Four crises, one solution - employee ownership

[Applause] so my name is Allison Lincoln I'm one of the co-founders of project equity and I'm just going to take a few minutes to to go through four crises frankly that that are affecting all of our communities and that we know that employee ownership can help mitigate and so you heard Evan talk about the silver tsunami and you know this is also the greatest wealth transfer in America's history turns out that baby boomers own an estimated one out of every two privately held companies with employees and together they employ one in five private sector workers this is not a small Trend one in five private sector workers half of locally owned employer businesses and so we have this opportunity with the greatest wealth transfer in America's history to intervene and to change the trajectory of of wealth of business ownership and the time is now for us to take advantage of that the second crisis today is employee retention so is there anyone here today who hasn't either heard firsthand from a business owner how hard it is to attract hire and retain workers or who hasn't heard about the great resignation or quiet quitting right this is real this is affecting all of us and you know this crisis is one that we talk about how can business owners create highly engaged workforces well some people talk about doing that through what's called an ownership culture so you tell me what's the best way to create an ownership culture maybe actually by having some ownership right mind blowing and so so we saw during during the worst of kova during the shutdowns you know story after story after story from our own clients and and the data that looked at this after the fact really um backs this up that employee-owned companies had significantly higher Employee Engagement they they did they fared way better than their peers did and that is that is because of that that true ownership and that ownership culture which brings me to the next Crisis which is um the impacts of covid which you know three years in we know that businesses are still hurting and still feeling the impacts of covid um December of last year the U.S Chamber of Commerce small business index they yeah they did a survey and they had 27 percent of business owners only 27 percent said that they feel like the U.S economy is on solid footing and so the you know back to back to what we saw during covid you know we had so many of our clients that had they were shut down the rules were changing every day about what they could and could not do and they came together they pivoted on a dime they rebuilt their whole service approach new products um rolled out new lines of business and why did they do that because it was their jobs was their businesses that they wanted to make sure that they could keep alive through this crisis and so um you know even though we're not in shutdowns we still have Employee Engagement issues we still have inflation we still have supply chain issues so as much as we wish that we had totally turned the page on the covet impact for small business we unfortunately haven't um so we have talked a lot about the fourth crisis and um uh you know we know that way too many American workers remember we used to call those workers essential during the pandemic like for the first time ever we actually called our Frontline workers essential workers we kind of don't even do that anymore right um you know these are folks who like making things work at the end of the month right it's not always easy and um you know 40 of families are poor or low income and uh you know the stats we all have heard them um especially through the through the lens of race so we've got the income gap and then we've got the wealth Gap greater than half of all Americans don't have enough savings to cover a 400 emergency expense so we talk about wealth right but I mean it's we're talking just about having a little bit of extra money to to make it through right and and frankly it's embarrassing in a country as as rich as ours uh that that we have that we have this going on so the four crises right and that employee ownership can help mitigate all of them so truly this this is a win and in fact we call it a triple win so it's a win for businesses so employee-owned businesses outperform their peers higher growth higher profit um and how do they do that will they do that through that hiring engagement so high engaged workplaces with better pay better benefits are better for workers both for their bank account and for their professional trajectory and guess what when you have businesses that are doing really well when you have a community of workers that are earning money and have savings have wealth that is better for your local economy and that is better for your communities [Music] [Applause]