Employee Ownership Blog

Corey Rosen

New Report Identifies 53 Funds Focused on Investing in Employee-Owned Companies

A new report by Curt Lyon and Julie Menter of Transform Finance, Employee Ownership: Overview for Mission-Oriented Investors, identifies 53 funds in the U.S. and Canada that invest partly or entirely in employee-owned companies. Twenty-two of these funds focus only on employee ownership and target raising $1.6 billion to invest. The other funds, which target raising $3.8 billion, invest only some of their assets in employee ownership companies. Five funds focus just on ESOPs, while the others focus on non-ESOP equity sharing.

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Ramona Rodriguez-Brooks

Fall Forum Keynote Sneak Peek: Three Leadership Strategies for Employee-Owned Businesses

This September in Indianapolis, I’ll have the honor of joining Jen Briggs on the Fall Forum main stage for our keynote conversation, “Brewing Potential: Leadership Strategies for Employee-Owned Businesses.” Jen is an insightful and experienced leader, and we will present a candid “beer with the boss”-style keynote focused on building effective leadership that prioritizes high-performance culture. As we start our engines and prepare to #racetoIndy, I’d like to share a few of the landmark themes Jen and I plan to explore in the keynote.

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Madelyn Hammack

National Economic Council Hosts White House Convening on Worker Ownership

On July 25, the National Economic Council (NEC) hosted a meeting on employee ownership in the White House compound that gathered representatives from federal agencies, legislative offices, and the employee ownership community, including the NCEO’s Loren Rodgers. As Joseph Blasi, speaking as a representative of the Treasury Department, noted, never before has a presidential administration hosted such a prominent inter-agency meeting on employee ownership. 

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Madelyn Hammack

State of New Jersey Partners with Rutgers University to Promote Employee Ownership

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA) has announced a significant collaboration with the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR) to foster employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) across the state. This partnership aims to create educational and informational programs to increase the number of New Jersey businesses implementing the ESOP model. Professor Bill Castellano, Executive Director of the New Jersey/New York Center for Employee Ownership, will be leading the charge. “A large percentage of retiring business owners have few succession plan options, and don’t realize they can sell the company to their employees instead of closing up shop,” he said. “Employee ownership strategies save jobs and help to keep the business and the local economy going.”

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Corey Rosen

North Carolina Law Is First in U.S. Qualifying ESOPs for Historically Disadvantaged Contracting Preferences

The North Carolina legislature has passed and the governor has signed S. 802 (PDF), an infrastructure finance bill that also includes an unrelated provision allowing ESOPs in which at least 51% of the participants are “minority persons or socially and economically disadvantaged individuals” to qualify for the state’s historically underutilized business set-aside program. The law states that “an ESOP company applying for certification as a historically underutilized business shall provide an attestation that it meets the requirements of this subdivision together with such documentation supporting the attestation as may be required by the Secretary." The law became effective on July 1, 2024.

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