EOT Case Study - Bicycle Technologies International

okay hello to new jersey and new york uh uh so happy to uh my name is chris michael from eot advisors so happy to present to everyone here the uh world exclusive premier uh video interview with preston martin uh of bicycle technology founder about bicycle technologies international which is uh i think possibly the country's largest employee ownership trust by our estimation uh he's from beaming in from santa fe new mexico hi how's it going chris good good to see you good to see you okay so the way the format of the presentation today is going to go it's about half an hour long altogether then we'll cut over to live q a um uh via zoom and the link above um i'm going to give us an as quick as possible overview on what what an employee ownership trust actually is and then we'll cut back to uh our interview with preston okay uh here we go so again everyone my name is chris michael from eot advisors it's always an honor to present at a state employee ownership center conferences and the national center for employment conference i have to say that i have a special affinity for the new jersey new york center for employee ownership for a number of reasons but one of them one of the top reasons is that i'm from new jersey in new york i was born in new york city and raised in new jersey uh and bergen county and teaneck new jersey in particular although i do live in new york city now so i'm the founder managing director of eot advisors so we've helped to really develop really put the employment trust on the map in the united states in a contemporary period we're the only eot shop in the dedicated eot shop in the country some of the kind of foundational research supporting the use of the eot in the united states was some pieces that we published in tax notes and probate and property uh back in 15 and 17. um as you'll see there i'm also professor rutgers um so that's another connection and half of new jersey and the center here um so uh very excited about getting as quickly as possible to the interview with preston martin this is intended to be a brief overview of of the employee ownership trust you can't really begin to speak about the eot without first talking about john lewis partnership which is sort of like the macy's of the uk um really large fancy um department store um except that it's not just the macy's they also have a a a supermarket sort of chain attached to it so it's both john lewis partnership is both john lewis department store and also weight rose supermarkets that's why you see the weight rows and john lewis on the sign on the picard's there these are some pictures from their annual end-of-year meeting where they announce um the annual profit share as a percentage of compensation so everybody at those uh events is getting an 11 or 17 percent in in the top right um one year end bonus as a part of their eot profit share um it's the largest and oldest eot in the world it has currently about 83 000 employee owners everybody at that company is an employee owner from day one although that's not a requirement to do it that way but at that company they choose to make employee owners uh employees owners on day one they did 14 billion in 2020 revenue they've been employee owned for almost 100 years they transitioned to a partial eot in about and they went to full 100 eot ownership in 1950. um so and i should also add that so eots since that point and moving forward have always been the mainstream form of employee ownership in the united kingdom um it's the us that went down the esau path but the uk has been and continues to be uh a place where eot eots are that are the main structure main approach towards relationships so what is an eot an eot is a trust that holds some or all of the shares of company on behalf of most or all of the employees of the company it's just like an esop in the sense that all of the things that make something employee owned are there right there are three main components to employee ownership are you sharing the financial rewards of the company and these are agreed upon nationally internationally when you know for 150 years if you if you're talking about employee ownership employee ownership means these three things it means you're sharing the financial rewards of the company that profits gains that the corporate governance at the highest level of the company is has a mandate to act in the best interests of the employee owners um and then finally that it's a great place to work that there's a really wonderful culture at the workplace so the the esop has all of these things and the eot also has all these qualities um the difference though is that an eot does not have the share accounts the per employee break you know broken out individual employee share accounts that the esap has um and so all of the benefit all the difference is really between an esop and an eot um if you can keep in mind this fundamental difference i think you can kind of almost figure out the rest of the differences so because an eot does not have individual employee share accounts where you're looking to buy an employee's shares back when they retire um it's not a retirement plan right estop is a regulated retirement plan eot is not um and esop because it's a regulated retirement plan has some tax differences that allow it to act as a tax shield you have to pay taxes at the end of the day but those taxes are deferred um with an eot you don't have any special tax shield difference um at the same time an eot is not regulated under erisa eots are regulated under state trust law eots aren't because you're not looking to repurchase shares in any given year there's no need for an annual evaluation again you're not looking at worth repeating you're not going to be repurchasing employee shares so there are no there's no future schedule of repurchase obligations in good years you reward employee owners with profits and in bad years if there's no extra you know profit sharing that can be done in any given year then there's no profit sharing done in that year um you can decide year by year how much to share with the employee owners um likewise it's not a regulated time plan erisa plan there's no need for a third party administrator with an eot um one way to think about it if it's helpful is that eots are employee ownership but without the esop peace another way to think about it which i'll come back to later on in the session is that eots are a private flexible low-cost and easy to understand alternative to the esop i'll add a fifth element there which is that they're a sustainable alternative to the e-stock two key points to remember similar to earlier once the shares go in they stay in so once the shares go into the eot they tend to stay in there and another way to think about it from the employee side is that employees this is the british the british expression employees are naked in naked out so they're not buying shares to come into the employee ownership and they're also not getting bought out of shares when they leave the employ in the employ ownership trust it functions really quite like any law partnership or any professional partnership you are made a partner because of the value that you bring to the firm there may or may not be a kind of a nominal buy-in but that's sort of beside the point um your benefit is getting a share of the profits while you work at the law partnership with the professional partnership and when you leave you're not expecting to get some outsized you're not expecting to get your fortune when you leave the company rather you're bought out if at all at that nominal level that you bought in at the benefits are while you work at the company um so if the eots are so great how come we haven't heard of them before how come they haven't been used in the united states for the past you know 50 100 years etc uh if i see the letters eot i just think of a some strange new greek fraternity okay very fair question um here's my answer this is a timeline of the use of the eot in american history now it turns out um you know in another part of my life i'm an academic and and do historical research and it turns out that their eot was used in the distant us past so we have a case of an eot company in 1897 in the state of washington um in the 1920s the most famous employee-owned business in the united states was an eot um in fact it was that the founder was a harvard grad he was advised by a university chicago economics professor who later went on to be a u.s senator from illinois paul douglas um they did tours all over the country there are write-ups about them in newspapers all over the country um i don't have any evidence of this but i imagine that it might have served as some inspiration actually for the john lewis company in the uk or for john for john lewis himself um and adopting this approach in the uk um things were looking good for the eot model certainly in the uk but but in the us as well so what changed and i think the answer to that question you know why why did the esop become the predominant model in the u.s and i think the answer to that question uh is easy enough the answer boils down to the the man in the bow tie on the bottom of the screen his name is luke helso um he invented something called the kelso plan uh first with peninsula newspapers in 1956 he was leveraging tax code that had already existed since i think about the early 20s um with employee retirement uh benefits and he was like a nuclear power plant in the size of a you know in in a human being in a human body in human form he he went all over the country flew all over the country proselytizing what was called the kelso plan uh ultimately his second wife patricia heather kind of joined him in the crusade they published books very high profile figures convinced companies all over the country just on their own steam the two of them for one reason or another the kelso plan wound up getting formalized as a part of tax code um after when erisa passed in 73-74 and from that point forward you had a whole generation of practitioners who were now able to leverage something that wasn't just uh wasn't just driven on you know by the kind of charisma of luke elso but was you know was now in federal law um and legitimized um by federal law and so you know to begin with people like john menke who was actually a senior tax associate for luke kelso opening up the first uh esop shop in 1974 to corey rosen opening up the nceo in 1978 which is of course focused on employee ownership but um naturally would would tend to you know has um uh has and continues to um focus on the stock because it was the main the main thing the main way to do employee ownership in the us so from that point forward from the 70s mid 70s ford the rest is history for for decades now the esop because of federal law and because of the whole generation a wonderful generation of of service providers who are able to make a living by helping businesses become employee-owned that's been the main story of employee ownership in the united states now i'm a big fan i'm a big fan of employee ownership and i'm a big fan of the esoc um at the same time i believe that you can um you can be you can like something right you can be a fan and an advocate of something but you can also be aware of it you can critique it you can be aware of its limitations and i think that um for my part i was just kind of um at the right place at the right time coming into this field a decade ago um you know in the early in 2009 and early 2010s um uh aware how wonderful the esop was as a device to create employee ownership that nothing like it had ever existed i wrote a 300 plus page phd dissertation you know arguing that point but at the same time i was aware of the limitations of the esop as our you know most of the people in the field aware that the esop isn't the right fit for every company and i started to invent what i thought was out of whole cloth the um employee ownership trust approach i wasn't aware that it existed in u.s history or in the uk yet and i published an article on tax notes on the concept a little bit later after that i discovered that actually this was you know this exists it's the mainstream forum in the uk and uh uh sort of re you know did it did a second article uh um crystallizing my my my my thinking on the employment trust in in 2017 in in an american bar association publication probate and properties the trust attorney publication and um started doing eots launched eot advisors in 2017. so our published research shows that the employee ownership trust is not subject to orisa that existing u.s trust law works we don't need any new laws to do an employee ownership trust and in fact you can do an employee ownership trust in any state in the country you would keep your corporation domiciled where it is at the moment and if trust law in your state is not perfectly ideal or perfectly suitable for the creation of an eot you would simply use another state's trust law to create the trust i mean this is extremely common for example with family trusts you live in new york you live in new jersey but you might want to use trust law from delaware or new hampshire or something like that my only minor contribution if there is any is to note that um there's been a development in trust law um in the last 20 or 30 years something that didn't really exist in the anglo-american tradition um you know in the in the thousand years or so of of that we've had trust law um um since 2004 in the united states you can now create a trust for a purpose trusts do not any longer have to have human beneficiaries you might recall the leona helmsly case with the trust for her dog there's more to talk about there but uh for the moment we can say that you can now have something called a non-charitable purpose trust where you identify a purpose as the overriding goal of the trust and human beneficiaries if there are any would be can be second that can be made secondary to that purpose and so for example uh adopting adapting this concept to the to employ to the context of employee ownership you can decide now whether or not you want to have employees as legal beneficiaries with standing to sue um you can create your own customized enforcement mechanism that doesn't rely on the employee owners themselves being the beneficiaries entitled to suit the company or the sue the trust i should say and you can thereby minimize litigation risk so we launched in 2017 eot advisors is the first financial advisory and investment banking firm in the country focused on assisting business owners selling to an eot we work in all 50 states we provide a one-stop shop for eot so we do the structure of the transaction we design the employee ownership um we help provide legal forms um and we also um do valuation pointing the right direction on ownership culture ownership culture and get you to a close okay um we've worked to date we've worked on about 15 um closed about 15 u.s eots we've worked with every u.s eot in the contemporary period we're on track to get that number up to 20 by the end of this year and i think the future is very bright at this moment for eots um here are some representative clients you see btis in the upper left there um we've done some video interviews with optimax with pradas and associates more video interviews on the way so what are the deal characteristics for an eot so typically these are not uh requirements or limitations um i've done eot transactions where the enterprise was down to you know between you know just a little north of a million dollars um and i've done eot transactions that were significantly above the range on the screen there but the kinds of companies that i'm finding are coming to me to ask about eots or who become my clients tend to have enterprise values in the range of 10 to 20 million dollars um typical workforce size in the range of 50 to 100 employees and again these aren't requirements uh some clients have been down to just a dozen employees um other clients have been up to the hundred hundreds of employees and um working with a company now that's in the thousands um but this is the typical uh you know company coming coming to speak with me tends to be in that 50 50 to 100 employee range typical time to close is about six months again this is not you know a heart there's flexibility here um i've closed an eot transaction in in under two months uh on the one end and uh you know taken up to a year and a half in another case where we were just you know really taking our time with the transaction and making sure every single detail was exactly uh to specification but six months feels like a nice i don't know if it's a leisurely pace but a very comfortable pace to complete an eot transaction so what are the advantages of an eot for the seller eots are private flexible low cost and easy to understand alternative to the esop and i'd add a sustainable alternative to the esop eots are private so when you do an esop transaction you're going to be sharing your first of all it's a quasi public transaction with department of labor oversight you're hiring a trustee you're giving that trustee money to hire an attorney to hire a valuation firm and then you're now bargaining with the trustee that you just hired and with their attorney and with their evaluation person um you have to involve probably about six or seven um firms all to help you get through the esop transaction each storm probably has a number of representatives from each firm so it's not uncommon when you're doing an esop transaction to have 20 people on a call um fleshing out how the esap is going to proceed uh eots couldn't be more different with an eot i'm getting you there a to z soup to nuts um i'm the only person that you have to hire in my experience when i set out to do eots i wasn't thinking privacy is the main concern but more and more with business owner clients of mine i'm i'm i'm noticing you know it makes sense that what a value people put on privacy for for most of my clients for the last 20 years the only people that have seen their books has been them and their cpa that's it um so um i think privacy is um it's it's it's an important value and it's you know again i think vsup is a great tool it's just it's just that the esop doesn't speak as closely uh uh to that value of privacy as as the eot does eots are also flexible um you know most business owners that i've encountered are are pretty independent spirits they like to do things their way a lot of business owners become um become the boss because they don't want anybody to tell them how to do things right so um you know again as great a tool as the esop is there's a kind of it's a retirement plan there's no getting around that there are a set of sort of options that you have when it comes time to structuring an esop and there's not you know there's some variation certainly um there's some certainly a a good amount of customization that can be done with the nissan but with an eot um it it's it's a it's just really wide open just it's an extremely flexible tool i mean you have companies that adopt an eot and want equity compensation equity sharing to be a big part of the eot so notwithstanding everything that i just said earlier in the presentation about eots and the shares going in and staying in eot you can always layer on equity compensation programs broad-based equity sharing um um broad-based share ownership you can always add that onto the eot on top of it right so if you want to do broad-based stock options if you want to have a phantom stock plan if you want to do actual shares outside of the ut you're not limited to that uh you're not limited to a purely profit sharing approach to employee ownership it's lots of flexibility and you can see that in the different you know clients that we that we've worked with in the past and you can also see that in the uk as well um low cost um eots are are it's still somewhat influx pricing around eots but it's at the moment looking like eots are coming in at about 20 percent of the cost of an esop to implement and about 20 percent of the cost of an esop to maintain on an annual basis um [Music] eots are also easy to understand um it's easy to understand for you as a seller you don't have to spend a year and a half learning what what esops are in order to create it in order to create employment your company again six months on a fairly sort of even basis meeting every couple of weeks will get us to an eot it's also easier for the employee owners to understand everybody understands a profit sharing program and uh you don't have to train employees on what it means to have share accounts and you know what what it means to value the company's shares um by default again there's flexibility here but by default an eot would involve a profit sharing program and uh annual annual bonuses so as as as great as all of these advantages are for the eot um i think that there are a few additional points to mention um in the current climate um one is that fewer sellers are fused fewer sellers to an esop are using the the theme 10 1042 tax deferral option so from the seller's perspective that's the real benefit to doing an isa it's that you get to defer taxes invest the sale proceeds in the stock market and get the appreciation on the tax pros on what would have gone to the tax collector and you know when you sell the stock you still have to pay taxes but you get to defer capital gains for a period fewer sellers are using that option for a number of reasons some sellers prefer to invest in for example real estate it's not operating companies other sellers might be interested in um international securities uh there are a host of reasons they might also not be interested in the complexity uh the added complexity they're hosting reasons why sellers aren't using 1042s on esop transactions but the k the fact of the matter is that that only about a third of sellers you know even use the 1042 for on asap transactions another important thing to note is that private equity firms are more and more targeting lower middle market businesses so all the business owners that i speak with they say they're getting a call every day from a private equity firm or an investment bank um you know with bids or offers to buy them out that's relevant for us in the employee ownership community because it now means that esop you know privately held esop companies in a lower middle market that would not simply not have been on the radar for um for private equity firms for for uh you know corporate conglomerates are now on the radar and um because of erisa rules because of the you know requirement or mandate or requirement i should say uh that erisa trustees consider sale you know consider offers for purchase of the business and uh there's even a you know requirement that if the offer is good enough that they might have to sell the e-stop out even if the employee owners don't want that sale to to occur um there's a real concern that if your goal is to you know not necessarily create employee ownership forever but at the very least to kind of to have some kind of sustainable employee ownership program that you you know might last at least a few decades let's say um that's you know not necessarily an imminent threat it really depends on your company your industry what's happening in the market around you um but it's it's a real concern at the very least that esop companies are being bought out and so if your goal is to create sustainable employee ownership then again an eot is something that you might want to think about another factor here is that unfortunately there's been more esop litigation in recent years that's uh you know a burden that i think not many people want to have to contend with again your your your i think litigation risk is minimized with the eot and as a result of the increased litigation or any subs uh esa costs have gone up and again um you know eot that again points to perhaps doing an eot um so that's it on my presentation here is my case study slide uh for bicycle technologies international you can see the warehouse there you can see the inside you can see some bikers and uh they're based in santa fe new mexico um and don't have to do anything more here because we're going to turn it back to our interview with preston uh first of all i'd like to thank you so much again for being here for this world exclusive interview with you as founder of largest cot in the united states bicycle technologies international and i'd like to start off the interview um with uh by asking um you know just just kind of your origin story how what what was the founding origin story of bti you know of course you had a partner rich originally you know tell us some of that right uh bti started in ashland oregon fresh out of college bike racing and and thought wow suspension bicycle suspension is taking off right now uh we're going to do bicycle suspension service so me and my partner fixed up my garage with its dirt floor and and basically renovated the whole shack into a space where we could do our repairs and also warehouse parts and that was the beginning of our distribution company bti bicycle technologies international so that was 1993 in ash northern then we moved to santa fe new mexico in 1996 and and then what made what what brought about that move was that like a personal lifestyle decision for you and your partner to move out and move down there or or it was a business decision or it was a combination now we were looking for a more centralized location for the company to operate somewhere with the longest riding season and not to mention the great weather and great food and southwest awesome awesome and then um what um you know tell us about the the company's growth over the years you know since the founding and since the move i mean how how how sales been how's your you know distribution network grown over the years well it's it's been perpetual growth since we started the uh the the move to the southwest was a was really helpful for the company to become established with shops all across the us and not just the west coast we ended up adding a second warehouse in sparks nevada in 2017 and that gave us one day shipping of the whole west coast so yeah our business is uh only blossomed especially in the west and uh we'll continue to uh to look at opportunities from expansion and with more warehouses fantastic and you know we're we're heading into talking in a few minutes about um uh your employee ownership trust uh it occurs to me to ask what was the transition like um i guess both to santa fe but then also and then in terms of opening up the new uh warehouse in sparks in terms of employees did you have any were you do you have employees come with you or you had to do new hire down in santa fe or what was that process like or was this still a kind of a growth stage where it wasn't so much of an issue we were fairly small when we moved to santa fe so it was primarily my partner and i who moved down and then hired staff here in santa fe and and then when we opened up the warehouse and sparks it was a whole fresh staff who who started that some some coming from um competing distributors bringing their their knowledge and background to help us get established there fantastic so let's let's shift into um talking about about employee ownership and you know uh um what you know how far back in this you know journey did you begin to think about something that might you know you might not have even known the term employee ownership but you just you you might have known you wanted to do something kind of good with your business when you were time to exit when it was time to exit or or maybe even that it was something that you'd want to do something that was good for your employees when it was time to exit how far back was that or how did that enter the thought process well you know i i really think the journey for the eot started with thinking about a succession plan and and that that came about in uh early 2020 and you know honestly it's one of those things that every business owner who's uh you know got a mature has a mature business has told you you should be thinking about your succession plan and well it's one of those things that you just keep pushing off and say i'll get to that tomorrow not meaning really tomorrow and ultimately uh with the uh how rapidly the world changed in 2020 everything kind of became clear that uh i need to change my priorities so i read a survey of our employees in mid-2020 and and i revealed their a strong desire for a more defined career path and greater earning potential and it was with that those remarks that i really said okay this is this requires special handling how how do i combine a succession plan with with these goals uh the employees goals and so that's where employee ownership became a priority you know rather than just polishing up the books and selling to the highest bidder and heading out it made more sense to look at the options out there in the old employee ownership world esops worker co-ops you know we looked at those they didn't really check all the boxes for us you know i'm doing a leveraged buy out with the employees presented its own debt challenges so here i i was poking around the internet and came across some articles by chris michael and uh and you you helped me understand you know the the simplicity and the value of uh employee ownership trust uh so that's in a nutshell that's how we we ended up you know looking at the eot i got it if you don't mind uh you know saying a few more words about some of the other options for employee ownership i mean this is clear that you know you wanted to do you know you wanted to exit the business at the same time it was you know you saw this desire on the part of the employees to to have uh you know opportunities for growth within the company and for for more earnings within the growing their their salaries inside of the company um you said you looked at other options and of course these are all great options um you know i'm a big fan of everybody knows me knows i'm a big fan of all kinds of employee ownership i just see the eot as one tool in the tool belt um what made you sort of think that maybe the esop or the co-op wasn't the right fit for you uh versus the eot being being what was the right fit for your company well the esap was probably the best known and i i was fairly certain that that would be the direction we might go and at the end of the day i i i did the interview several esop attorneys who who could help provide those services and and came to understand the cost structure and the number of people involved and the annual requirements to maintain an esop and it just became clear that the the formula wasn't right for our our company alternatively you know worker co-ops another interesting model it just it really uh to me spoke to a decentralized decision making that that kind of wasn't wasn't exactly what we wanted we wanted a strong management culture that still encouraged individual achievement amongst the employee owners and so that's that's why we ended up going towards the eot which really does keep that emphasis on the current management structure keeping that largely unchanged but bringing in more more of a voice for the employee owners and members of the trust that's perfect um one other thing that i said before um you know prior occasion is just the kind of the difference between the esop approach to employ ownership which is you know ease up as a retirement plan versus the def i only i keep saying the default mode of structuring financial rewards in an eot because eots are so flexible you can do it different ways but the default mode of structuring financial rewards sharing and eot for profit shares so if you could speak a little bit about about your thoughts about that well the esop like you said is a retirement program the the company would give the employee a share in the company and then when they leave the company they uh they're able to cash out and and it depends on how well the company performed as to whether you know they actually gained or lost when they leave the company our big challenge there was you know we didn't want to basically incentivize an employee to leave is giving the employee uh a reward only at the point that they depart the company and so when things go get get rough you know in a year where things aren't going great you know when your your cash might not be that great it's not a good time for employees to leave but that's exactly what might happen under an esop it's an interesting point that you raise and i i don't i don't hear that uh discussed very often and employment shift community about the kind of the possible sort of in i mean we it's it's clear on the one hand that esup companies tend to have um lower turnover than than the typical company but it is curious to think about what the potential effects might be of uh you know having that incentive of of of the buyout uh for individual employees and what effect that might have on turnover and and what and whether or not it might look different in an eot context we'd have to look at data from the uk um and over time as we have more eot companies in the us we'd have you know data that we can use here as well um so um now i i want to talk i know that a part of your uh um um idea of of bringing in the eot and and transitioning to eot ownership was precisely your your aspirations for uh bti to continue to really grow quite strongly into the in the future um and so let's get to that in a moment in in a moment or two but before we get to that those kind of sort of future plans for bti just you know if you could share a few thoughts or experiences over the last year you guys transitioned at end of year uh between 2020 2021. um um how is it uh it's been about a year you've had the eot in place how has it been since the transition right um it's november now we started in january of this year and uh we made an announcement you know first day of the year when everybody's back from new year's break and surprised the heck out of everybody that was uh not something that i prepared anybody for and but well received the employees were full of questions naturally you know how does this work what are the benefits and i explained it's it's a perpetual trust model you know the legacy and culture of bti is intended to be maintained in perpetuity provided that's what the will of the employee owners the members of the trust in return the uh the members are partaking in the profits each year that there's a formula that that we use to split up the profit between reinvesting in the company and in profit sharing and so and so you know employees have received it well um you know how has business been how is the kind of uh has the you know any particular experiences with the employee with you with the employee owners uh the members um um since that since um since the launch so to speak uh uh right i think what i'm seeing is a lot more engagement with the employee members that are they're asking the right questions about our expenses about how to increase sales improve margin they generally care about the bottom line in the in a way that you know they did before but now they're they're very uh tuned in now so good good good good and will you be announcing a uh just very short term will you be will you have um well i know of course the company's gonna be paying off the note for a number of years because it was seller financed um that you financed the transaction yourself um um are you going to be doing a little profit share for this year um to kind of get things going and and what do you expect that to look like or plans for that correct so so for 2021 we're on a fiscal year that runs through the uh through december 31st and and therefore we wait until our financials are completed and then we issue profit sharing checks in form of a bonus uh in the spring and the employees uh you know of course they might have been used to seeing something in the uh in the december time frame for the from the company in the past and and so this this first year this transition year we're gonna uh keep some of the bonus in december and then the remainder will come out in the spring yeah awesome awesome and so then getting back to the sort of the issue of sort of you know bti's future and and your kind of plans you know in the in the design phase of of putting together the eot um you know how do you think about the future growth of the company even beyond your involvement with the company and and and the eot how those things work together right well like i said earlier um we're we're more interested in encouraging individual achievement achievement over you know just you know top down control um and so i'm really excited about you know the new engagement i spoke of but really it's the uh the management here that is keen to make sure that the the values behind the uh the employee ownership trust are are understood not just by the members but by the whole company that this is a different type of culture they're working in now and that diy spirit do-it-yourself is now kind of percolating through the the pores of the company you know bts innovations over time have occurred internally that you know we are one of those companies who doesn't always hire out just to accomplish every task we like to do it ourselves so we have our you know a broad i.t department that solves problems uh on the go our our marketing department takes its own videos and photography you know these are pretty cool actually you got a lot a lot of content up out there that's right yeah and uh and so you know the eot dovetails really nicely with bti's number one core value which is take care of each other you know we're really concerned not just about the co-workers but also our customers our vendors and the community at large we're trying to make make sure that this company is going to be around for the long term creating jobs and wealth for our community and as well as obviously the members of the trust you know uh uh that that's that's a good point i think to to i i love that for us to care you know we'll have to do more of these uh uh record more of these discussions for the future we're we're limited in our time for the the in new york conference but that might be a good point to end on which is that although you know of course employee ownership is is the core at the core of all of this i feel like um every time i i call you you're you're like you know on the way to some big bike giveaway for kids or something like that so if you could talk a little bit about how how some of that kind of community give back element kind of can stay with bti well it was a it's interesting that you mentioned that because as part of developing the dot we also developed a non-profit called bicycle harvest and and part of the the annual profit sharing formula includes not just reinvestment and a share for the employees but also part going to our non-profit part of the profits are reinvested in this non-profit to help build our our community not just in santa fe but around the state and in other areas where bti has a presence so one of our programs free bikes for kids in its first year collected and repaired over a thousand bicycles donated all over the state we also do thanksgiving and national program that collects food on bicycles donates it to the local food banks and that's been around for over 20 years now awesome preston that's just amazing stuff thank you so much for agreeing to participate in in this interview and and this event the new jersey new york center for influential conference thank you so much and um um uh we're gonna move to live q a right now and uh invite everybody to click on the link on the top of the page there okay see you guys in the zoom meeting