Background on ESOPsNot all ESOPs are Employee-OwnedMany Employee-Owned Companies Don’t Have an ESOPDefining “Employee-Owned”Quick Background on ESOPsGiven their importance to employee ownership, it makes sense to start with a bit of background information on ESOPs. Since their creation in 1974 as part of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), ESOPs have grown dramatically. According to the National Center for Employee Ownership, there are currently around 6,300 companies with an ESOP. They range in size from dozens of employees to hundreds of thousands and operate in every industry imaginable. The ESOP’s popularity is due to a number of factors, including nearly 50 years of proven success, strong tax benefits, and a fantastic community of advocates and service providers.By law, ESOPs are extremely inclusive. The basic idea behind an ESOP is that it is a trust that owns a portion or all of a company on behalf of a broad-based group of employees. Shares are usually allocated to eligible employees annually, and the eligibility criteria employees must meet to receive a share allocation are very open. Typically employees need to work 1,000 hours in a year to participate, an average of only 20 hours per week. Additionally, ESOP shares are paid out of company profits and are allocated to employees at no cost. These simple and open criteria drive high levels of participation in the plan and ensure that workers at ESOP companies benefit when their business is successful. Not all ESOPs are Employee-OwnedWhile all ESOPs are broad-based, the percentage of total outstanding stock owned by the ESOP varies dramatically from company to company. There is no minimum, and in practice we’ve seen this range anywhere from a fraction of a percent to 100%. Of course, an ESOP that owns even just a tiny piece of a large and successful company can provide a great benefit to employees, especially since employees are not paying for the shares out of their wages or benefits. However, there is a categorical distinction between a company operating a small ESOP as an employee benefit versus a company where the plan owns a substantial portion of the company, perhaps even 100%. In other words, there is a difference between having an ESOP and being employee-owned. Further clarity can be gained by looking at a specific example. When downloading the publicly available Form 5500 data from the Department of Labor and filtering for all companies that indicate they have an ESOP, we see the largest such company by number of active participants is Walmart. Their ESOP is probably a nice benefit for some of the company's employees. However, it is not having the same impact on people as the ESOP at 100% employee-owned WinCo Foods, which has made many front line employees into millionaires. That’s why it’s important to remember that having an ESOPs doesn't always mean a company is employee-owned.Many Employee-Owned Companies Don’t Have an ESOPWhile the ESOP model is the most popular and successful structure used by employee-owned companies, it is not the only option. There are a number of alternatives that companies can use to implement significant and broad-based employee ownership, including worker cooperatives, employee ownership trusts (EOTs), employee stock purchase programs, and equity compensation plans like stock options. We describe each in more detail here. Companies can even implement employee ownership through direct share ownership, though often there are advantages to a more formal structure. Alternative structures play an important role in building an employee-owned economy because not every company is a good fit for an ESOP. The setup and administrative costs of an ESOP can be prohibitive for companies under 40 people. Companies that want to ensure employees have a strong voice in governance might find the worker cooperative to be a better fit. Perhaps the most promising use case for alternative structures is helping smaller companies become employee-owned. For example, in recent years we’ve seen a growing number of EOTs implemented at companies that are too small for an ESOP, an encouraging trend that could greatly expand the employee ownership community. Defining “Employee-Owned”If not all ESOPs are employee-owned and many employee-owned companies don’t have an ESOP, then it begs the question: What does “employee-owned” mean? Answering this question was priority number one when we started Certified Employee-Owned. Our vision from the very beginning has been to create national recognition for employee ownership by making it simple and easy for Americans to find and support employee-owned companies. We quickly realized that, while companies leveraging different ownership structures certainly have distinct administrative and legal concerns, everyone in the employee ownership community would benefit from increased visibility and awareness . With this big-tent vision in mind, we set out to create specific and verifiable criteria to define “employee-owned” that could be applied to any underlying ownership structure. We searched extensively for historical precedent and had over 200 conversations with companies and advocates. Ultimately, we identified financial ownership as a common thread running through legislation and views of advocates from across the space. After accumulating feedback and input, we created a definition of what it means for a company to be employee-owned that focuses on three main concepts:Ownership: At least 30% of the company must be owned by employees (excluding founders)Access: Reasonable access to ownership must be open to every employeeConcentration: Ownership among employees cannot be too concentratedWe have specific practices that we verify under each of these headings, and while we will provide details on both our certification standards and the development process in a future post, it’s important to emphasize that our goal is not to determine who is a “good” or “bad” employee-owned company. There are businesses doing great things with broad-based ownership below our 30% threshold, and there are other companies that would view our standards as too low. It only took about five conversations to realize no definition would ever satisfy everyone, and that’s not the point. The point is to grow the employee-owned economy. Think about what Organic, Fair Trade, and B Corporation have done in terms of awareness and imagine if we could create that for employee-owned companies. A necessary part of having a certification program is a specific and clear delineation between who does and does not meet the standards. Our standards also allow us to create resources that benefit the entire community, for example our Directory of Employee-Owned Companies, which is an up-to-date list of every company that, to the best of our knowledge, meets the above definition of employee-owned. Our approach has the potential to change the game for the employee ownership community, including the ESOP space, and that’s why it’s important to understand the difference between “ESOP” and “employee-owned”.
Read More ▶Employee-Owned Spotlight: SRC Holdings Corporation
January 31, 2022
Certified EO is excited to spotlight SRC Holdings Corporation, a 100% employee-owned remanufacturing company with 10 subsidiaries and operations based across Missouri, Kentucky, and Illinois. SRC has shared company ownership since its founding in 1983, and in 2011 the company became 100% employee-owned. SRC also works to popularize its open-book management practices, known as The Great Game of Business, which promote transparency, integrity, and business literacy among the company’s 1,800 associates. In the early 1980’s, SRC’s first team of managers, including founder and CEO Jack Stack, were at risk of finding themselves out of work when their original parent company, International Harvester, began laying off employees and selling off company assets. SRC’s management made a last-ditch effort to save the operation by buying out their plant, Springfield ReManufacturing, from International Harvester with a bank loan, a transaction that left them dangerously leveraged and still at risk of closing down. But this also opened the door to revamping the ownership and management structure, including introducing an employee ownership program and open-book management practices that focused on sharing financial information with all staff and training them to understand how to read the company’s books. This pivot helped build the company’s ownership culture and tie the contributions of each employee-owner to the financial success of the plant. The company’s stock price had rebounded from $0.10 in 1983 to $13 only five years later, and by 2017 it had paid over $100 million in distributions to employee-owners retiring or leaving the company. SRC serves clients that produce machinery for agricultural, industrial, construction, truck, marine and automotive markets. The core of SRC’s business—remanufacturing, or “reman”—is an industrial process that involves improving previously used, worn, or non-functional equipment into like-new or better-than-new condition. This helps extend a product’s lifecycle, and it diverts valuable and salvageable materials from landfills. The environmental benefits of remanufacturing versus traditional manufacturing processes are significant. The remanufacturing process uses up to 85% less energy, water, and raw materials compared to traditional manufacturing, resulting in SRC’s companies diverting about 70 million pounds of material from landfills each year. SRC continues to expand its lines of business, and a flatter organizational hierarchy helps maintain an entrepreneurial culture that leads to new ventures and innovations in production each year. In February 2021, the company announced $100 million in planned real estate development over the next 10 years, which is expected to bring its manufacturing and warehousing footprint to over 3.5 million square feet. In October 2021, the National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO) announced SRC as a member of its Employee Ownership 100, a list of the largest majority employee-owned companies in the country. Learn more about SRC Holdings, a Certified EO member since 2018, on the company’s website.
Read More ▶10 Reasons Business Owners Have Transitioned to Employee Ownership
January 20, 2022
Since launching Certified Employee-Owned in 2017, I’ve spoken to over 1,000 employee-owned companies. These conversations are the highlight of my day. I love hearing stories about entrepreneurs starting companies and I'm always curious to learn how founders have come across employee ownership. Spending so much time talking to entrepreneurs and leaders in the employee ownership space has shown me a few interesting trends. Most notably, the vast majority of companies I have spoken with did not start out as employee-owned, but transitioned after many years in business. I haven’t kept exact numbers, but I would estimate this is the case with over 95% of the companies I know. While there are as many reasons for conversion as there are founders, there are a few trends that stick out. Here are 10 reasons that stand out as to why business owners have made the transition to employee ownership, along with a paraphrased story for each one that captures the essence of the journey: 1. Keeping it in the family“ Starting this company was my dad’s greatest accomplishment and growing the business has been my life’s work. But none of my kids were interested in taking the reins. I know what can happen when a company is taken over by a strategic or private equity and I didn’t have the heart to do that to people I’ve known my entire life. Transitioning to 100% employee-owned was my way of keeping the company in the family.” 2. Giving our owners partial liquidity“ To me going 30% employee-owned was a no-brainer. I got some liquidity, and now my people have a direct stake in the action, so the company is doing even better. As a bonus I have a built in succession plan. I don’t have any plans to step back, but you never know what will happen and it’s great to have that option.” 3. Continuity through succession“ This company was her baby, she wasn't going to sell it. She really liked the idea of leaving the company in the hands of the employees, because the alternative was going the way of other companies that she had seen bought out and changed completely.” 4. Staying an anchor in our community “Our founder was deeply concerned with what would happen to the local economy. He knew that if he sold to a strategic buyer, they would move the headquarters and maybe even the factory. We’re the biggest employer in the area so that would have devastated the town. By transitioning to EO our founder kept us local and kept the town alive.” 5. Start-up business sharing equity “A lot of start-ups share equity with talented employees in exchange for under-market wages, but my vision for sharing equity in the company was different. I wanted all my dedicated employees to have skin in the game from the beginning. The set formulas for sharing equity with only early employees didn’t work for me.” 6. Aligning employees at a time of growth “After years of start-up hustle, we were finally poised to take our company to the next level, and employees were going to be critical to our growth. We wanted to align the interests of owners and employees by giving employees a stake and a better understanding of what makes our company tick.” 7. Finding alternatives to private equity“ Private equity started knocking at our door and it made us think critically about the future of our company. We believe in our mission, our people, and the services we provide and are not willing to compromise those to get the highest dollar. Some of our shareholders were pressuring us for liquidity, and we needed to figure out how to provide that without overburdening the company with debt.” 8. Mission-driven at our core “We have been mission-first since day one. I started the business to help us transition to a sustainable future. Growing the company and making money has always been an outcome of our success, not a goal. I transitioned us to employee-owned to lock that mission-focus into our DNA. I want everyone here to have a stake in our future and to feel as bought-in as I feel as the founder.” 9. Feeling alone at the top “I did not expect to become a solo entrepreneur running a company by myself. I always wanted to do this as a team. I don’t have a co-founder anymore, and I want everyone to be more bought in and engaged as co-owners of this business.” 10. Democracy at work“ We wanted to be a worker cooperative from the start. It is the only corporate structure that aligns with our values - that each worker should have equal say in the governance of the company. We are in this together and that should be reflected in every aspect of our structure and culture. ”Are you a business owner looking to learn more about employee ownership? A great place to start is our overview.
Read More ▶11 of the 100 Largest Private Companies in America are Employee-Owned
April 13, 2021
Forbes curates a number of interesting lists, among them a list of the largest private companies in America [https://www.forbes.com/largest-private-companies/list/]. Today I was looking through this list and thought: how many of these companies are employee-owned? Using our new Directory [https://www.certifiedeo.com/companies], I found that 11 of the 100 largest private companies on the Forbes list are likely to be employee-owned. Two of them are Certified EO Members: * #23 Wawa * #53 WinCo Foods Nine others have a broad-based ownership program that, to the best of our knowledge, owns at least 30% of the company: * #5 Publix Super Markets * #55 Graybar Electric * #73 Sammons Enterprises * #74 Hensel Phelps Construction * #86 Schreiber Foods * #94 McCarthy Holdings * #96 Swinerton * #97 Kehe Distributors The fact that over 10% of the largest private companies in America are employee-owned is a powerful proof point that employee ownership works! The question for those of us that want to see employee ownership grow is: what would it take to get this number from 11 to 50?
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