Key Takeaways
ACP International became the first Employee Ownership Trust (EOT) in the State of Texas in 2022.
Founder Joe Nussbaum chose an EOT over private equity, a strategic sale, a family handoff, and an ESOP because it was the only structure that could keep ACP debt-free, headquartered in Arlington, and protected from a future resale.
EOT Advisors, founded by Chris Michael, is the first U.S. firm dedicated to Employee Ownership Trusts and guided ACP through valuation, deal structuring, tax planning, financing, documentation, fiduciary setup, and employee communications.
An Employee Ownership Trust differs from an ESOP in three core ways: no ERISA oversight, no repurchase obligation, and structural permanence that prevents future boards from selling the company.
Joe Nussbaum is staying on as President through 2028 and has become a public advocate for employee ownership.
When Joe Nussbaum woke up one morning in 2021 and decided it was finally time to think seriously about succession, he already knew what he didn't want.
He had watched too many fellow founders sell their companies to private equity and live to regret it. The deals worked on paper. The wires cleared. Then came the cuts: layoffs at the plant, headquarters quietly relocated, broken promises to long-tenured employees, vendors, and customers left to absorb the disruption.
As Joe would later put it in his own letter to ACP's people, the seller "ended up with a fat wallet but a broken heart."
After 36 years of building ACP International from a used 1972 single-wide trailer house in Arlington, Texas, into a 72,000-square-foot manufacturing operation serving the fiber optic, telecom, pipeline, utility, and signage industries across the country, Joe wasn't going to let that be ACP's ending.
So, he found a different path. In 2022, with EOT Advisors as his transition partner, ACP International became 100% employee-owned through an Employee Ownership Trust and the first EOT in the State of Texas.
This is the story of how that happened.
The Start: A Single-Wide Trailer House in Arlington
ACP began in April 1986 as American Communication Products. Joe and his wife Becky Nussbaum bought a used 1972 single-wide trailer ("before trailers improved to mobile homes, and before mobile homes improved to manufactured housing," as Joe likes to put it), set it up in Arlington, and turned the dining room into ACP's first headquarters. They worked side by side, mainly, Joe says, because there wasn't room to work back to back.
There were two products and two people. The first year barely broke even. But ACP made it through, and that was enough.
Slow Growth, Long Tenures
The company didn't grow fast, and that turned out to be the secret.
Year after year, Joe and Becky reinvested profits, stayed debt-free, hired carefully, and added product lines. By 1988, ACP had its first leased plant and its first employees. Two of those original hires, Judy Schuchman and Ginger Biagiotti, are still named publicly on the company's About page decades later, a small detail that says a lot about how ACP thinks about its people.
By 1992, the company owned its building. In 2007, it moved into the 72,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Arlington that it occupies today.
Ask anyone at ACP how long they've been there, and the answer usually comes back in decades, not years. The company brags about it openly on its About page, and the brag holds up. Plenty of the people Joe and Becky hired in the late '80s and early '90s spent their whole working lives at ACP before retiring, and the ones who came after them tend to stick too.
A Family of Brands, From 1863 Onward
Along the way, Joe quietly built a family of brands:
VIP (acquired 2002): A Houston-based tag and label manufacturer, ACP's first acquisition and a way to extend the company's reach into industries beyond telecom.
Porter Graphics (acquired 2003): Parts of the New Braunfels printing operation, folded into ACP to expand its product range.
Concrete Graphics (developed 2006): Not an acquisition but a homegrown product line, a patented pavement-marking system that has since become one of ACP's signature offerings.
SA-SO (acquired 2009): A school and small-town safety supplier with roots stretching back to 1948, originally a mail-order house selling traffic signs, ambulance stretchers, kerosene road flares, and the occasional dog-catcher net to towns all over America.
Stonehouse Signs (acquired 2020): The company's lineage runs back to 1863, when William Stonehouse opened a sign shop in Chicago and taught his son to paint gold-leaf lettering on storefront windows. Stonehouse went on to help found the National Safety Council in 1912 and to shape the ANSI Z35.1 industrial accident-prevention sign standards now embedded in OSHA.
Capital StreetScapes (acquired 2022): An Austin-based maker of decorative signposts and frame systems for upscale developments, historic districts, and campuses, brought into the family just months before ACP's own ownership transition.
Today, the ACP family of brands employs roughly 60 people serving utility, telecom, pipeline, government, and commercial customers across the country. ACP is, by any reasonable measure, a quiet American success story.
Which is exactly what made the question of what comes next so important to get right.
The Dilemma: How Do You Sell the Company Without Selling Out the People Who Built It?
For Joe, getting it right started with knowing what ACP actually was. He has a simple way of describing it: the triangle. Customers on one side. Vendors on another. Employees on the third. Each side equal and each side carrying its share of the weight. When ACP is working, all three sides hold.
The trouble with most succession options is that they wreck the triangle. Joe spent the better part of a year working through the choices on the table, and one by one, he ruled them out.
Private Equity
Joe had watched friends sell their companies to private equity. The deal closes, the wires clear, and within a few years, the company is loaded with debt, the workforce trimmed, the headquarters relocated, and the vendor relationships strained. As Joe later put it, the seller ends up with a fat wallet and a broken heart. ACP had stayed debt-free for its entire 36-year existence. Joe wasn't going to undo that on the way out.
A Strategic Acquisition
The most likely buyers were larger competitors, and Joe knew what happens when bigger companies absorb smaller ones: someone else's hometown gets the jobs. ACP would lose Arlington, the long-tenured employees would lose ACP, and the triangle would collapse all at once.
A Family Handoff
A family transition can work beautifully when the timing and the people line up. It didn't fit Joe's situation. He had other plans for his next chapter, and ACP needed a succession plan that would outlast any single individual.
Three options had been ruled out. There was one more on his list.
Then He Weighed an ESOP
Of the options on Joe's list, the ESOP came closest to what he was looking for. Employee Stock Ownership Plans have been the main American path to employee ownership since 1956, and the basic outcome was right: a sale to ACP's own employees.
But the closer Joe looked, the more the structure pushed back. ESOPs are governed by ERISA, which means annual valuations, DOL oversight, and ongoing administrative costs. They carry a repurchase obligation that grows over time as employees retire. And nothing in the structure prevents a future board from selling the company anyway.
Joe wanted employee ownership, not a federal compliance program. He wanted permanence, not a holding pattern. He wanted to do this once and have it stick.
He just didn't know what to call it yet.
Enter EOT Advisors
That's where EOT Advisors came in.
Chris Michael had been working on this exact problem for a decade. He'd recognized the Employee Ownership Trust as an established succession option in the United Kingdom, recognized that American founders had no equivalent, and, roughly ten years ago, founded EOT Advisors to bring the model across the Atlantic. The firm became the first in the U.S. to specialize in the structure and is still the most experienced.
By the time Joe came calling, EOT Advisors had already guided a number of American founders through the same transition, and Corey Rosen of the National Center for Employee Ownership had described Chris as "the leading expert on Employee Ownership Trusts in the US."
Joe had spent a year describing the kind of company he wanted to leave behind. EOT Advisors had spent a decade building the structure for exactly that.
The Solution: A Trust Built for Permanence
Once Chris walked Joe through how an Employee Ownership Trust would work for ACP, the fit was obvious.
Joe would sell his shares to a perpetual trust with the purpose of rewarding the people who worked at the company. From that point forward, the trust would hold ACP. Operations wouldn't change. Profits would flow back to the people creating them. The trust itself would be built to outlast everyone in the room.
None of the friction Joe had been worried about came with it. There was no ERISA layer to manage because an EOT isn't a retirement plan. No repurchase obligation would build up on the balance sheet, because the trust holds the shares permanently rather than vesting them out to individual employees. Nor would there be a future board that could quietly flip the company to private equity or a strategic buyer, because permanence would be baked into the structure itself.
This was exactly what Joe had been hunting for. The sale would go to the people who built ACP. The company would stay debt-free, stay in Arlington, and keep the triangle standing for the long run.
How EOT Advisors Guided the Transition
EOT transactions are tricky. There's a valuation to nail down, a deal to structure for tax efficiency, documentation to put in order, and seller financing to work out so that the founder gets paid without crushing the company, and a fiduciary framework to put in place so the trust runs cleanly for decades.
Every piece feeds the next, and a misstep on any one of them can compromise everything downstream. It's the kind of work most founders are not equipped to manage on top of running their company.
But Joe didn't have to. Chris and the EOT Advisors team handled it end-to-end and were direct with him about what mattered, what didn't, and what to expect at each stage. Joe stayed focused on ACP. EOT Advisors moved the deal.
When the time came to tell ACP's employees that the company was changing hands, EOT Advisors helped Joe think through how to say it: what employee ownership would mean for their jobs, their paychecks, and the company they'd helped build.
By the time the deal closed in 2022, ACP became the first Employee Ownership Trust in the State of Texas.
What Comes Next
A few years on, the company looks the way Joe hoped it would. ACP is still in Arlington. The brands are intact. Operations are rolling along the way they always have. The long-tenured employees who helped Joe and Becky build the place are now its owners, and the people coming up behind them will be too.
Joe is staying on as President through 2028 to see the transition fully through. But he's spending his free time on a second mission: telling every other founder he can find about employee ownership. He published an op-ed in the Fort Worth Business Press in November 2025, making the case directly to Texas's roughly 206,500 retiring business owners: "My employees are the reason we've gotten as big as we have today. Employee Ownership was my way of saying thank you."
ACP isn't alone in making this choice. Across the country, a growing number of founders have walked the same road with EOT Advisors at their side: manufacturers, professional services firms, family businesses with long employee tenures and longer histories. These are people who looked at the options on the table and decided the team that built the company should be the team that inherits it.
ACP started in a used trailer house in Arlington with two products and two people, and thirty-six years of slow, careful building turned it into a company that sixty-some employees now own outright.
The triangle still stands, and Joe got to write the ending himself.
In Joe's Own Words
"Selling a company you've spent 36 years building is a hard thing to get right. Chris Michael and the team at EOT Advisors made it the right thing — for me, for my employees, and for the customers and vendors who built this business alongside us. They've been doing Employee Ownership Trusts in this country longer than anyone, and it shows in every part of the process. ACP wouldn't be the first EOT in Texas without them, and these days I tell every founder I meet to call EOT Advisors before they call anyone else."
— Joe Nussbaum, Founder & President, ACP International
About EOT Advisors
EOT Advisors is the first U.S. financial services firm dedicated to Employee Ownership Trusts. Working with business owners in all 50 states, the firm guides each sale from start to finish: advisory, valuation, tax planning, financing, legal coordination, and trust administration.
To learn whether an EOT is the right path for your company, schedule a free consultation or call (800) 289-9865.