Dashboard: A Grand Experiment in Buying and Building Small Businesses

Over the past six years, Teamshares has quietly been running an ambitious experiment in small-business ownership. The company has bought some 90 businesses—promising never to sell them—and then converted those companies to employee ownership. Even amid the uncertainty of 2025, those businesses generated more than $400 million in revenue and about $60 million in profit, with a surprisingly low failure rate and unusually high employee retention. This week, Michael Brown, co-founder and CEO of Teamshares, returns to the podcast at a pivotal moment. Teamshares is preparing to go public—a move that raises obvious questions for a company built around long-term ownership and patient capital. We talk about what Teamshares has learned about buying businesses from aging owners, what employee ownership really changes inside a company, and what is likely to happen when an experiment like this collides with the public markets.