A path to happiness through employee ownership

[Music] the thought of taking away their job and the work culture that they love so that i could go do something different just seemed like the worst thing to do to a group of people that trusted you to work for a small business in the beginning we kind of knew we wanted it to be a company-owned business we just weren't sure how it was going to work but in the last like couple years we really have decided that we wanted to move back home and to sell the business the idea of selling to somebody outside of happy earth would be a mistake we built this company into a business where people get treated well we felt like anyone we sold to would potentially obliterate the culture that we've developed i was very worried about happy earth getting sold to an outside party not because i thought there was a huge chance of it happening but just because i knew if it did happen it would be kind of the end of everything there was no way that the company getting sold to a third party would have ended with it being anything remotely the same kind of company as it had been before we had started talking to some employees about being a co-op but every time they would ask us questions we had no idea what it meant we are going with an employee-owned cooperative we chose it because after looking at all of our options it seemed like the best possible option for us and just the best fit for the way that we were running the business already we chose to go with that because it gave more people a voice so more people could be a part of it and be an owner in it and have that ownership which gives them a different feeling about being at work we've had other companies come to us seeing if we wanted to buy their cleaning companies and i wish we would have had this information to give them because a lot of their employees just lost their jobs and those employees could have banded together and become their own thing the responses from the team have been positive from the folks that are part of the conversion team anyone else who is considering forming a co-op or buying in as a worker owner i think it's an amazing idea you do not get the opportunity to get the kind of equity and fairness that you get this way with most other companies most other structures so i think it's just such a rare opportunity i feel like if it's something you can do you absolutely should i think the idea that you could sell your business and actually make some money off of it is the biggest benefit but also leaving your business in the hands of people who actually like the work and not just looking to make the biggest profit off it project equity and nexus made the entire thing possible teaching us what we didn't know that we needed to know because none of us knew anything about how to make this transition project equity and nexus have helped us with our exit strategy by helping us determine if the co-op was a feasible option and something that we could actually do but more than that they really helped our team see that they could do the employee ownership portion of this which opens up the door for us to go out to the next part of my life i'm no longer hesitant or feel like i'm setting them up to fail like i feel like i've given them all the tools i can possibly give them to be successful but to see the confidence over the past six months with our employees on this team seeing this their confidence in their everyday life and how they interact with one another and how they're talking to each other it's been amazing to watch so that's been that's the part i like the most you