Howard Brodsky of CCA Global on Capitalism with a Conscience: The $14 Billion Co-op Whose Founder Owns No Shares

Howard Brodsky's father was a Ukrainian refugee with a two-person flooring store in New Hampshire. Forty years later, the company Howard co-founded to save businesses like his father's, CCA Global Partners, gives scale to thousands of family businesses across fourteen sectors, from flooring to childcare, with roughly $14 billion a year in combined volume and more than $1 billion in profit returned to members. Howard ran it for 38 years, chairs it still, and owns no shares in it.

We talk about why he chose a cooperative over the rollup that would have made him a billionaire, how a member-owned conglomerate actually governs itself (regional "Congress," advisory "Senate," and members who forced term limits), how the mills that wanted his business dead ultimately became partners, why his member stores have outpaced the public chains in growth, the Aspen Institute call that took CCA into childcare and now 32,000 centers, and the case he takes to governments: the missing link for shared ownership is the allocation of capital.

Howard delivers the closing plenary at the 4th Ownership Economy Summit, October 1 in New York, on how AI plus shared ownership can change how wealth is created.

Come be in the room. Howard delivers the closing plenary at the 4th Annual Ownership Economy Summit, October 1 at 140 Broadway, NYC.
🎟️ Tickets — use code PODCAST30 for 30% off
Full agenda

Everything Howard and Jahed mention in this episode:

• CCA Global Partners, the $14B cooperative of cooperatives
• Carpet One, CCA's largest member cooperative
• True Value, the hardware co-op whose CEO talked Howard and Alan Greenberg into the model in 1984
• Mondragon Corporation, which Howard visited this spring
• Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program — Kirsten Moy's call that took CCA into nonprofits
• Early Learning Ventures, the childcare platform born from that call, 32,000+ centers by Howard's count
• The Drivers Cooperative, where drivers keep ~95% of the fare
• Bharat Taxi, India's driver-owned answer to Uber and Ola, launched February 2026 — verified, his "opened in February" is right
• start.coop, where Howard tells beginners to start
• The Principle 6 Cooperative, his newest venture
• International Cooperative Alliance, whose G20 group he chairs
• The research behind "10% of the global economy, a billion members": ICA facts and figures and the World Cooperative Monitor — this covers the "we'll put some of this research in the notes" promise you made on tape at the outpacing-the-publics moment

Find Howard: howard-brodsky.com · LinkedIn ·