Corey Rosen
Ken Baker, the CEO of Southampton, PA-based NewAge Industries, has donated $3 million to Montgomery County Community College to start the Baker Center of Excellence for Employee Ownership and Business Transformation. The Center will promote and provide resources on ESOPs and other employee-employer partnerships. It is the largest gift in the college’s 56-year history.
Dallan Guzinski
Having a great corporate culture doesn’t necessarily mean you have a great ownership culture. In fact, a company that recently took the NCEO’s Ownership Culture Survey received feedback from employees that scored above average on just about every aspect of its culture compared to other ESOP companies in our employee survey database. Despite such positive feedback in all these areas, the company’s results were below average on survey items focused on ESOP understanding and ownership identity. For many employees, the ESOP benefit seemed distant and didn’t feel meaningful when it came to their day-to-day work.
Loren Rodgers
The Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing invites applications from doctoral students and pre/post tenure scholars for the 2021–2022 research fellowship competition.
Loren Rodgers
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.
Jordan Boone
The NCEO is proud to serve the employee ownership community as a nexus for education, networking, solidarity, and growth.
Corey Rosen
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.
Loren Rodgers
Several of our member reported receiving an email this morning from a sending called "Web Cargo" claiming to be the NCEO. This is not from us.
Suzanne Vinson
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.
Dallan Guzinski
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.”
