Local Ocean Seafoods: a journey into an Employee Ownership Trust

I was interested in employee ownership from day one ownership was a real motivator and driver for high performance in individuals and feelings of satisfaction and connectivity and I wanted to be in and work in that kind of a [Music] place local ocean opened 18 years ago as a restaurant it is always a little surprising for people when they learn that most of the seafood that they consume is not from around here I guess it just made sense to me being the daughter of a commercial fisherman and growing up in a fishing family and in a Coastal Community we wanted to provide local fish but we also wanted to provide another market for fishermen to sell into it's been a tough go Fisheries go up and down and up and down and having more places for Fishers to sell their fish at a higher value you is really important for the health of our local economy I think it became apparent to me in the last few years that I was just ready to exit the business I could feel that my motivation level was lower my interests were starting to stray and so I didn't even really think about selling outright to a private party I just looked into what are the employee ownership options and are we a good candidate for it and that's where project Equity stepped in I found them in a basic web search and reached out and uh they got back to ler R away and we did a very robust feasibility study uh we looked at workers Cooperative model we looked at employee ownership trusts and uh we looked a little bit at ESOP models and uh did all of the financial analysis to see if we're a good candidate and as I suspected we were at excellent candidate local ocean has developed into a real Legacy business for this community in Newport and I think one of my other motivations for going into a playy ownership rather than just selling outright was just the assurance that the way that local oan operates mostly buying direct local fish from fishermen supporting our fishing Community supporting the oceans and taking care of our people that that stays true in perpetuity I think that especially our local customers and community members appreciate also knowing that local Ocean's going to be here doing exactly what we're doing now in the Long Haul in fact we have to it's baked in to the trust stewardship agreement and into the principles for which the the trust exists we're going to be holding up those values forever I want to think that when we do our first results to purpose we're going to see lower turnover and that we're going to see better recruitment particularly in a time when recruiting employees has been very challenging for businesses I can honestly say that I've never looked back and said was that the right decision or was that the right thing to do there's no question in my mind whatsoever that this was the right thing not only for me personally but for the company the community the employees the Fishers all of the stakeholders that rely on this business so yeah no regrets at [Music] all