The “ESOP-Owned S corporation” structure offers truly remarkable advantages that can transform a business into a tax-exempt, for-profit entity. An S corporation whose stock is held in an ESOP, of course, pays no federal income tax (and little or no state income tax) at the corporate level…
In December, my family finalized a very personal, and we hope impactful, gift titled, J.R. Beyster Papers, to UCSD Library’s Special Collections. After about one year of pre-processing, the collection includes more than 200 boxes of documents covering more than 50 years of hundreds of advanced scientific innovations, small- to billion-dollar business experiments, and discontinued to transformational government program development.
In 1993, Mack Hembree, a successful real estate businessman, was invited to invest in opening a business that he had some commonly held reservations about. The business was a pawn shop… By fostering and aligning employee satisfaction, collaboration, and commitment at every level, Mack has developed an ownership culture that differentiates Gems N’ Loans from its peers and has been instrumental in the company’s success.
When structured and maintained properly, the 100 percent ESOP-owned S Corporation can be a powerful force of employee ownership…
This Fortune Magazine video describes employee ownership at Publix Super Markets, the largest employee-owned company operating in the United States.
The authors offer a bipartisan exploration of employee ownership, its history, and the simple, common sense policies to help this proven wealth building approach grow exponentially.
This course is presented from the perspective of the entrepreneur and employee owner. The seven week course will cover the critical steps of equity and employee ownership; founding your own company or joining a start–up, successfully navigating funding rounds, deploying your equity to incentivize employees and encourage long–term growth, or negotiating through an exit.
This paper by Jared Bernstein shows that employee ownership appears to have a small equalizing impact on wealth and wage distributions.
The consolidation and sale of some beloved brands to Big Beer has raised eyebrows and piqued new questions about the industry’s identity. The good news is the industry is still expanding with more than 4,000 U.S. craft breweries, over 100 in San Diego alone, and there is an opportunity for employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) to play a larger role in the industry’s future.
The purpose of this brief article is to suggest an interview script that reflects a list of areas that an ESOP company should want to understand completely before handing over this extremely important role to an outsider…
In this paper, we first examine whether Huawei has an advantage over ZTE following the strategic restructurings in 2011, and then retest the hypothesis on the positive effect of an ESOP on Huawei’s competitive position…
A favorite question of mine for any CEO: What’s the toughest thing about your business? I guarantee you any executive in the supermarket industry will rank among his or her top headaches the hiring and retention of good people, in an industry where service quality increasingly is the mark of differentiation, and worker turnover is … Read More
This interview with Martin Staubus discusses employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs). As Executive Director of the Beyster Institute at UCSD, Staubus has extensive experience in workplace issues and the challenges and opportunities of implementing ESOPs.
This report has two goals. The first goal is to answer questions about undue risk in order to prevent companies from adopting employee ownership structures that endanger workers and jeopardize the collective benefits of broad-based sharing. The second goal is to help create widespread support for policies that would encourage greater adoption of beneficial employee … Read More
Profit-sharing plans are one way to address the global issues of income inequality and uneven wealth distribution while increasing employee engagement. One company, the Chinese telecom Huawei, has a successful employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) that demonstrates such incentives can be good for both employees and the business.
MONDRAGON, the largest cooperative in the world, and the inspiration for several U.S. cooperatives, faces a challenge in 2013 after one of its largest cooperatives votes to leave the group and another goes bankrupt.
Like many ESOPs, the Macfadden Employee Stock Ownership Plan was established as a means of transitioning ownership from the company’s founder to its employees. Just over 12 years later, the Macfadden ESOP now owns 100 percent of the company…
For the last several years, there has been a constant and very predictable discussion taking place regarding the sustainability of ESOP companies…
When a company does well, so should its workers. American workers have helped the economy grow by becoming more productive. Yet, even as productivity has increased, many middle- and working-class households have experienced stagnant wages and declining household incomes over the past few decades. This means workers currently receive only a small share of the … Read More
The Berrett-Koehler (BK) case highlights the efforts of a competitively successful, mission-driven, socially responsible publishing company to preserve its values, culture and practices while ensuring continued future success. The case provides an opportunity to cover corporate governance topics such as: ownership structures, shareholder relations, CEO and organizational succession planning, and board roles and responsibilities.
To survive, Atlas changed from an external to an internal growth strategy. The smoothness of the transition could at least be partially attributed to a set of internal strategies that were unusual for a commodity/cost-driven industry. They included democratic governance and employee ownership…
By taking the great example of regional ESOP promotion pioneers, engaging the University of California in the effort and working to engage other educational institutions as well as leaders in business and the local employee ownership community, we believe that it will be very possible to build strong regional support for the idea that communities ought to be the most active supporters of employee ownership…
Two of the most common industries to have established ESOPs are construction and manufacturing, combining to make up 35 percent of the 1,600 companies represented by the ESOP Association…
Ultimately, the success of your venture will be determined not by your efforts alone but by the performance of the cast of people — employees, partners, or associates — that you assemble. So, if there is a strategy that can help you get more out of the people on whom you depend and also boost your organizational horsepower, you owe it to yourself to take a serious look. A policy of sharing equity with employees that is designed and used wisely can be just that strategy.
William H. (Bill) Carris set a deliberate purposeful course for the whole system change that he deeply desired for his employees. The Carris transformation, innovative in its own right, provides examples of change from being traditionally owned, managed and governed to having shared ownership, participatory management and shared governance by the whole…