Webinar with EOT Advisors’ Chris Michael discussing EOTs at the Aspen Institute with Maureen Conway, Kristin Toussaint of Fast Company, and EOT Advisors clients Rick Plympton and Leah Hamilton of Optimax Systems and Melinda Paras of Paras and Associates
Moderated by Kristin Toussaint of Fast Company, this Aspen Institute discussion features Chris Michael of EOT Advisors, Rick Plympton and Leah Hamilton of Optimax Systems, and Melinda Paras of Paras and Associates. The panel examines how Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs) provide a simpler, lower-cost alternative to ESOPs for business succession. Drawing on real-world experiences, the speakers explain how EOTs enable founders to preserve independent ownership, reward employees through ongoing profit sharing, and create long-term business stability without requiring employees to purchase shares. The conversation also explores succession planning, governance, financing, workplace culture, and the practical challenges of educating the broader business community about this emerging employee ownership model.
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Maureen Conway
Lauren, good afternoon, and welcome. I'm Maureen Conway, a Vice President at the Aspen Institute and Executive Director of the Institute's Economic Opportunities Program. It's my pleasure to welcome you to today's panel discussion: Sustaining Ownership: The Promise of Employee Ownership Trust. This is part of the Economic Opportunities Program, Ongoing Opportunity in America discussion series, in which we discuss
Maureen Conway
the events of the changing economy, how things are playing out for workers, businesses, families, and communities, and ideas for change. Over the last year, we've held a number of events and conversations on employee ownership and the promise it holds for improving jobs and wealth building opportunities for workers. This last June, we co-hosted the Employee Ownership Ideas Forum with our colleagues at the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing. It was a tremendous success, thanks to those of you who joined us for that. It included, we had a day at the Capitol. We had a day here in our DC offices, and we had folks, senators, congresspeople, folks from government agencies, investors, business leaders, academics, practitioners, a wide range of perspectives that were brought together. And I'm very pleased to say that we will be hosting this again in 2024 The dates are april 9 and 10th, so mark your calendars and stay tuned for updates on that. But our conversation today is about employee ownership trust, and as I mentioned, it's the third in our mini series on this, and we've talked again with practitioners, companies, researchers, and other experts. It's Employee Ownership Month. but it's also just otherwise a really exciting time to be talking about employee ownership. We now have a solid body of evidence I would say that really shows the benefits of employee ownership, both for good sound business operations and for high-quality jobs. So, it's I think there's a really strong evidence base, and now people are really thinking about, well, what do we do to sort of spread employee ownership more, and think about, you know, what are innovations, what are ways we can, we can do more with this approach to building an economy that really does work for everybody. So we're very excited about this, but as with, you know, so many things, there is kind of the depths in the details, and there's a lot of complexity, and so we have a great set of folks today who are going to dive into that complexity in a very conversational and engaging way. But first, I just have a couple of things to say about our technology. All the attendees are muted. We'd very much welcome your questions. Please use the Q and A button at the bottom of your screen to submit and upvote questions. We also encourage you to share your perspective. We know a lot of you in the audience also have a lot of expertise on this topic, so please share your comments and resources in the chat. We always appreciate getting your perspective on the discussion and just your perspective on the issues, we also appreciate your feedback. There'll be a feedback survey at the end. Please just take a moment before you leave to respond to our feedback survey. It helps us just continue to improve these events. We encourage you to tweet about this event. Our hashtag is talk opportunity. You have any technical issues, you can put a note in the chat, or you can email us at eop.program@aspeninstitute.org The event is being recorded and will be shared via email and posted on our website. Closed captions are available. Please click the CC button at the bottom of your screen to activate them. A quick note, just to say that unfortunately Mark Hand, Mark Hand from the University of Texas Arlington was unable to join us today. We'll be sharing some of his, his work in the, in the chat, but also he has a great weekly newsletter on employee ownership and workplace democracy at EO wd@substack.com d@substack.com if you're interested in that. Okay, so now it is my great pleasure to introduce our panels for today's discussion. Joining us today we have Rick Plimpton, CEO of Optimax System, and also an alumni of our Job Quality Fellowship. Thanks for joining us, Rick. Leah Hamilton, Manager of Culture and Organizational Effectiveness at Optimax Systems.
Maureen Conway
Thanks for joining us, Chris Michael, founder and managing director, EOT Advisors, well labeled there. Thanks, Chris, and Melinda Pras, founder and former owner, Peras and Associates, and finally, we're very grateful to have Kristen Toussaint here today to moderate today's discussion. Kristen is the staff editor of the Impact Section at Fast Company, where she covers climate change, labor, shareholder capitalism, and all sorts of innovations meant to improve the world, which sounds. A lot of fun, Kristen. Let me turn it over to you.
Kristin Toussaint
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here, and to hear from our panelists about employee ownership trusts. Like you said, Maureen, it's such an interesting time to talk about employee ownership in general. There's this impending silver tsunami, this growing population of aging Americans that are approaching retirement, these Americans own 2.9 million businesses, which employ more than 32 million people. That's something sort of happening in the background, right. And then, in the foreground, we have all the issues of rising inequality, stagnating wages, workforce participation, that's still, you know, slightly lower than it was pre-pandemic, and this perpetual quest for good jobs, right, that people want with good jobs with dignity and safety and a living wage, and employee ownership can be a really unique way to address all of these things, but one of the biggest challenges I hear when reporting on this solution about what holds employee ownership back is just the knowledge gap or the misconceptions about what employee ownership actually is, and the different forms it can take. So, I'm really excited to dig into one of those specific forms, employee ownership trusts today. And to start off, Chris, I'm going to start with you. You're an expert on employee ownership trusts. Can you just sort of quickly explain, you know, what these trusts are, and tell us a little bit about how you got into this space, and what your work at EOT Advisors entails.
Chris Michael
Well, thank you so much, Kristen. Thank you, Maureen. I'm so glad to be here with Leia and Rick and Melinda. Rick and Melinda, I know pretty well, it's fair to say, and so I think maybe the starting point here is to note that there are already three to 4000 majority employee-owned businesses in the United States, with possibly up to 1% of the private sector workforce working at these majority employee-owned businesses. The main way that these businesses have become employee owned over the last 50 years has been through an ESOP, which is somewhat confusingly, for the purposes of today's talk, an employee trust. It's an employee stock ownership trust. So, what we're talking about today, I think, is a relatively simpler, easier to understand, possibly more sustainable, lower cost alternative to employee ownership that I think is much more accessible for the vast majority of small business owners across the United States. Our entry point into this field, I've been working in the employership space for about 15 years now. It was like yesterday that I said it was 10 years, but it's now about 15 years, and about my concerns, sort of early on, were one was to sort of identify an approach to employee ownership that would be more sustainable or perpetual, and the other was to make this transaction easier for business owners. Business owners are the deciders, they're the ones who get to say whether or not a business becomes employee-owned or not, so let's roll out the red carpet and make this as simple, cozy, comfortable as possible for business owners. And so, somewhere about a decade ago, I was just doing research and trying to figure this all out, and kind of what did what I thought was sort of carving out of, you know, sort of carving a new approach to employee ownership, and I published an article in Tax Notes on this within the next couple of months. Realized that this new approach that I thought that I had invented has actually been the main form of employee ownership in the United Kingdom for 100 years, and as I started to work with companies to use this employee ownership trust or EOT structure, I also learned that actually we had this approach in the United States 100 years ago as well, and so really my work, or my firm's work, has been to kind of reintroduce, if anything, the employee ownership trust into the United States.
Kristin Toussaint
And now that you, you mentioned ESOPs as well, but are there any sort of like top three differentiating points, or what really differentiate weight ownership trust.
Chris Michael
The two or three differentiating points: one is that the ESOP is a federally regulated retirement plan, so it's employee ownership, but it has, it is, it functions as it is a retirement program. There's a lot of federal regulation that comes with that, and the way that Newsep works is that employees get sliced, this company sliced up, and shares go into employee accounts, and those shares are repurchased when an employee exits. With an employee ownership trust, the default structure, and I would emphasize that word, default is that the shares are held as a group for the benefit of all of the employees, you can make it more complicated than that. You can create employee equity accounts if you want to, but the default simple, easy to understand, easy to administer approach is simply to put those shares into a bucket and you know use them for the benefit of all the employees, so.
Kristin Toussaint
Great, so Melinda, I'm going to go over to you. You're one of those business owners who transitioned to an employee ownership trust. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your company, and why you went down that path.
Melinda Paras
Well, myself and my company created, designed the first video conferencing medical interpretation system. I know today Zoom looks like a really easy process, but 1520 years ago having a video conference meeting was very complicated and very difficult, and we created a system by which doctors and nurses in hospitals could press a button on their screen and reach a qualified medical interpreter, so that's what our company did, and I have to say, myself and my team really came at it, not from the point of view of let's create a company and figure out how to make money, we were actually trying to solve a social problem, which is that patients going into hospitals who didn't speak English were unable to communicate with their providers, and that's actually quite dangerous in terms of medical outcomes. So that's how we went into the business, and I am part of that. What did you call it, the silver tsunami, somebody who wanted to retire, and myself and some of the others who helped create the company, reaching retirement age, and wanted to figure out how to leave, and we looked at the idea of selling that, what people do is sell the company, usually to a competitor, and that seemed like a terrible idea to us, because we thought it would cut up the company, lay off all the employees, and just want our accounts, and we heard about ESOPs, and that was at the beginning what I understood to be the only way to sell your company to your employees, and that seemed like a very good kind of moral and ethical road to take. So I went down the ESOP road and tried to figure out if our company could do that, but first we were too small. Secondly, the idea of creating a retirement - we're like a 10 person, 10 employee company - we didn't want to create a whole retirement plan. It's a very complex and expensive process, elaborate, and we were a small, streamlined company, and that just wasn't of interest. And when we heard about EOT, we were really excited about the opportunity it gave us to sell the company fairly quickly. The employees were very happy that they didn't have to put any money in, and suddenly became owners of the company. Myself and our senior team were able to work out a retirement plan, where the notes for the sale of the company would pay, be paid to us over 10 years, which was a doable thing for the company, and it was a big win-win. And honestly, I know that ESAP - there's an ESAP industry now, many advisors and companies that help people with ESAPs, because they're so complicated, and I really don't quite understand if people saw the option of an EOT head to head with a with an ESOP, I don't know why would people would pick an ESOP, honestly
Kristin Toussaint
interesting. Well, Rick, I'm going to pose that same general question to you. I know Optimize Systems is a, is a bigger company. Tell us a little bit about that, and also why you picked this, the same format.
Rick Plympton
Yeah, thanks, Kristen. And I want to thank Aspen Institute for shining a light on EOTs. You know, I spent five years looking for a solution for our succession planning, and finally, toward the end of it, had the privilege of meeting Chris, Michael, and learning about EOTS through him. Optimax is a manufacturer of precision optics. To give you an idea, we make lenses for NASA. We have lenses on each of the Mars rovers, New Horizons, and went out to Pluto. So that's the type of thing that we do, very high precision optics for research and industry. Optimax currently is just under 500 employees, and we converted to an EOT in 2020 so we've, we're still fairly new on this in this journey, just a few years in, but the primary objectives that that my my business partner and I had when we were looking at succession planning, we want to make sure that the company would never be sold, that the company would always share at least 25% of the profits with the employees, and that we kind of set a stage for decades of prosperity and growth, so that we could continue to create jobs here in our community, I. So, in a nutshell, that's kind of, kind of where we're at, and why we chose this as our, as our journey forward.
Kristin Toussaint
I can't wait to hear, hear more specifics. Lee, I'm going to go over to you. You're at Optimax as well. Tell me about your role there, and did switching to an EOT sort of change that role at all for you, or change your relationship with the company?
Leah Hamilton
When I first crossed paths with Optimax, I was a public library director, fostering strategic and sustainable community partnerships with community organizations, industry, and educators. You know, we wanted them to take ownership of and meet the needs of the community. So I joined Optimax in 2019 as the workforce development coordinator building those internal and external relationships, and I've since transitioned to the culture and organizational effectiveness, where I lead those culture initiatives, leadership development, and work directly with the team leaders and the team members to co-create solutions to foster that sense of belonging, so when I joined in 2019 the first meeting that I attended was the announcement of the Employee Ownership Trust. So I don't have a personal experience of what it was like beforehand, but because of the planning that went into this, and you know there wasn't any shock and awe effect of the implementation, it was well planned, there were no new policies, there were no significant changes, no one was hired because of it, so because of that transition it was just the new normal,
Kristin Toussaint
that's so interesting, How do you ever involve been involved in a company with employee ownership before?
Leah Hamilton
I have not. No,
Kristin Toussaint
what a sort of good first introduction to it. I'm sure
Leah Hamilton
definitely
Kristin Toussaint
it's so interesting to me that we have these two different companies, different in size, different in purpose and scope, that both follow the same path. So, Chris, I'm going to go back to you for sort of a zoom out about what are the benefits of an employee ownership trust, and are there sort of specific companies that really fit for this, or can it really be generally applied to any company?
Chris Michael
Well, great question. So, I mean, employee ownership, whatever type of structure you use, it boils down to three things: sharing the financial rewards with the team, that you have a governance of the company that's directed to the best interest of the employees, and then you've got a great culture, the great great place to work, a place where employees are treated with dignity and respect, and so you get all of those things with an employee ownership trust, and you know, one of the main differences here, you know, when thinking about this, as opposed to an ESOP, in terms of the employee benefit side, is that instead of getting kind of lump sum payout at retirement, which you then roll over tax free into your 401 k and get paid out over the next hopefully decades, you're getting paid profit sharing in the current year. Again, that's the default approach to an EOT. There are other ways to do it, but the other aspects of employee ownership remain the same. They get with governance of the company directed the best interests of the employees, the employee owners, and you hopefully create a great culture, great place to work, terms of the companies, you know, again, it's I think at the end of the day, I think the typical median, this might surprise some people to hear, but the typical median EOT, you know, company, I think is over time going to look a lot like the typical median ESOP company, most easy, I mean, we hear about the large media, the large thinking of the large ESOP transactions, right, but that the, the, the median ESOP transaction is, I believe, a 50 to 100 employee firm, so, and that's that's the media, my typical client is about 50 to 100 employees, 10 to $20 million in enterprise value, and there's a good reason for that, which is, if that's, you know, what the typical small business that's large enough to turn into employee ownership looks like in this country, right? There's, there's the, they have, that's the largest volume in that in that company size, I think that hits most of your questions.
Kristin Toussaint
Yeah, and we'll hear more from Melinda Rick about this too. But of the companies you've worked with, Chris, is there sort of a story that sticks out about a company where this just made so much sense and really brought, you know specific benefits.
Chris Michael
I'm only going to point to Melinda and Rick for this.
Kristin Toussaint
Yeah, well, Rick, you, Chris just brought up the profit sharing aspect of EOTs, and you brought that up as well. Tell me, why that was so important for you and for your company to start.
Rick Plympton
Yeah, so in our region. And we're the Rochester, we're near Rochester, New York, the home of Kodak and Xerox. We have a lot of families in our region where the family retirement was in company stock, and you know, a lot of, a lot of ESOPs work out great, but sometimes having your all your eggs in the in that one basket can be a little risky at Optimax. When we ask our employees, do you want stock? Do you want shares of the company, or would you prefer cash share profit? Our employees have always chosen share the cash with us. So we've been doing that for years, and as we share 25% of our profit every month. We run the company Open Books. Our employees know what our revenues are, they know our expenses and how much money we make. And it's kind of funny, you know, when you look at small businesses, a lot of times the employees think that the owners are making out like bandits, but oftentimes the owners are just trying to keep, keep it going, stay in the game. So yeah, it's in addition to the profit sharing that we do. We have a 401 k program where we set it up so that anyone that's with us for their career for 30 to 40 years, they have a path to be a millionaire, and that's just, you know, with Optimax, we, Mike and I, my business partner and I started our careers on the production floor. We grew up blue collar, and so we wanted to create a world where every one of our employees has a path to a comfortable retirement.
Kristin Toussaint
Melinda, I saw you nodding a lot through what Rick was saying about hearing from employees and things like that. Tell me about how that resonates, even with a company that is that is smaller like yours.
Melinda Paras
Well, I think what you'll find with businesses that are considering employee ownership is that there's a strong kind of ethical and moral bent to who these companies are, that that just making profits for the owners, not the driving force in who the company is, and consequently looking at employee ownership is a very important piece to that, and I do want to say that the National Center for Employee Ownership is how we found out about EOTs, and I really want to encourage any business owner who's thinking about employee ownership to go to their conferences to see all of the different types of employee ownership that are there, and and be part of a community, because there really is now a community of of employee ownership companies. This issue about whether or not you get compensated at the time you're leaving the company, or you get compensated every year based on what the profits of the company are. I think is a big consideration for employees, and similarly our employees wanted to be compensated every year, and I've, I've spoken with HR managers at the NCEO conferences who have said to me, I feel really bad that the people were paying out are the people leaving. I wish that we could be giving those benefits to people who stay, that that staying should be the biggest incentive, because that's how you build a company, is you have employee loyalty, so you know we also created 501 I'm sorry, 401 k, a retirement plan, and did the highest employee employer match we could, and we built that from the beginning of the company, we, we gave the most expensive health insurance we could to our employees, just because those were our ethics, but it really is different now that the employees own the company, and in our company they meet at the end of the fiscal year and say what portion of the profits will go to be distributed to the employees and and what portion will be reinvested in the company, and I think that's a great way to build employee loyalty and keep the company operating for years to come.
Kristin Toussaint
Yeah, especially when so many companies are thinking about retention, right, and thinking about how to keep their employees engaged at a far off benefit. It can be a little less tangible to some people. And Leah, I mean, you're one of these employees. Tell me about what it's like to work at a company that that thinks like this and that includes their employees, about about that, and what that changes about your sort of long term view of the company and your role in it.
Leah Hamilton
Well, the profit sharing happens on a monthly basis, so you can see everyone rallying together to make sure that by the end of the month that we are, we're you know working together to have the biggest profit sharing that we can, and knowing that the company won't be sold, it creates this sense of psychological safety that, and the opportunity to continuously improve ourselves, our teams, and our overall organization, so we're. Together toward that success and rewarded each month, also knowing we're part of something that's bigger for ourselves and for the world.
Kristin Toussaint
I think that touches a lot on that long-term outlook that Ricky brought up as well, right? And I guess, tell me a little bit about just how that differs from other companies that only sort of have these, these short term goals, or how you balance the short term goals with with that long term view, especially in an employee ownership trust structure.
Rick Plympton
Is that to me?
Kristin Toussaint
Yes. Sorry,
Rick Plympton
I just want to, I want to build a little bit on what Leah said. You know, we've talked about our profit sharing, and I just want to point out that here at Optimax, we share 25% of profit, but we do it equally across a company, so the janitor gets the same monthly bonus check that the president gets, and we did it intentionally that way, where everybody gets the same amount, so that it reinforces team performance, working together as a team, lifting each other up, helping each other grow and become a stronger team, and stay focused on creating value for our customers. One of the other things that's really unique about forming an EOT with Optimax, we did, we created a perpetual purpose trust where the wishes of the owners or the founders could be specified in that perpetual purpose document, and once we once we did that, we and we put a block of equity into the trust, so that going forward, Optimax operates as a for-profit C corporation wholly owned by the trust. It was interesting that many of our key accounts, many of our largest customers kind of breed a sigh of relief when we shared with them what we were doing with the ownership of the company, because at over 400 employees they were kind of waiting for Optimax to be acquired by a bigger organization or conglomerate, and that could compromise their supply chain for many of our, for many of our customers, the lenses and the optics that we make are critical items that for their success, and so as they learned about our succession plan, and and that we would be owned by a trust, and we would never be acquired by anybody. Many of our key accounts have doubled down with us and reinvested more in their relationship with us, which is a beautiful thing.
Kristin Toussaint
That's so interesting, that that long-term guarantee helps even in the short term. It seems like,
Rick Plympton
yeah,
Kristin Toussaint
yeah. Now, I think it might be worth sort of breaking down those perpetual purpose trusts. Chris, do you just want to touch on, I guess, like how that fits in with an EOT, or how the two coexist?
Chris Michael
So, thanks for the tee up on that question, Kristen. So, that there is a little bit of talk about perpetual purpose trusts as well, and there was the Patagonia transaction recently, so really, aside from sort of reintroducing the employee ownership trust into the United States, I think our only sort of minor contribution here was to identify that we have this thing that's quite unique in the United States and US trust law called a non-charitable purpose trust with or without ascertainable beneficiaries. This is something I recognized in 2015 the credit really goes to Alexander Bobey, who's an attorney who was promoting this stuff back in the early 2000s and has a great article about it in Probit and Property, but when he was promoting the concept originally back in early 2000s there wasn't a talk about using a purpose trust for kind of social purposes, and I think our minor contribution here has been to identify that the purpose trust is a great vehicle for preserving businesses and dedicating their operations and the proceeds of the financial proceeds to social purposes. One of those social purposes might be benefiting the employees who work at the company, and so, whether you call it a perpetual purpose trust or employee ownership trust, doesn't really matter so much. An employee ownership trust, I would say, speaking quite generally at a high level, is really a purpose trust that is dedicated to the best interest of the employees. So that's to kind of, for any, any confusion around that point, hopefully that helps to clarify. Yeah,
Kristin Toussaint
I want to get a little bit into how these EOTs, like specifically, are structured. So, I don't know if Rick or Melinda, you want to start, just, you know, telling us how you specifically structured your EOT and what that looks like for the executives, the managers, and things like that.
Melinda Paras
Well, when we started this process, there weren't actually very radical changes in the way the company was organized. We had a management team, we had positions, a seat. CEO, and there wasn't really a need to make a big change. Now I know a workers cooperative is an alternate mechanism for an employee-owned situation, but I am kind of a believer, and there's a role and importance of a management team that helps to guide the company day to day, that that now in a smaller company you don't need as big or as complicated a management team, but certainly if you've got a company the size of Optimax, you need to have a group of people who are leading the company in terms of its day to day operations. So, really, the employee owned trust didn't make any changes in that. Now, our new leadership, since I am no longer the owner decided, since we're such a small company, to put all of the employees on the board of directors, which was not true initially, but now it's such a small group, and so the vote at the end of the fiscal year about what portion of the profit is divided among the employees is done by that board of directors, but honestly it hasn't made that much of a change in the operations of the company, except as Leah mentioned, when it's time to know what the size of the profit is and how it will be divided, there's a lot of interest among all the employees in paying close attention at that moment, but honestly, it doesn't really change your operations, doesn't have to.
Kristin Toussaint
Yeah, Rick, do you find that that's true as well, even with a company of your size?
Rick Plympton
Yeah, that was one of the objectives, as Leah mentioned, was, you know, as we transition to an EOT, we were really hopeful that we could preserve our culture with as little disruption as possible, and in our situation, just like Melinda, we chose leaders inside the company and elevated them as we transitioned to the EOT with respect to ownership, what we did is I gifted a block of equity to the trust, and then sold the rest of my equity back to Optimax, and the equity that's sold back to Optimax gets shredded, so that going forward the only voting shares are those shares owned by the trust, and that's how we gave the trust total control of the company. Now this is like peeling an onion. There's one of the really cool things about EOTs is there's a ton of flexibility, so there are a couple other vehicles or tools that we developed to provide longer term incentives for for our leadership team members, and one of them is phantom stock options that vest over a five year period, so select individuals are offered a block of phantom stock options, and it's to get them thinking not just about, you know, making profit this month or next month, but to think about workforce development needs, about equipment needs, that sort of thing on a longer time scale, and then those individuals that were elevated to the new board of directors, and there happened to be seven in our situation, we went from an executive team of four to a younger board of directors of seven, they were given the opportunity to buy Class B shares. Class B shares don't have any voting rights, but down the road they will have dividend rights. We've, we've never paid a dividend, but that's something that's in the parking lot for them to consider in the future, so a dividend might be an annual incentive for those board members, in addition to the monthly bonus plan that we have, so you can see how that just gets them thinking, you know, a little bit longer term than the monthly bonus,
Melinda Paras
we, we did something similar to what Rick did, not as complicated with shares, but we did create a process for the division of the profits, which was proportional to salaries, and what that meant is that the management team, who had slightly higher salaries, got a larger portion of the profits each year, but it meant that at the end of the fiscal year there was no dispute about how the profits would be divided. Once there was a set amount that was going to be divided, there's a process for how that. Gets done, and our company, the differentiation between the lowest paid employee and the highest paid employee is not very big, so this is not a huge difference, but I think the point that you might want to incentivize the management of your company in some way, because of the contributions they're making, is is reasonable, but There was a question that was posed about what happens after the notes are paid off, and the owners have been paid off by the company for us, because we had a 10 year payment plan, and the answer is that the proportion of profits is higher, because a portion of the profits each year has to go to pay the notes to the owners, once that those notes are paid off, then the profits are higher, and the employees will get more at the end of the fiscal year. So, there is an incentive for people to stick around for that higher payoff moment.
Rick Plympton
Yeah, I want to jump on that too. You know, when, when I give, when I sell my shares back to Optimax, we came up with a 15 year payback period, because we wanted to make sure we could do it without third party money, and, and so, while my shares are being bought out, the way a profit dollar looks, 25 cents goes to the employees, roughly 25 cents goes to pay down the equity, another 25 cents or so goes to Uncle Sam taxes state and federal, and then it leaves a quarter, you know, 25 cents for for growth of the business, and once my shares are paid off, there's going to be about 50 cents left over for growth of the business, so there's going to be some. It's a super robust business model, you know. Even, even though we're sharing 25% of profit with the employees, we give some to taxes, but at least 50 50% of each profit dollar to grow the business.
Kristin Toussaint
That's so interesting. I think that can also get into a little bit about the different ways that even even trust can can be right about what percentage of the company is is controlled this way. Chris, do you want to talk a little bit about the different just like forms this can take in, in that sense?
Chris Michael
Sure, I mean that I think that's ultimately a question more to kind of navigate with an advisor, but sure, you can, you know, employee ownership, you know, I would point again, and Melinda mentioned the National Center for Employee Ownership, I would point everybody in that direction, it's just the most fantastic nonprofit educational organization, go to their conferences, visit their website, call them, they're a fantastic source of information, and I always give, you know, the definition they give of employee ownership, or at least it was on their website at one point in the last few years. You know, employee ownership is ownership of some or all of a company by most for all of the employees, and so you know, employee share ownership could mean, you know, 1% or 5% of the company is broadly held by the, you know, most or all of the employees of the company. It could mean 30% 51% majority employee on up to 100% Another thing I just want to make sure we say out loud here before our time runs out today is, you know, none of this should be viewed, you know, ultimately as a kind of a contest between employee ownership trusts or ESOPs. EOTs are kind of the new kid on the block again, maybe in the US, ESOPs have had such a fantastic track record. I spent a few years of my life writing a 300 plus page book arguing that Aesop's are the best thing since slight spread when it comes to employee ownership, and this is really about the fact that we now have this alternative, which is still simpler and maybe more to some people's liking, or some people's preference, and you know, I should also add here, or maybe I'm jumping ahead of your questions here, Kristen, but this is an alternative available to in every state in the country. No new laws have to get passed, no new policy has to get changed, no policy has to get adopted, any small business in any part of the country can can do an employee ownership trust.
Kristin Toussaint
Oh, that's so interesting. Is there something then there about why they haven't been so popular before, especially compared to the UK, or why they're getting more attention now?
Chris Michael
Yeah, I love, I love, so we always talk about this giving public talks. I love what I think is the right answer to this question, also as a kind of, I guess, an academic, and another part of my life, and my dissertation was a history, history, historical in nature. I think, I think, in this particular case, I think Lewis Kelso and Patricia Hetter were a wonderful tag team proselytizing ESOPs, what was what were known as Kelso plans, since the from the 50s on, and ultimately the Kelso plan was introduced into federal law with the ESOP, and we just, even the Kelso plan was based on the. Federal law from the 20s, and so we just had this kind of tax loophole available that Luke Elso leveraged, and then the kind of whole cottage industry grew up around the ESOP in the 70s and 80s, and on, and at that point there's kind of like no looking, no looking back at that point, so You know, sometimes I say maybe it's kind of my vantage point generationally, sort of as a kind of in between Gen X and millennial, where I sort of was looking for the simpler option. There's so much complexity as it is in life, so, so, and I had no, you know professional attachments towards the the ESOP vehicle, and so it was just kind of looking at looking at the whole scope of how employee leadership has developed in this country over the last 50 years with fresh eyes, maybe in identifying an alternative
Kristin Toussaint
we talked about culture a little bit, that came up in some answers, but I want to hear more about, I guess, what that culture actually feels like. So, Leah, this sounds like something you could sort of weigh in on about what does this employee ownership trust bring to Optimex culture? How does that sort of play out, or how does that reinforce the things that were already present in the business.
Leah Hamilton
Well, first and foremost, you know, culture is dynamic, it's driven by values. We do talk about the profit sharing during the company meeting, but it isn't something that's talked about on the on the floor. That's how you know that it's working well, because it's not something that everyone is discussing, you know, looking at it from the perspective, looking at culture from the perspective of our values, so our values are trust, integrity, grit, unity, and respect. Now, those are very nebulous terms, we all have our own definitions of them based on our experiences, but just looking at the culture as a whole, we invited our employees, because ultimately, if we're talking ownership, it's about employee voice, so we asked them, What do these values mean to you, and there was a common thread throughout each of them, we created culture videos that you can find on our YouTube, our Optimex YouTube channel, because I think it's so important that to incorporate your values within these discussions to make sure that there is aligned behaviors and philosophies, so you know, I can tell you a story about how that that plays out. How you continue to build the culture, you know, there was this time when one of our employees, he had some physical limitations because of an accident, and some employee went out and brushed the snow off of his car. Now, we never would have known that this had happened if this employee hadn't sent an email to the company saying thank you for whoever, whoever helped us. So, you know, when we're looking at specific ways to drive this employee ownership culture, we now have shout outs to show appreciation that are aligned with those values. We have social events throughout the year that where people can can come together and talk about their experiences. We have organizational development opportunities where we're we're calling upon our employee employees to to again co-create those solutions that I mentioned earlier, and then training. I know that was something that was of interest, is we talk about culture in our on our onboarding, so we do talk about the profit sharing within that culture training and what that looks like, and how you can use again those values to help sustain this, this, this ownership culture
Kristin Toussaint
that you brought up a worker voice in that a lot, and I think that it's sort of important to address maybe a misconception with employee ownership that workers are driving all of the decisions, or having like the dominant voice. So, I'm interested in hearing, you know, from Melinda and Rick about how your structures sort of balance that employee voice with with the other needs of the business.
Melinda Paras
Well, I want to say, if you have a small company, and I really think EOTs are a great way to go if you're a small company, because they're just so much less complex to set up and to manage, but our culture has really been engendered by by the employees themselves, is that the culture of the company attracted certain types of people who who believed in social good and what the company was trying to create other than making money, and so when you have an. Employee base who embodies that culture. If you can create a succession process by which those employees get to stay and continue the work of the owners. If an owner has a vision and the employees engender that vision, then having the employees become the owners and the future is absolutely the way to go, so we don't have as complex a process. If you have 400 employees, you need, you know, a much bigger process to that. All of these employee ownership cottage industry that's arisen, people contact me and say, do you need help with the communications plan to explain your employee-owned trust to the employees, and I say, well, you know what, there's 10 people, and we have a meeting, and we explain it, and you don't need a communications plan if you have a small company, but I really believe that the culture is embodied in the employees and the leadership that you help build within your company, so that you, as an owner and a founder, can retire with some confidence that those values will continue.
Rick Plympton
Yeah, just build on that. For at Optimax, you know, we have a fundamental belief that most people wake up in the morning and they want to create value, they want to earn respect to their peers, and so we try to create an environment where we give them that opportunity, we provide them with the training, the tooling, and the information that they need to make good decisions every day, and we've really, we've made a lot of efforts to get away from a pyramid structure where it's top-down leadership, and we try to have organic leadership and provide opportunity for anybody in the company to come up with good ideas for improvement, because the reality is that the people doing the work in the offices and out on the production floor, they're the ones that are going to find the best way to drive cost out or to be more efficient, so we want everyone in the building to be engaged in looking for opportunities for improvement, which kind of goes back to our profit sharing. Our people know that if they can save $1.25 is going to end up in that bonus pool. Now, with regard to worker boys, one of the things that we've made an effort to do is to have small group meetings frequently throughout the company, where you know people can, you know, express themselves and share their ideas, and in addition to what happens every day here at Optimax, we have what we call Read to Lead, which is usually like a group of eight to 12 people that are getting together weekly and kind of reading through a book chapter by chapter. The book, it doesn't give the answers to what we should be doing, but it tees up conversation, and we can talk about what the what was said in the book, and then what's happening at Optimax in real time, and talk about maybe things that we could be doing differently to make our world better.
Kristin Toussaint
We've talked about a lot of the benefits, and as we sort of get close to the end, I want to also just touch on some of the challenges of making this conversion. And Melinda and Rick, I don't know if you can share sort of how long it took, or sort of if there were roadblocks you faced when making this transition for your company.
Melinda Paras
Our biggest roadblock initially was that we were trying to go down an ESOP path that wasn't going to work for us. Once we realized that an EOT was possible, I believe we completed the transaction in under four months. It cost us under $100,000 and I would say the, the only.. I don't think it was a challenge, but there was just some anxiety about feeling like we were very early in the EOT process, like I hope this is.. this is real. It seemed a little too good to be true, and so just a little bit of anxiety that way, that also has faced us in some of our relations, which is actually our biggest challenge, was with our bank. We had a robust line of credit, which for in our industry was very important, because a transition between when our costs are expended and when we get paid by our clients, a lot of our clients are hospitals, they're not notoriously good payers or fast payers, and so our line of credit was very important in terms of cash flow process, and our bank did not understand what any OT was, and our vice president that we worked with at the local bank was supporting us, was trying to get us through, but ultimately the higher-ups in the bank said, "We don't know what an AOT is, and it's not supported by anyone's personal collateral. So we lost our line of credit. Gratefully, in the employee-owned trust community, we found another company. Had found a kind of a more community-oriented bank in California, and we were able to move our banking there and get our line of credit reestablished, but also we were a minority-owned business and a women's own business, and the associations that give certifications for minority and women's own business did not know what an EOT was, and we actually lost our certifications for both of those, because even though the majority of owners were women and the majority of owners were people of color, they didn't understand what it was, and the people they send out to investigate your company and see if you're really minority owned didn't know what an EOT was, and consequently was the good news is at the end of the day that minority and women's own business certifications, frankly, in our industry did not particularly help us, so we didn't, we didn't actually lose anything material, but it was frustrating that the EOT concept is not well understood broadly, and so it's I think it's our challenge to try and change that, and and encourage others in the employer community to understand the EOT concept and make it more accepted in the US.
Rick Plympton
I share what happened with Melinda, with respect to the banks. It's, I don't care where you are, bankers don't understand what an EOT is. For us, you know, we wanted one of the tenants of our perpetual purpose to be never sell the company, and when we told the bankers that, they're like, no, no, no, you can't do the trustees have to have the option to sell the company if things become insolvent, and so we did, we put a clause in the very back of the document where if for some reason Optimax leadership doesn't pivot with the market and it becomes a company that's just loaded with debt and no path forward. The company could be sold, debtors paid off. Any proceeds that are left over would be shared with nonprofits in our community, where no nonprofit can get more than 10% and and we created that clause so that no individual could ever profit from the sale of the company. So that's how we dealt with that issue, but to go back to one of the other problems that we had, you know, when you look at succession planning, the easiest thing for a business owner to do, a small business owner, is clean up your financial, sell to the highest bidder. We, you know, we didn't want to do that, because we know with this unique culture we've created here, any conglomerate or bigger company that bought Optimax would just crush our corporate culture and what we've built. So I was actually looking at creating a nonprofit parent company and having Optimax owned by a nonprofit until I was giving a presentation at the National Conference for Employee Ownership about our corporate culture, and Chris came up to me after the presentation, said, "Hey, I think I've got an idea for you, and started telling me about EOT. I was like, "Oh my goodness. We went out to dinner. I was like, "This hits on all cylinders. This is really awesome. So that was really great.
Kristin Toussaint
Yeah, Chris, is there.. is there one you want to add on there about the potential roadblocks the company could face, and how to be prepared for this.
Chris Michael
I think it's not particularly.. it's actually fairly straightforward. I mean, Rick and Melinda have those experiences with the banks, that hasn't been the case, you know, with all of my clients by any stretch, and you know we can do an E, we can close an EOT transaction in two months. I mean it can be pretty straightforward, actually. And you know, for those who don't know, you know, employee ownership broadly speaking works in all kinds of industries. You know, you hear Melinda here with 10 employees, Rick with close to 500 It's, it's a robust approach to selling your business as a fantastic success and strategy, and yeah,
Kristin Toussaint
so if there's not those, like you said earlier, sort of policy challenges to making this more widespread, is it really just then about education, like, like with letting them know that this is a thing?
Chris Michael
I think I think it absolutely is. Again, you know, we only kind of brought this to the sort of reintroduce this to the US about a decade ago, and the first couple of years are kind of testing out the concept with a few companies, and we're just starting to now, about 10 years in, get traction to the point where we're having a forum like this to discuss the employership trust, and and CEO so graciously. I updated all of their website materials about two years ago to include employee ownership trust as a major approach to employee ownership, or a major option for employee ownership in the United States. So, think it really is about building awareness, and I think that there's a great growth period ahead for us in the United States. Think it's also important to note that we're not starting from scratch here, we've got 50 years of successful employee ownership successions through the ESOP, and so we're really building on a fantastic foundation with the ESOP.
Melinda Paras
Can I just add two things about the challenges I do want to distinguish that I don't think succession planning is the same as the employee ownership issue. I think succession planning is really a question of leadership, and you know, in my, my past organizational lives, I've often had a deputy director or chief operating officer, and they, they kind of can move into the position of CEO easily, but that's not always the case. And I really want to encourage any business owners who are thinking about selling their company to think about succession planning in its own right, about if you plan to retire as an owner, who will be leading, and how will they be leading the company. The second thing I wanted to mention is about the financing, because our original owners, that's what we call them, the original shareholders, were not interested in a big check immediately, because a lot of theories are when you sell your company, suddenly you have a, you're sitting on top of a big check, and then you, I don't know, buy a new house, do something. We have built the company over many years, and we're very interested in it continuing. We wanted the employees to be able to own the company without having to put money in. I think that is a huge element to this, because when, when you say, well, the employees own the company now, people say, well, how much did they have to pay, and the answer is it can be nothing if the owners are willing to be paid off over time. Now, this presumes you have enough profit to pay off the owners and still be a successful company, but if the owners are willing to take a note for whatever the value of the company is, and I'm talking about a real value, it doesn't have to be hugely discounted, it can be an industry standard value, if you're willing to be paid out over 10 years, 15 years, the employees can own the company without having to put money in, they have built the company with their labor, so I don't view it as a, as a fake transaction, I think they helped create our company, and so I don't feel like, oh, I feel bad, they, they didn't have to pay. I'm glad that they could own the company and just own it with the work they've already provided, the work they're going to provide in the future. So I really think the transaction financially does not have to be complicated, I
Kristin Toussaint
Rick, I don't know if you wanted a chance to sort of respond to that, especially the idea about succession is interesting, because Melinda, Rick, you stayed on, so
Rick Plympton
yeah, that's a good point, Melinda,
Melinda Paras
Rick's not as silver as I am,
Rick Plympton
you know, one comment I was gonna make is, you know, we, we found this as part of our succession planning, but you know, we were already close to 400 employees. I wish we had found this when we were 20 or 30 employees, because the EOT is so simple, and it's not very, it's not very costly. The annual maintenance is, I like to think, in log scale, it's more than $1,000 but it's not 100,000 a year in expenses. It's on the order of five to 10k for the annual expense to maintain the EOT. Where, if you know, if you're doing a co-op or an ESOP, I think the expenses, annual expenses, can be a little bit higher than that. But I'll share with you a sound bite that I like to share with our local politicians. Optimax was founded in 1991 so we just celebrated 30 years in business. In the first 30 years of Optimax, we did $500 million in business, and roughly half of that, two $50 million was shared with our workforce through payroll, benefits, and bonuses, and they go out and they spend it at, you know, the auto dealership or the supermarket, or whatever, whatever they want to save a little bit for retirement in the next 30 years. With our current growth plan, Optimax will do over $5 billion in revenue, and roughly half of that will be shared with our workforce, and if we can get another 10 or 20 companies in our region and our community that convert to EOT, we've already got one more that's done it, and a couple more looking at it, but if we can get 10 or 20 doing it, we can really strengthen the entire economy here in our region and create financial security for many, many families, and that's what that's really what it's all. About
Melinda Paras
that's what it's all about.
Kristin Toussaint
I love that. That zoom out, I think that's a great place to pause for our talk. And I'm going to switch to some questions from the listeners. I know that a lot are coming in, and we've got about 15 minutes left. This first one, Chris, is just to ask a little bit about some of the deciding factors to determine whether an EOT, a cooperative, or an ESOP is appropriate, and also, can they ever be combined? Can you ever have an ESOP and an EOT?
Chris Michael
I think that just comes down to the preference of the seller. I think we don't have time to get into all the ins and outs of it, but talk all the NCO again, touch with some advisors, and they should be able to walk you through the selection process and see what's a good fit for you. You can combine these approaches. Some, I mean, the largest, I would, you know, I sort of, I typically say that the largest worker cooperative in the world is actually an employee ownership trust. They don't brand themselves as a worker cooperative, but it's the flagship EOT in the UK, John Lewis Partnership. It's everybody's a partner on the first day of working there, and it's one worker, one vote to elect the governance of the governing body of the organization. Again, they don't brand themselves as a worker property, but they use the EOT structure to create a working property. Alternatively, you could, in principle, have a company that's a 51% EOT and a 49% ESOP, or you could have 100% EOT that layers in, you know, you know, equity sharing with the employees in a way that's not a retirement program, but is still sort of gets you some of the features of gain of capital gains that ESOP advocates often like.
Melinda Paras
One of the reasons that people will choose an ESAP are some of the tax advantages, and I think people in the EOT community are really hopeful that through wider understanding of the EOT as an option that some greater tax advantages can be directed to the EOT process, because that's that is a distinct advantage to an ESOP, is as the tac tax advantages that are offered
Kristin Toussaint
that can easily get very in the weeds if we go super into taxes, but Chris, is there anything you just want to add about where people can hear more about those tax advantages, or what the differences are?
Chris Michael
I don't think I'm supposed to plug myself here. Contact your advisor and your advisors, and call them CEO, and anybody should be able to walk you through a clear and objective and partial sort of, you know, laying out of what the actual tax differences are for the ESOP, as opposed to the EOT, also worth mentioning that you know, taxes have there's no such thing as a free lunch, taxes do get paid with an ESOP, and so I think it's, I think if you, if you walk through it carefully, there might not be so many differences, I think EOT tax differences often work as kind of a sort of smoothing function on the transaction rather than some kind of, you know, big wad of cash that, that you know, the IRS is going to let people have access to.
Kristin Toussaint
All right, this next question in the chat, you both touched on this a little bit, Melinda and Rick, but this is asking if you can talk more about the costs of transitioning to an EOT and what a deal could specifically look like.
Chris Michael
This is for me.
Kristin Toussaint
Well, for anyone, yeah, I guess Chris, if you want to, you probably do broader view than what Melinda and Rick already shared.
Chris Michael
I think people typically price - I often say for this, that you know it's people typically price an ESOP transaction. Installing an ESOP can be at the floor, maybe 250 to 350 K, and I think an EO Transact, EOT transaction might be sort of a fifth of that, 20% of that, a quarter that maintaining an ESOP can be 50 to 100k a year, and again maintaining an EOT could be 20% to a quarter of that annually. That helps answer the question. Again, this can take as quickly as two months. A lot of my clients often will take up to six months, or maybe longer, because they want to sort of go at a leisurely pay a leisurely pace, but it can move fairly quickly if everyone's ready to go.
Melinda Paras
Transaction to create an EOT is you need a legal advisor to draw up your paperwork and help you work through these issues, and you need evaluation. Those are the two main costs. As I said, ours was accomplished at under 100,000 I think a big area of difference is the ongoing costs. What I see about ESOPs is that they are spending 100 to 200,000 annually, because their stocks have to be continuing, there has to be continuing valuations that are done, the process is complicated enough that perhaps they need communications advisors to help them explain, and for employees to understand. There's just a lot of costs associated with an ESEP that you don't have with an EOT, so I think it's not just the startup costs, it's really the ongoing costs that I found kind of difficult about going the ESEP route.
Rick Plympton
Yeah, I'll just share that, you know, Chris, Chris really got me on the EOT path, and then I found a local attorney that was very experienced at corporate law, and just his natural behavior, he's half lawyer, half professor. So, when I told him about EOTs, and that we were looking at doing this, he got really excited and jumped right in, helped us develop the founding documents that we needed, and the bylaws, but we also, we also had to work closely with our local banks and our accounting, our accounting firm in order to do some forecasting and make sure that we understood the finances and had some realistic projections of how it would play out.
Kristin Toussaint
There's some other questions here about more about the trustees, how they're chosen, what role they play, and how are they held accountable. Rick, do you want to start with that?
Rick Plympton
Okay, anybody that knows how to hold trustees accountable, let me know. I want to talk, so what we've done, we have three trustees, my business partner and I are the two trustees, and then the third seat is filled by a member of our board of directors, and so that seat is an individual that represents the Optimax workforce at the trustee level, and so that's a really important seat going forward, that it's always there, so that we have employee representation at the trustee level for us, as, as Mike and I age out, and you know, we want to step away, we need, we still haven't figured out yet, but we need to decide how we choose somebody to fill the seat that we're vacating, you know what's obvious. We want somebody that understands our corporate culture. The role of the trustee is to defend that perpetual purpose trust document that's written. Trustees have nothing to do with the operation of the business; their sole responsibility is to defend that trust document, so it's a very narrow role in terms of scope, but a very, very important role,
Melinda Paras
actually. Our trustee is Chris, and I can say what his function is. As Rick said, it's defending the role of the trust, so he conducts an annual audit to make sure that that the leadership of the company conducts with him to make sure that the company is continuing to execute the goals of the trust. Did you, did you have profits? Did you distribute the profits to your employees like that? And that's how our trust is protected. And then also Chris had an idea to create a trust protector position, which is myself, and that any future potential sale of the company would have to be approved by the trust protector, so that kind of, I know Rick mentioned about how they kind of organized in their, their, the execution of their, their change to keep the company from being sold, but we allow that to go to the trust protector, so, and similarly, if the company is not able to financially survive anymore, the assets are divided among nonprofits, but then, as a trust protector, I could say whether or not that's that's really true, or if the employees wanted to sell to another company, I could potentially veto that.
Kristin Toussaint
All right, this next one we sort of heard a little bit about when Melinda, you talked about, you know, this wasn't something that the employees paid for specifically, but this is asking about more about how EOT transactions are typically financed, so I guess Chris, this is probably for you, and if you know today's high interest rates affect maybe the market value of founder takes when making that transition or anything like that.
Chris Michael
Well, I, this is a great question, um. Um, you know, again, I would say we've got such an amazing track record with the ESOP over the last 50 years, and you look at NCEO survey data, and it looks like I think a majority of, you know, employee ownership transactions today, ESOP transactions are seller financed, 100% seller financed, and the balance are 60% seller finance with maybe 30 to 40% bank financing. That's for larger companies often that can obtain the bank financing. So we have this fantastic track record of business owners seller financing transactions, and often works out to be in the financial interest of the seller, and that might take some time to walk through, but it's in the financial interest of the seller to provide that financing, and so you know, with EOTs, I've talked to clients and potential clients about going to banks or going to outside sources of capital, but for the most part, folks aren't interested, they've, they've already kind of groped that seller financing is a great way to go, and that's kind of why they're speaking with me in the first place, and that's why they're exploring the employment of option the first place, so sure there, I sort of keep in, I'm keeping an open mind about the potential for sort of financing using bank financing or outside capital, but I don't want that conversation to get too, too far away from the fact that seller financing is the way that this is employee ownership successions are done, and it works great.
Kristin Toussaint
Okay, this next question touches on just timelines for this, I mean, Melinda and Rick, you both talked about, you know, transitioning to an employee ownership trust later on in your business, and this is asking again, Chris, this is probably for you, as it's a little more broad, if there are challenges or opportunities to, you know, having the structure from the beginning of a company versus converting later on,
Chris Michael
I would say based on my research and firsthand experience, I really think employee ownership is for mature companies as opposed to startups.
Kristin Toussaint
Interesting. I mean, Miller, is there more to expand on that?
Melinda Paras
Well, I'm not saying it's not possible to go that route, but my experience is that there's an entrepreneurial spirit that a founder of a company, or the founders of the company, have that, that well, I guess Christian, one of the things you study is capitalism, but I guess that's part of the nature of capitalism and that entrepreneurial spirit can help drive and build a company. I think as entrepreneurs build the company and they build a relationship with the base of employees who help them build that company. I think it makes more sense as a, as an exit plan for the silver tsunami, because there are so many people who are now looking at retirement and want to sell their businesses and don't want to sell it to a competitor and see their company gutted, and I just think it's a great option for a large number of companies that are looking at that, so I guess it's possible for a startup, but I don't know if that kind of mucks with the entrepreneurial engine of capitalism. It might.
Rick Plympton
I view employee ownership as an evolution of capitalism, and so to that extent, let's, let's have everybody, you know if we've got some people that are just forming their companies and they want to give it a try, do it. Let's see what happens. I know for Optimix this is a wild journey that we're on, and there are days we feel like we're walking blind through the woods, but it's been working out really great for us.
Melinda Paras
Well, actually, all of our original core of our company were shareholders, so I do want to say actually it was kind of employee owned in its initial stages. It was really just as expanded that that became a question.
Kristin Toussaint
Yeah, I love that idea of why not try, right? We have to change something about about where this is all going, and then I think that that's really our time. Thank you all so much. Yeah, no, thank you all. This
Maureen Conway
has been an amazing conversation. Really appreciate you all digging in, sharing all your experience, and really thank you. So, thank you, Kristen, Chris, Melinda, Rick, Leah, and thank you so much to our audience, what an amazing conversation in the chat, too. So this has been just a really, just an exciting conversation, and really thrilled that everybody could join us today. And thank you all so much for your, for your leadership in this space, and all the work that you do. I know I was really impressed with everybody's, everybody's comments today. Stay tuned, every. Everybody, this is not the last in our Opportunity in America series. Next up, on november 15 at 2pm Eastern time, we'll be talking about unstable schedules, unwrapping the impact on service workers and important issues. So, please join us for that conversation, and I want to take a moment to thank my colleagues who do all of such hard work in bringing these sessions together, so huge thanks to Matt Helmer, Maxwell Johnson, Colleen Cunningham, Amanda Fins, Maya Smith, Merritt Steuben, Frances Elmar, Cinin Young, Bryn Morgan, Tony Mastria, and Nora Heffernan. Thank you, guys, all so much. You guys do great, great, great work, and really appreciate all you do. And any feedback, please remember, please fill out the feedback or send us an email at EOP dot program at Aspen institute.org We love hearing from you all, so let us know what you think, and hope you'll join us all again soon. So, thanks