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Add mentionESOPs are often presented as one of the best ways for a business owner to exit. You preserve your company's independence, reward the employees who helped build it, and create a retirement benefit that can be life-changing for the people who stay with the business. What gets less attention is that ESOPs are still businesses. They can lose customers. They can hit hard times. And because employees' retirement savings are often tied to the company, the stakes can be even higher than they are at a conventionally owned week, Roland Burdett tells the story of Miklos Systems, a Virginia defense contractor that became an ESOP in 2006 and spent nearly two decades building an ownership culture in which employees truly thought and acted like owners. Then came the pandemic, the Great Resignation, and, most recently, the uncertainty created by DOGE and deep cuts to federal contracting. Suddenly, Roland found himself worrying not only about his employees' jobs, but about their retirement savings as than continue rolling the dice, Miklos made the difficult decision to sell itself to a larger defense contractor. Roland takes us inside that process—from explaining the decision to employee-owners, to working with an outside trustee who ultimately had the authority to approve the deal, to the surprising complexity of unwinding an ESOP after 20 years. Along the way, he offers a refreshingly candid look at both the strengths and the limitations of employee ownership, and why, in the end, protecting the people who had helped build the company meant giving up the independence they had worked so hard to preserve. This episode is brought to you by Grasshopper Bank.
Published July 31, 2026
Lauren Feldman I'm your host, Lauren Feldman, and I'm here today with Roland Burdett, who until pretty recently was president of Miklos Systems, a Virginia-based defense contractor that Roland helped sell to VTG, a larger Virginia-based defense contractor where he has continued to work, at least for a little while. Welcome to the podcast, Roland.
Roland Burdett Thank you. It's good to be here.
Lauren Feldman It's great to have you here. I want to talk about the sale of Miklos in part because it's, I think it's particularly interesting because the company was an ESOP. But first, a little background. What, what did Miklos do?
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The 21 Hats Podcast presents an authentic weekly conversation with small business owners who are remarkably willing to share what’s working for them and what isn’t. Unlike many business podcasts, which tend to talk to highly successful entrepreneurs whose struggles are in the past, the 21 Hats Podcast features a rotating cast of business owners who are still very much in the trenches fighting the good fight. Every week, our regulars gather to talk about the kinds of important issues many owners won’t even discuss behind closed doors: whether their businesses are as profitable as they should be, whether they are willing to give up some control to an investor in order to grow faster, why they had to lay off employees, how they wound up with way too much inventory, why they don’t have a succession plan, and even why they are concerned about their own mental health. Visit 21hats.com to hear all of our podcast episodes, read episode transcripts, and learn more. The show is produced by Jess Thoubboron, founder of Blank Word.
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Lauren Feldman You didn't found the company, right?
Roland Burdett I did not. Betsy Miklos did in 1993. I joined as employee number 2 in 1995.
Lauren Feldman And when did you become president or whatever your title was when you basically started running the business?
Roland Burdett I took over as president and CEO in 2006 when we turned it into an ESOP. Betsy was ready to retire at that point. And so we were looking for exactly that succession plan you were talking about recently. And so we chose to go ESOP and that's when I took over.
Lauren Feldman Were you part of the process of turning it into an ESOP?
Roland Burdett Absolutely. Yes. We, we, the CFO, Cheryl White, and I spent all of 2025 working with Betsy on how to design it, implement it, and then briefed it to all the employees in November of '25 and actually did the transaction in March of '26— or March of 2006, sorry.
Lauren Feldman And you had any ESOP experience? Was that why you—
Roland Burdett Nope.
Lauren Feldman You were brought in, then to kind of figure it out?
Roland Burdett Yes. So when Betsy said she wanted to retire, what are my options? It was, so then she and Cheryl and I were investigating in 2005, what can we do? How do we make it work? How can, you know, what can we do? We could have sold it to any of the big boys in the Beltway Bandit community here in DC. But at that point, nobody in the company wanted to do that. We had all come from those big companies and we wanted to, keep the culture, and then Betsy wanted to take care of the employees and reward the ones who had started with her and had made the jump and taken the risk to join her.
Lauren Feldman Are those the things that pretty much drove the decision? That's why you picked an ESOP?
Roland Burdett Yes.
Lauren Feldman Was there anything else that you came close to? Did you consider another option seriously?
Roland Burdett Not seriously. We settled pretty quickly on an ESOP. We started talking about it in February of 2005. In May, we really hit on ESOP as the way we want to go. And then we started investigating it and we started getting all the players and consultants in place across the summer of 2005 so that we could get things moving.
Lauren Feldman Did it go well from the beginning?
Roland Burdett Yes, it went fantastically well. Yes.
Lauren Feldman How so? What was fantastic about it?
Roland Burdett The consultants that we got, and that those advisors really make a difference, the people you get on your team. And I think we had just a crackerjack team that knew what they were doing and helped us make the choices that we wanted to make and then guided us through the process so that we were as efficient as possible and could make the right decisions. And then the employees took to it right away. We had employees who, you know, started asking questions about what if I stay in a cheaper hotel when I'm on travel for the government? Here in DC, when the snow comes, the traffic comes to a snarl, so they close work. And so employees were asking, hey, can I make up those hours and get billable revenues back in for the company? So all of those things, the employees quickly took to, this is my company and we can make it better.
Lauren Feldman It sounds like your employees really took the notion of employee ownership seriously. my understanding is that that doesn't always happen and it doesn't just happen on its own. What did you do that encouraged that?
Roland Burdett Yes, it definitely, I mean, you can run an ESOP as just a retirement plan and you don't have to do any of the other stuff, but we really took it to heart that it's employee-owned. So in every company meeting we had, we would have the first half of the meeting We would say, think like an employee, and it's just the usual sorts of employee stuff, company updates, benefits changes, whatever's happening. And then the second half of the meeting is think like an owner. And here's numbers, here's contracts we've won, here's contracts we've lost, here's what we're doing for next quarter, here's our goals for the rest of the year. Really getting everybody to participate there.
Lauren Feldman Is there anything that really surprised you about the way the ESOP operated?
Roland Burdett The amount of work it takes to run it successfully and to make sure it goes well. That was a surprise. And then our joke was, even across the 20 years, it was always like dealing with an onion. Every time you thought you understood it and peeled down, there was another layer. That was both fun and intimidating sometimes, but we enjoyed it.
Lauren Feldman Could you give us an example of both what the additional work was that you didn't anticipate and what you had to learn by going through it?
Roland Burdett Sure. The amount of work that we didn't anticipate, just the, there's a pattern, there's a cadence, there's a routine to the year. You know, it starts with closing your financial books from last year, Where you're working with your usual financial people, and then there's moving into the valuation. And then if you need to have an audit of your plan because you're more than 100 people, you know, and then you have to work with your third-party administrator to get all of the stock allocations reviewed and be sure they're all right. And then if you're really going to make it, you know, walk your talk and do the ownership, then you've got to have the whole Ownership meeting and put out the stock certificates and update everybody on how many shares they have, how big their account is, that kind of thing. And then it's the extra work of making sure everybody understands. So we had an employee ownership committee that did the education. I started off doing the education, sometimes didn't go so well. So I was like, okay, get the employees to take care of it. What do they want to know? How do they want to learn it? So we had a great group of folks who put together an ESOP 101 and ESOP 201 and ESOP 301. So when employees started with the company, they would get ESOP 101. This is how this works. This is what it means. This is what you get from the company. This is what you should give to the company. And then ESOP 201 is sort of drilling down. Here's how the valuation works. Here's how the We determine the value in the company, and then ESOP 301 we would do for the employees who were coming up on 5 to 10 years away from retirement. So, okay, here's how you're going to get your money out of the plan. Here's how the things work. Here's the decisions you need to make so that we could keep everybody involved and educated along the way.
Lauren Feldman I've talked to a number of owners who've either been thinking about doing an ESOP or actually had taken the leap. And one common concern I've heard is they wonder what subsequent generations of leadership will do with the business. They wonder if they will continue to operate it as an ESOP, or, you know, especially someone like you where there are potential suitors out there, as you've clearly proven. Yep. Will future leaders choose to sell the business and maybe take some of the money that the original owner left on the table by trying to preserve the culture and the jobs that they had built. How did you think about that in the early days?
Roland Burdett In the early days, we very much bought into the concept that ESOP's forever and we're going to take care of it. In the middle years, we started working on succession planning. Identifying who are the people in the company that might be that next generation of leaders to take over for myself as CEO, take over for our CFO, take over for our COO. So we really started trying to identify who those people might be and starting to figure out how to get them involved in the company. And then as we got post-COVID and we got into Especially last year with all of the Doge and all the chaos in the government contracting community, we began to look at the idea that you only make money as a stockholder when you sell the stock. And so we had to come to terms with the idea that maybe an ESOP isn't really forever and that maybe at some point there is a way to cash out and lock in your gains. And we had to really come to terms with that and think about that and work through what that would look like and made that decision.
Lauren Feldman You mentioned Doge. You're a government contractor. That had to be a bit of a difficult time, especially perhaps coming out of, I don't know how the pandemic affected you. Maybe that was a difficult time as well.
Roland Burdett Yes. So the pandemic was tough. Fortunately, in the national security space, it wasn't as bad financially because the government, in the highly secured work, you can't take it home. So they couldn't do remote work. So they were bringing, still bringing people in, but they were doing all the social distancing. They were setting up to where you had one team working one week, another team working another week. So even if you did have a breakout, you didn't have a, you didn't take out your entire team. So they were doing a lot of those kind of things, but everybody had to go into work. And so as all of our people were going into work every day and looking around at everybody else who was remote across the intelligence and defense community, a lot of people left that market space in '21 and '22. Just, I don't want to deal with that. So we had employees who wanted to go back to their hometowns, who wanted to go to the beach, who wanted to go to the mountains. We had an employee who literally went and got an apartment that overlooks one of the national parks in Utah so he can look at the parking lot and decide if he's going to work in the afternoon or he's, if it's not busy, he's going to go hang out in the park. And so that's, that was hard. So we had a big, in the Great Resignation, we had a big dip in '22 where employees left the company, but it was Market-wide employees left the cleared contracting community a lot in that year.
Lauren Feldman And did Doge target you? I mean, did that have a significant impact?
Roland Burdett Doge, it didn't have a significant impact. We lost 10% positions. We were moving people around and making it work, but it was just the uncertainty and the chaos. At that point, we began thinking first, it's better to be part of a bigger company instead of a 35-person company. It might be better as part of a 1,500-person company just to have more options, to have more firepower behind you, to have more top cover. And then the other is with all of these jobs, everybody's got their job, which is their salary to pay their mortgages and everything else. And their benefits, but then because we're an ESOP, it's also their retirement. And so just looking at everything that was going on, the disaster that was USAID when they when Doge just destroyed that and all of the companies that were working there, a lot of the Doge impacts in the in the CISA agency and some other places where they just gutted it. And you look at, if you're an ESOP company, you're risking your retirement plans. And so I was frankly having trouble sleeping, being responsible for that. And so our board of directors and our executive team were like, maybe it's time we sold. Maybe it's time to cash out that equity, to lock in the gains, get it to the employees so we're not risking everybody's retirement plans anymore.
Lauren Feldman Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression that that's an aspect of running an ESOP that doesn't get as much attention as perhaps it deserves. People tend to, I mean, most people who do an ESOP, they do it because the company is growing and profitable. If it's not profitable, you really can't do it. But even profitable companies turn around and go through tough times occasionally.
Roland Burdett Yeah.
Lauren Feldman And while we've all heard the heartwarming stories of the employees, you know, the receptionist who retires with a million-dollar nest egg, and that sounds pretty great, but it doesn't have to happen. If the company gets into trouble, if it fails, that nest egg can disappear. Yeah. It's not like a 401 where the money is automatically segregated, although I guess some companies do choose to operate that way if they can. You mentioned you lost some sleep. Tell us about that. How concerned were
Roland Burdett You? It was very scary to be president and CEO and our CFO and our COO of the company at that point and looking around and seeing what was going on in the community and that At least it appeared to us at the snap of a finger, Doge could come through and say, you know, you're gone, you're gone, you're gone. And the risk that was putting all of our employees at just wasn't comfortable. And because it was, as I said, jobs, benefits, pay, and ultimately people's retirement, we felt like we needed to take some action. That the best answer we felt was to, like I said, lock in those gains and pay out everybody and keep going, but in a bigger company as part of something bigger than us.
Lauren Feldman Sounds like you had not segregated the money it would've taken to buy everybody's equity if necessary.
Roland Burdett We had done that, so we had that there. But again, if the If you wind up, you know, if you get so much revenue cut that at some point you have to eat into some of that money. So yes, it was logically segregated, but it was still there. And if we lost revenues, we, you know, to try and keep running, you'd have to make that choice. So rather than risk going bankrupt or risk taking our revenues down to, you know, not enough to keep the ESOP going, if we We would rather go out on our terms and sell at a value that would help everybody.
Lauren Feldman Did you actually get to the point where you were kind of playing out what that scenario might be like, how you would handle it?
Roland Burdett Yep. Yep.
Lauren Feldman What did it look like?
Roland Burdett And from the very beginning, Betsy had always been a big believer in what she called scenario planning, not 5-year strategic plans, but Short-term scenario plans. If this happens, what are you going to do? If this happens, what are you going to do? Looking six months, twelve months, eighteen months. So we had those kind of plans, and where would you move people? How would you switch? Who would you? Which contracts would we go to? Which customers? Which primes? But there was just so much chaos in the market at that point that doing any of that kind of planning was. It was certainly doable and we had those plans and we were ready if something happened to contract ABC. We knew where we could go move them, who we, what doors we would go knock on next. But it was going to be a hit on cash. The valuation of the business stayed relatively flat even though we'd lost a couple positions. We still had good Cash reserves, we were still in a good place contracts-wise. We had long-term contracts moving forward. So from a valuation perspective, we were still pretty good. We didn't take any kind of hit there.
Lauren Feldman Did it cause concern among employees? Did, you know, you just described the concerns that you obviously had. Was that widespread throughout the company?
Roland Burdett I don't know that widespread is the right word, but there were definitely some Employees who in talks said, hey, what are we going to do if, and what's going to happen if, and what's going to, you know, what are we going to do? So that was definitely on people's minds in the whole contracting community last year.
Lauren Feldman You made the decision to look for an acquirer.
Roland Burdett Yes.
Lauren Feldman And how did you proceed? How did that go?
Roland Burdett So the first step was really getting all of our board of directors to buy into it and our executive team that yes, this is what we wanted to do. And then it was an education project of how do you do it? Because for exactly what you said, it's not common in the ESOP world. It's not talked about that much. So there was a lot of education. How do we do this? What's the process? What do we need to think about? So we went on kind of an education listening tour, a learning exercise to figure it out. And then we started as we were doing this and said, okay, we'd never put out an ad. We never went to brokers and listed ourselves or anything like that, but just talking to people, talking to people, talking to people. We wound up with some companies that came and knocked on our door and said, hey, are you interested? And so we had discussions with several companies enough that we figured out what it is we were looking for. And we got down to 2 companies and we chose the one that was going to be the best for the employees.
Lauren Feldman Is it more complicated to sell an ESOP than a traditionally owned business?
Roland Burdett Well, that's, it definitely is. What we said was when we put in the ESOP, we discovered that it took a lot of time, a lot of energy. and a lot of consultants to put in the ESOP. Then we discovered when you're ready to take out an ESOP, it takes a lot of time, a lot of energy, and a lot of consultants to take it out too. So there definitely is, because you wind up with not just the board of directors has to sign off on the sale, the board of trustees has to sign off on the sale. And the board of trustees are the ones, in our case, we were 100% ESOP, so they held 100% of the stock. So ultimately, BTG as the acquirer was really negotiating with our board of trustees, not with the board of directors.
Lauren Feldman Who made up the, the 2 different boards?
Roland Burdett So the— for the— for most of MSI's history, they were actually the same people. We're what was called an internally trusted group. But as we were approaching this decision, we went and got an outside trustee, who would be able to ask us as the board of directors and as the internal trustees the tough questions. And then when we got to, when we selected the one we wanted to go with and he agreed with that, then he wound up taking over the negotiations and closing the deal.
Lauren Feldman So the outside trustee negotiated the deal, closed it, made the ultimate determination that this is the one we're going to take and not you, the CEO?
Roland Burdett Yes. We said, here's the one we recommend. And so we could put a lot of weight behind it, but ultimately when it got down to, are we going to take the deal? He had the ultimate answer.
Lauren Feldman That's really interesting. Did that bother you at the time?
Roland Burdett No, we, again, we selected a good one. He did a terrific job, a guy named Michael New out of Ohio. He was terrific at it and he got the employees a great deal, I think.
Lauren Feldman And what role did the employees play through this? Were they aware of each step of the way?
Roland Burdett Yes. So much to our corporate lawyer's chagrin, we went and talked to all of the employees early on. So in the middle of June last year, we had an all-employee meeting and said, everybody come to this meeting. It's really important. So everybody came in a little nervous to that, and we really went through the details again. Think like an owner. We went through here's the finances, here's how everything ended in 2024, here's how things look for 2025, here's the risks with Doge and the chaos in the government contracting space, and here's what we think. You know, here's what the alternatives are. We can Keep going on our own. We can sell, we can go buy another company to try and make ourselves bigger, or we can just kind of fold up and go away. And went through all of those options. And then the joke was, I, you know, put up the classic system engineering chart of here's your options, here's the problems, and which of these 4 options is the right solution and all the checkboxes. And the one to sell had all the right checkboxes checked. And then I just sat there in the meeting and we, I was there, employees were there with questions till 7 or 8 o'clock at night that night. And then we set up lunch meetings over the next couple of weeks where employees could just come and ask any questions. And we said, we wanted your questions, we wanted your input, concerns you had, things you wanted us to negotiate, things you wanted to be sure were in our deal. So we really, again, back to walking the talk of employee ownership. We wanted their input. So no, they weren't negotiating, but we wanted their input for what was important to negotiate.
Lauren Feldman Were there moments when you thought the interests of the business, of the employees, of the leadership were diverging in any way?
Roland Burdett The only issue, and we dealt with it early on was in terms of our, myself and our CFO and our COO, that certainly we could have lost our jobs out of the deal because the acquiring companies got the level of positions. So certainly it was a risk to us personally, but we felt like it was more important. And frankly, as board of directors and board of trustees, our obligation was to get the best deal for the employees, not for us.
Lauren Feldman That was probably the way the trustee would've looked at it as well, I assume.
Roland Burdett Absolutely. I don't really care about you. We're looking for the big deal. Yes.
Lauren Feldman I don't know how much you can share, but can you give us a sense of what the, where the price ended up being? Was it what you would've anticipated a few years before the difficult years, or was it a bit more, did it show some of the distress that You'd been through, maybe that's too strong a word, but you know what I mean?
Roland Burdett Yeah, I would say certainly pre-pandemic we might have gotten a higher number. Post-pandemic, we are very happy with our number. We wound up at just over 2 times our valuation, which was our target.
Lauren Feldman How did you select that target? Was that looking at the experience of other ESOPs, other businesses in your industry, all of the above?
Roland Burdett All of the above. Yeah. Talking to other companies in our space and what deals had been made and talking to other ESOPs and looking at where things were.
Lauren Feldman Did you turn down any offers at any point?
Roland Burdett Yes.
Lauren Feldman And what was that based on?
Roland Burdett We can't talk about who they were or anything, but ultimately we didn't run a process in terms of soliciting bids or anything like that. It was really just talking to companies. And it just, it, we talked, we wound up talking seriously with 5 companies and then got it to really 2 at the very end that we both had, you know, here's letters where they actually put pen on paper. And that was where we evaluated the offers that they were making. And which one we felt like was going to be better for the employees.
Lauren Feldman Do you think all of this would've gone differently if you had been traditionally owned instead of an ESOP? If you were the owner, would you have made different decisions throughout this process?
Roland Burdett Ultimately, I don't think I would've made a different decision. Like I said, I think we made the right decision. Since the acquisition, BTG has done everything they said they were going to do with us. They were true to their word all the way through. They've been a great partner. They've integrated us well into their systems and into their structure. So we absolutely made the right decision. If we weren't in ESOP, I think it would have gone, could have gone faster. But at the same time, I'm not sure I would have asked all the same questions and would have worked as hard to learn the process and understand it. So I think in the end we probably got a better deal.
Lauren Feldman Better deal in terms of financially or better deal in terms of how they said they would run the business after the acquisition?
Roland Burdett All of the above. That because we learned so much about the process, because we were forced to think through the deal and understand all the implications of the deal, I think we Got the better result than if it had just been me making my own decisions along the way.
Lauren Feldman Are they going to continue to operate the Miklos subsidiary, whatever they call it, as an ESOP, or are they fully integrating it into the existing business?
Roland Burdett We are fully integrated. And so again, when you're— the things you learn, you can't be an ESOP on the day of the closing. So you have to terminate the ESOP the day if they're not going to pick up the ESOP. So they're not picking up the ESOP. So the day before the ESOP, you have to terminate it effective midnight before the day of closing. So November 18th, we had the meeting where we signed all the papers to terminate the ESOP at midnight. And then on November 19th, we signed all the papers to be bought by BTG.
Lauren Feldman And what exactly does that entail, terminating the ESOP?
Roland Burdett It's an amend— literally, it's an amendment to your retirement plan to terminate it, to take it out, that it no longer exists.
Lauren Feldman Do you have to provide cash at that point, buy everybody out?
Roland Burdett Nope. Nope. It's just a paperwork exercise to terminate the ESOP on the condition that tomorrow the acquiring company buys it and closes the deal.
Lauren Feldman Did employees get the retirement money that was waiting for them at that moment, or did that—
Roland Burdett You know, like ESOPs, there's things you learn, right? So just the first week of July here, so just a few weeks ago, a couple of weeks ago was payout week. And so everybody got their money transferred into their accounts. I guess it was actually the last week of June, but that was payout week. So all the money hit the accounts then. So before then was all of the machinations of you have to do the final valuation of the company and, you know, how, what was all the money that came in the sale? Where did it go? How do you then allocate the stock that you had on that last day into everybody's accounts and then translate that into cash? And then figure out how much each person gets so that then it can all get processed. So it was 6 months to get that first payout. And then there's still, because of the IRS process, there's another probably 8 months to a year to go before the final payout. So the employees got 80% of their money due here a couple of weeks ago, and they'll get the remaining 20%. When the IRS says, yes, you're terminated and you were terminated as a tax-deductible or tax-free entity, then you get the last of the payout.
Lauren Feldman With this kind of sale to a larger company, owners, whether it's a traditional owner or an ESOP, everybody's hopeful that the acquirer will treat employees well and maintain the jobs. But you really can't guarantee that, can you?
Roland Burdett No.
Lauren Feldman How did you deal with that? How did you assess that you were dealing with someone that would actually do what they were saying they were going to do?
Roland Burdett Ultimately, it was a, it, you know, ultimately it comes down to trust, to relationships. We spent a lot of time talking to their CEO and to their executive team in the process of the due diligence and in the The process of the deal. And then they had a great track record. They have acquired a series of other companies over the previous 2 or 3 years in our market space. So they've really gotten well-practiced at acquiring smaller companies and bringing them into the fold. So we felt like we, they had a good track record and everybody we talked to had had good experiences with them. So we felt like it was a reasonable bet to take at that point.
Lauren Feldman So you really vetted them almost as if you were buying them.
Roland Burdett Right. And, you know, because we were going to be part of them at that point, so we wanted to be sure we had a strong partner.
Lauren Feldman And what did this mean for you specifically? Did you arrange a deal where you would stay on?
Roland Burdett Right. And so again, with the ESOP and with the With the outside trustee, if there was a specific deal for me or our CFO or our COO, it would've had to gone through the trustee. So frankly, their CEO and I shook hands on, this is how we're going to take care of you afterwards. And so yes, there's a deal for how long we would work for them and what we would do and how we would integrate the company and how we would support that. And then there's a window at which we can walk away if they don't want us or don't need us, or we have a change of heart. So that window has opened. That's where we're at.
Lauren Feldman Do you know what your plans are?
Roland Burdett Yes. So my father passed away last month, and so it was Not unexpected. I'd been, my brothers and I have been caring for him for the last 6 months, but watching him and working with him over that process made me realize that sort of time is finite. And I didn't want to just keep doing what I was doing. So I really want to do something different where I have more control of my time and more control of my workload. And so I am effective the end of this month, at the end of July, I will drop down to one day a week working for VTG. And really that my job will be supporting the legacy MSI folks in the environment there and helping them be sure they get integrated and everything gets integrated. And that we wind down the ESOP and do all the payouts and all the paperwork correctly over the next year. And then with the rest of the time, I'm hoping to start into that ESOP industrial complex, as you called it, and be a consultant who can help other companies who are facing some of these same questions, same decisions with ESOP administration, ESOP governance, ESOP systems.
Lauren Feldman Do you think you have some relevant experience?
Roland Burdett I think after having designed, put in, run, grown an ESOP, and then made the hard decision to take it out, I think I have, we have a story to tell that is different from a lot of other consultants, and we lived the ESOP experience for 20 years. So I'm hoping that works. If not, I'll come back and see you about running podcasts.
Lauren Feldman You can do both, you know. Is there something in particular that you wish you had known before all of this? One particular lesson or surprise that, is that something that you would've done differently had you had perhaps the opportunity to talk to someone like you who had been through it?
Roland Burdett I think we made a lot of good decisions, so I'm not sure there's any one that stands out as we didn't do it right that way. With an ESOP, there is just so much flexibility with the plans and the way you can set things up. I think there's just, there's so many choices. That was always our challenge was, are we making the right choice at the right time? I think we did a pretty good job all the way through. I think in terms of a decision or a question that we had. Should we have considered selling earlier? Yeah, like I said, pre-pandemic when our value was a little bit higher. Did we miss an opportunity there or not? But I think the employees have been happy.
Lauren Feldman You didn't see the pandemic coming?
Roland Burdett No, no.
Lauren Feldman Or Doge?
Roland Burdett Missed that one. I knew there were going to be cuts, but I did not expect Doge. No. So I think in terms of a what if, sure, maybe we could have sold at a higher number in the late 20-teens. But I think all the employees liked where we were at MSI and liked what we were doing for them. And I think we got through the pandemic as an employee-owned company. I think we did a lot of things. I think we made a lot of choices that the employees appreciated and that helped them and their families during the pandemic. And I'm not sure we would've made some of those same choices if we hadn't been employee-owned.
Lauren Feldman We missed anything, Roland? Anything I should have asked you about?
Roland Burdett I don't think so. It's been good.
Lauren Feldman You shared a lot. I think this is likely to be of great interest to a lot of people. I guess the last thing I would ask you is, looking forward to your new career as a consultant, Have you gotten up to speed on some of the alternative employee ownership models like worker co-ops or employee ownership trusts?
Roland Burdett So I had been a member of Tugboat Institute until of course I decided to sell last year, got drummed out. But so through that, we had met people who had gone the employee ownership trust route, and one of the co-op route. So it's been, that has always been of interest to me is learning those things. There certainly are alternatives to the ESOP and there are, there's reasons to do those alternatives sometimes, and there's reasons to do the ESOP sometimes.
Lauren Feldman I should point out, you said you're a member of Tugboat. That's an organization that encourages businesses to set themselves up to remain privately owned forever, at least 100 years. And clearly that was your intent.
Roland Burdett That was the original intent. And I really struggled with the decision and what that meant in terms of Tugboat. And Tugboat has their 7 Ps formula, their values, and ultimately private is their number one. But ultimately we chose to put people in terms of their jobs and their mortgages and their benefits and in the end, their retirement above being private, we felt like it was more important to lock in and guarantee that retirement benefit for everybody rather than keep rolling the dice and staying private.
Lauren Feldman Roland Burdett was until recently the CEO of Miklos Systems, a defense contractor that he helped sell to VTG, a larger defense contractor. Roland, if If anybody's interested in your consulting services, where can they find you?
Roland Burdett So we're starting out, we're setting up the website, but you can hit me on my email, harvardf3@outlook.com.
Lauren Feldman Thank you for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
Roland Burdett I appreciate it.