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Sharing the Wealth: Why It Pays To Work For An Employee-Owned Business

Jun 28, 2023 by Darren Dahl 0 Comments
SRC Celebrates 40 Years In Business—And The Best Is Yet To Come The employee-owners of SRC have a lot to celebrate this year. Not only does 2023 mark the company’s 40thanniversary, but the ten businesses that comprise SRC Holdings continue to set records with their performance despite the challenges of high inflation, soaring interest rates, and continued supply chain challenges.
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Why ESOPs Can Be a Good Fit for Agribusiness

Agribusiness is a robust and diverse industry that is at the core of American success and food security. Over time, the agriculture industry has evolved from crop tillage to precision ag, and numerous types of companies—including implements and parts manufacturers, food processors and distributors and green and renewable energy firms, among others—have contributed to this evolution.
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Evergreen Cooperatives: How They're Creating Wealth and Opportunities For Their Employees

Evergreen Cooperatives is a family of worker-owned cooperatives that includes the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry and Green City Growers. Evergreen Cooperatives focuses on creating economic development within specific neighborhoods in Cleveland, making it their mission to build up the people and communities around them. As Cleveland Foundation’s President/CEO and Evergreen Board Chairman, Ronn Richard, says: “Our goal is equitable wealth creation at scale.”
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The Power Of Equity: When Employees Own The Company, Great Things Happen

Oct 4, 2022 by Darren Dahl 0 Comments
When the employee-owners of SRC Holdings gathered on the evening of Wednesday, June 15, 2022, for SRC’s 38th Annual Shareholder Meeting, you could feel the electricity in the room. Many of the company’s 2,000-strong workforce were in attendance—some with spouses, partners, and children in tow. Not only was everyone enjoying the ability to gather in person again, the company and its ten subsidiaries had been on a hot streak after a down year caused by the disruptions of the pandemic. Everyone was expecting big news because they were about to learn the updated share price of their company. They weren’t going to be disappointed.
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What Makes Fortune's "100 Best Companies to Work For" so Great?

Each year, Fortune partners with the Great Place to Work Institute to survey employees at hundreds of corporate America’s top firms to determine which companies will be named as one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. The most recent list, released in 2022, included Great Game Hall of Fame winner, Hilcorp Energy.
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Planning Leads To Stability

Tom DeSimone, Director at Prairie Capital Advisors, Inc, joins to share the shifts his team witnessed during the pandemic, and how focusing on 2021 and not 2020 to ensure stability in your company.
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How ESOPs Could Solve Your Employee Turnover Problem

Jul 26, 2022 by Keith Davenport 0 Comments
Employee-owned businesses have experienced significantly fewer issues with employee retention than their non-employee-owned counterparts. I can’t remember a time in my career when employee retention was talked about more often than it is now. Even personally, I’m one of those Great Resignation statistics. In late 2021, I resigned from my position in local government to take on the role of Executive Director of Missouri Center for Employee Ownership, Inc. (MOCEO). Like many members of the American workforce, the pandemic pushed me to reevaluate my personal and professional priorities. So, when I joined MOCEO, I was very interested to learn what effect employee ownership had on employee retention. So, as soon as my second week of work, I began asking every executive of an employee-owned business I met, how their business model impacted retention. With very few exceptions, the general response was that retention wasn’t a significant issue.
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How to Create a Safe Environment for Employee Involvement

The best, most successful companies feature highly participatory cultures in which employees routinely identify problems and share and implement ideas. High engagement cultures take a lot of work—the right information, the right team structure, management commitment, training time, and more. But a key factor that is often overlooked is the need to create a safe environment in which people feel comfortable dealing with conflict, taking risks, and trying new ideas. This blog talks about why this matters and how to get there.
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Five Reasons Open-Book Companies Should Consider an ESOP

Oct 21, 2021 by Victor Aspengren 1 Comment
Liquidity options are plentiful for business owners: strategic sale, private equity, management buyout, family transfer, and leveraged recapitalization. Which path should you take? We know that 42% of the 2021 Great Game™ All-Star companies and many others walked a different path—implementing an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). Apart from the fact that ESOPs can be a great exit strategy for open-book companies, here are the top five reasons why open-book management companies should consider an ESOP.
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Are ESOPs Really More Complex and Costly Than Other Ways to Sell a Business?

Using an ESOP for Business Transition Can Be Complicated, But Selling to an Outside Buyer Is Often Uncertain and Even More Complicated with Less Flexibility and Fewer Tax Benefits When people describe the pros and cons of ESOPs, often they note that the plans are complex. ESOPs are somewhat more complex than 401(k) and similar retirement plans and do cost substantially more to install and somewhat more to operate, mostly because an annual appraisal is required for closely held companies. But ESOPs are not more complex than selling to a third party. The table below compares what issues come up in the sale of a company to an ESOP compared to a sale to a third party. It was prepared with the advice of professionals who have done both kinds of transactions. The table indicates that the overall level of complexity is similar, but ESOPs are much less risky in terms of the likelihood of finding a buyer. They are also considerably less costly, mostly because in the case of a sale to a third party, in addition to substantial legal, accounting, and sometimes other fees, the price paid to the seller is usually reduced by brokerage commissions paid by the buyer. Sales to third parties also do not qualify for special tax benefits, as is the case with ESOPs.
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About The Great Game of Business

Our approach to running a company was developed to help close one of the biggest gaps in business: the gap between managers and employees. We call our open-book approach The Great Game of Business. What lies at the heart of The Game is a very simple proposition: The best, most efficient, most profitable way to operate a business is to give everybody in the company a voice in saying how the company is run and a stake in the outcome. Let us teach you how to develop a culture of ownership, where employees think, act and feel like owners.