Selling your business, preserving your legacy

the idea here of getting an asset and transferring it and educating the owner that you can exit this business you can take out of it some wealth that's great good for your family and your generational wealth and give the opportunity to your workers to then have their own intergenerational wealth that is a powerful message thank you you chose to to turn proof into a worker Cooperative to sell it to your employees and tell us a little bit about why you made that choice one of the things personally for me that I saw as my business crew was I needed to sort of change somehow change the organizational structure I tried many different models I hired a lot of Consultants at that time trying to sort of be like you know what can we do different managers investigative profit sharing there were so many things I tried but just as an individual like nothing ever really kind of stuck when Scott our town he's the founder when he was getting to the point where he's going to retire he had a wish to sell it to the employees he had thought about a co-op but to be honest with you nobody knew what that meant not to plug project Equity but I'm going to plug project Equity we couldn't have done it without him like we had no clue what was coming we had to create the company because there was no management structure so we had to create the structure so that people knew what they were going to buy because we didn't think anybody would buy it if it was just a company bereft of a founder there was no there was no plan so we had to create the structure and then at the same time project equity showed us what a co-op could structure like and it fit I'm going to give credit to project equity for making it possible to make the the conversion to an employee and Company I've never been prouder of almost anything I've done other than have children and have a lovely family seeing the people I've hired grow and develop and take on responsibilities they've never had before it was just a wonderful experience um I mean people ask me you know uh you regret leaving I say no because I have such a a great legacy I mean an alumni association if you will uh for all the things that uh I've been able to accomplish they've accomplished even more soon as we train Ed it was like you said it was seamless of course we had project equity and their support and their guidance and with without them I don't think it would have been as smooth as it was it's paved the way for uh continue learning learning about a business learning how a business is run in a sense with a group of individuals and how it could be very difficult for just one individual to carry the weight and the burden of an entire business I still am excited to sort of see where worker owners make changes there's a lot of changes going on changes that actually I wanted to make several years ago but just couldn't do throughout my years I was told oh labor and cost of goods can't exceed 60 and you're you know you got to do this and you got to do that but I had no idea so they're really investigating all these different ways to sort of change um proof from the inside in terms of like okay how can we make this like go on and help all of us foreign