California Solar Electric Company becomes employee owned

california solar has been in business for 20 years installing off-grid and grid-tied and commercial renewable energy systems in beautiful grass valley california and we currently have 35 workers and are cooperative and 23 of those are the owners i'm lars ortegrin i am the general manager of california solar electric company we approached our staff really early on talking about the idea of real equality where everyone's contribution is as important as everyone else's contribution towards that overall success owning a company with a bunch of people that i like is great i feel like this is one of the best things that's happened to me and one of the best opportunities that i've had to grow in a company i mean basically here at california solar sky is the limit you can kind of do what you put your mind to it does feel like an amazing thing an opportunity to be part of a company where i as an individual really matter we actually have money in this company we actually have a chance to make more money from this company if we're successful so instead of just being you know still the best solar company around as a uh you know owned company now that we're worker owned we're the best with a stake in that you know we have a reason to continue to improve our bottom line and a reason to pay attention to what we're doing instead of just clocking in and clocking out for us when you know when we were starting to grow and expand we realized that we didn't want to be focusing on communities that were further and further away we really wanted the benefits of our work to be very local you know so we hired local people and we worked on developing partnerships and relationships with local businesses to kind of strengthen our community in working with project equity we were able to get that expert advice and be able to utilize a lot of their connections to be able to get us so much further along in the direction towards where we wanted to be at a fraction of the cost they helped us all the way through the transition process and then after we transitioned their thrive program allowed us to thrive as as a business by supporting both our board and our management to work better together in our first year becoming a co-op if you're a business owner and you have that culture that that family style business where everyone cares about one another and you care as much about your employees as you care about your business then the idea of employee ownership is absolutely a no-brainer it gives you more flexibility for being able to stay in your business and know that that business that you put your heart and soul into is going to is going to continue on and to benefit those people who have built that business you