Caktus Group Co-op Conversion

[Music] our accountant I think to just to think about like a succession plan and for example in the events you know tragic event Colin and I are both caught in a plane crash or something that it might be better to pass on the company to our employees who are already here and invested you know rather than a family member who might not uh have the interest in software development than than we and our staff do I think our concern with the possibility of selling the business to to a third party um was that that you know that may turn into an exercise of trying to extract as much value as possible from our workers and you know that's just not something that I think is been a part of what we've set out to achieve with cactus when we started ahead of cactus uh converting to employee ownership um we went down a fun little rabbit hole of Shifting our organizational structure to one that's delayered an autonomous um and that comes with a number of um kind of facets but the the most common one uh that people know of is self-management or self-direction at the same time that we were um exploring employee ownership um we also made the decision to adopt a more self-directed management style uh called called teal I think some differences um that I've seen over the years between um employee owned organizations and more traditional um non-employee owned organizations is the level of Engagement with the team one of the goals that we had when converting to an employee owned uh company was resilience um The Hope is that um me an employee owned company would allow us to um better WEA any you know Financial challenges that the business might um encounter and another goal that we had uh in the conversion process is governance so now we have a established Board of uh directors um three of whom are elected employee representatives and Colin and I are the other two Representatives on the board yeah I guess the advice I might have for other companies considering employee ownership is to you know take your time you know don't you know hold yourselves to an artificial timeline as you're going through the process you know allow time for employees and you know yourselves as owners to um become comfortable with the idea get invested and excited uh and you know then to take time to figure out the details and how to do it right we could not uh have uh gone through the conversion process on our own uh we interviewed a several Consultants at the time in 2018 and uh eventually hired the Ia group and you know our consultant there helped us over the course of two two and a half years the North Carolina employee ownership Center is a central hub for employee ownership in North Carolina and we have a variety of information resources videos articles stories of businesses that have gone through employee ownership transitions so that those connections and that information is very helpful when companies are considering a transition when Kus started this journey uh there was no organization in North Carolina that was focused on employee ownership so uh we are incredibly happy that the North Carolina employee ownership Center exists um you know both to help cactus in its continuing journey and hopefully to help other organizations that are exploring this opportunity I proceed with their Journey as [Music] well