As we celebrate the latest additions to the Vermont ESOP community, we ask for your support in helping bring employee ownership to the forefront of the conversation when business owners are looking at their exit options.

ESOPs are an excellent means for sharing a company’s wealth among all of its employees but do not in themselves offer a model for shared decision making. This profile of Hallam-ICS serves as one example of how ESOP companies can create a culture of shared ownership beyond the financial benefit of the ESOP.

On Friday, Engineers Construction, Inc. (ECI), a Vermont-based heavy civil construction company, transitioned to 100% employee ownership through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP).

We are accepting applications for a 2025 Communications and Events Intern now through Friday, November 22!

In celebration of Employee Ownership Month, we’re supporting and hosting a mix of activities throughout October, with a bit more emphasis on the fun this time around.

Faced with the extensive need for succession planning support plus the decline in small employers across industries, more people are recognizing the promise of internal exit paths that hand ownership over to individuals who are near to both the company and its community of employees, customers, and suppliers.

The departure of our summer intern marks the completion of several projects, including one that made full use of his numbers know-how: enhancing a financial modeling spreadsheet used to determine viability of a worker cooperative conversion deal for a given business.

Despite a clear wave of interest in Employee Stock Ownership Plans and increasing numbers of worker-owned cooperatives being established in the US, companies owned by their employees remain relatively few.

As governments look for better ways to peer inside the growing private equity machine to better regulate certain industries, a profoundly different model for acquiring and sustaining companies is emerging: the Employee Stock Ownership Plan holding company.

When the owners and founders at Rovers North started considering their succession strategies over a decade ago, they weren’t enthused about the options until learning of the Employee Stock Ownership Plan, the most common broad-based employee ownership business model in the United States.

Highlighting the extreme rarity of an existing business that dates back to the days of the founding president of the United States, The Associated Press recently put the spotlight on Vermont’s 100% employee-owned flour and baking goods company, King Arthur Baking Co.

We recorded video for our 2024 conference morning plenary as well as for one session from each of the four rounds. Please enjoy and share the videos in this selection as you please.

The 2024 Vermont Employee Ownership Conference brought out over 250 people to UVM’s Davis Center on May 31 for a full day that included an excellent keynote address plus 24 workshops led by presenters and panelists from 23 different employee-owned companies from around Vermont and New England.

Early this year, variations of the same headline appeared in multiple publications: World's Five Richest Men Have Doubled their Wealth since 2020. Meanwhile, the world saw a reduction in the combined wealth of the world's poorest 60% (nearly 5 billion people) over the same period.

Professors hold the power to share this knowledge with the next generation of entrepreneurs, accountants, lawyers, lenders, and policymakers. Helping them understand the power of employee ownership is a seed we plant today not for our own benefit but for those who come after us.

With her latest book, Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises, Kelly has taken a step back from promoting any particular business models or economic solutions. Instead, the book deliberately goes straight into the center of our economic system in order to give name to what is found there.

In celebration of Employee Ownership Month, the Employee Owners of Vermont, an active group of local employee-owned companies, raised just under $30,000 in October for the group’s sixth annual fundraiser for the Vermont Foodbank.

In the basement of the old firehouse on Main St. in Windsor, Vermont, a worker-owned cookie-baking cooperative is carrying on a legacy of local artisanal baking.

In the end, Jason celebrated Alliance’s ESOP for allowing he and Shaun to receive the value they were happy with when they sold to employees in 2018 and then creating the opportunity for a meaningful payday for employees in April.