Sharpen the Saw 2022 Day 2

we hope that every day this week you bring great ideas to share at home or where you're working so with that i would like to introduce the director of the apa and executive education program jeff davis who will introduce our next speaker jeff thank you peter and thank you everybody for coming great to see everybody here today hope we see more you tomorrow again on thursday if somebody's not if everybody can mute this not talking helpful for a minute we can see if we can catch that there it goes so thank you for joining us we've got a great speaker for you today and i'm i'm really excited to introduce this person uh we're going through what we call and we just talked about a minute ago the great resignation and actually a better term for it might be the great upgrade because you know we're not losing all the people in the working force they're finding better opportunities and they're looking for places that give them what they want and this is somebody managing one of those companies that does that many of you went through the program recently and as part of executive leadership you might have visited a company like optimax run by our very own mike mandina and optimax did a great job with this right they really focused on how do we retain the people we get they turned into an employee-owned company and they really turned around the business model that people were used to and it was quite successful as they grew from a small company to over 400 employees and still growing well this is another story very much like that so we're excited today to bring you kimberly jones the president and ceo of butler till and kimberly has been there almost 15 years and the company has changed dramatically during that time frame so besides her personal abilities to win awards and accolades like effie's and addie's and pinnacle awards she's also done an amazing job in the leadership role that she's taken there taking butler till and going the same route becoming a b corp 100 employee owned and and just doing exactly what you want to see your companies do something you want to own you want to be at you want to be a part of and that's what she's created at butler till and they've now moved downtown into a phenomenal new facility and so if you want to take a look at that place go down to where parcel 5 is and look to your side you're going to see a great setup right next to bergman which is another one of our alumni so i really am i'm excited to bring kimberly to speak to you today and to tell you about her story but i also want to mention that besides her great business accolades uh some of you may know that i have a side passion i like to run a little bit and uh i i don't love to run the road so much i like to run in the woods in strange places where we go up and down and around trees and roots but i know that kimberly does a lot of running also and we're not talking about 5ks what she's done or 10ks but half marathons and even a marathon and so to be honest with you i remember thinking people who run marathons have got to be just crazy because why would anybody want to do that to themselves but when you get running and you get running more and more it actually is is almost a zen-like state to get out and run long distances and start thinking about other things so maybe kimberly can share that experience with you as well today so kimberly thank you for joining us at sharpen the saw we're excited to have you welcome thanks so much jeff just want to check my sound can everybody hear me okay yes thumbs up that's great um thank you so much for having me and i feel like today is uh very relevant for this conversation it being international women's day and we are lucky at butler till not only to be a woman-owned enterprise but we are 100 employee owned and as jeff mentioned also a b corp which means that we believe that businesses should be in business for good and we look more uh to just the bottom line we look at how our business is affecting all of our stakeholders which means of course our employee owners but also the communities in which we live and serve but today i'm here to talk about esops employee stock ownership plans and so i thought for the next oh 40 minutes or so i would share a little bit more about butler till a little bit about esops because i recognize that it might be a concept unfamiliar to most of you i'll tell you a little bit about our esop story how butler till became an esop it was once owned by our two founders and now of course is owned by all of our 200 plus employee owners a little bit of the logistics around how esops work what it means to be an esop and then what it means to be the a culture in an esop owned organization uh and last but not least as jeff and peter both mention what it means to be an esop today as we are looking kind of post-coveted and acknowledging that there is this concept i guess if you will called the great resignation and perhaps why being an esop is valuable in that construct so first a little bit about butler till and by the way i should mention um given the size of this group i'm happy to keep it very conversational so that if you do have questions you know don't hesitate put it into chat raise your hand and i would love to get to them as we go along so butler till so we were founded about 20 plus years ago by two fabulous women sue butler and tracy till we started as a predominantly paid media planning and buying agency initially serving a lot of local clients here in rochester since then we have grown to be really a results-driven marketing agency serving clients across the country and we specialize in highly regulatory industries such as financial services healthcare we have quite a few pharmaceutical companies medical device biotech and last summer we had the privilege of acquiring another upstate new york company called digital hive and they specialize in digital marketing for small and medium-sized businesses i think one of the things that makes us quite unique other than the accolades i mentioned before being women-owned and a b corp is of course being an esop so esops again employee stock ownership plan and there are a lot of different ways that you can go about being employee owned being an esop is one of them there are co-ops and kind of other ownership constructs that get you to similar results but the idea of an esop was started i think back in like the 1960s and it was a way for companies to try to distribute economic wealth if you think about most business ownership models they're owned by a corporation maybe family owned maybe owned by venture capital if you think about the growth of those companies a lot of the economic success is funneled through a very few number of people and so the employees that are helping those companies grow and become sustainable are not often the ones that are reaping the rewards of that business's success and so this idea of employee ownership came about as a way to distribute that economic wealth more evenly and so today i think there are about 6 500 esops in the united states about 14 million employee owners and that amounts to almost a trillion in assets so it's no small thing and there are several aesop's here in the rochester community butler till is is just one of them so our esap story i mentioned that we were founded by sue butler and tracy till two of my mentors and just fabulous women overall and when i joined the company um gosh in like 2009-2010 they started thinking about their succession plan and their exit strategy they had been in business at that time for about a dozen years or so and they knew that they didn't want to be in business forever and they also knew that they didn't want to leave the business to their children there just wasn't an interest so there wasn't really a clear answer for them at that time they entertained strategic buyers uh had several offers in fact to be bought by companies in our industry but once they uncovered the idea of employee ownership the idea really took root because being an employee-owned company meant that their legacy would stay alive long after they had left and it would also be a way to reward all of the employees who had helped make butler till so strong so they started having conversations of course about becoming an esop and we ultimately did it in two separate transactions so in 2010 sue and tracy sold 51 percent of their equity in butler till to our esop trust and so we became 51 employee owned and they retained 49 of the business now in those subsequent years from that first tranche the company went through tremendous growth perhaps even more than we had even anticipated and we were able to pay down that initial loan faster than anybody expected which ultimately kind of expedited their plans of retirement so early on we had thought that we would become a 100 percent employee owned over the course of let's say a dozen years or more but actually we did the second tranche as you call it um only four years later so in 2014 they sold the remaining 49 of butler till to our esop trust and as of april and 2014 we became a hundred percent employee owned and sue and tracy made their plans for retiring later that year so they both retired in december of 2014. i became the president january 1st of 2015 and the ceo uh in january of 2020. so sue and tracy both remained on our board of directors actually last year was tracy's last year so five or six years in different capacities so they did kind of maintain an arms length if you will with butler till they wanted to make sure that we were obviously in very good hands and i can't thank them enough for that transition it was it was quite amazing um so that's our esop story so again 2014 so let's talk a little bit about what that means like how an esop works so i mentioned that sue and tracy sold their shares of butler till into an esop trust so practically speaking we have 12 000 shares the number is somewhat arbitrary there are 12 000 shares of butler so and those shares get allocated on an annual basis to all of the employees who have worked at butler till for a thousand hours or more so roughly half a year and you become quote unquote esop eligible so our business is valued on an annual basis so we have a third party valuation company that determines the value of butler till shares and then that price is determined and the shares are allocated to all of those employee owners and so we have a huge party in june or july of every year called statement day where everybody receives not only their annual allocation of esop shares but the new value of those esop shares which is pretty amazing we make a pretty big deal out of that and like a 401k and esop vests over time so in our esop and again i'm saying ours because there are you know slightly different constructs uh depending on the esop that you're talking about and every plan can be just slightly different so it like a 401k you kind of vest in 20 increments so after the first year you're best at 20 then 40 60 and so on so after five years you are fully vested in our employee stock ownership plan which means when you leave butler till hopefully upon retirement because this is meant to be a retirement incentive your shares are valued as of that year and you receive the value of those shares essentially the company is buying back those shares at that year's share price and then those shares go on to be distributed to other employee owners and so on and so forth so like i said it's really meant to be a retirement plan and as the company continues to grow and the share value continues to grow every single employee owner reaps the benefit of of that growth which is pretty pretty incredible and it's been amazing to watch because just in the past i would say three to four years you know so if you think about it we've been an esop now for about 10 years but it's just been in the past three or four years where we actually have had some retirements and it's such a celebration because this is on top of a 401k so to be able to contribute to somebody's financial stability as they enter retirement age is just remarkable it's amazing um so that's the financial benefit of an esap i should mention that from a business perspective from a company perspective what makes becoming an esop attractive is that we are federally tax exempt which is kind of interesting so essentially instead of paying the government on an annual basis the 30 corporate tax rate we are able to reinvest in our business so that makes esops a lot more sustainable oftentimes esops outpace their closest competitors in terms of growth there's a considerable competitive advantage there and the idea again is is that we're essentially deferring tax income until people leave the company and then they're leaving at retirement age and of course at a much lower tax bracket so that's kind of the nuts and bolts i'll pause there for a second because it's quite complex just to see if there are any questions and admittedly i cannot see all of the hands being raised or chat so if there are no questions just let me know and i'll keep rolling well we'll let you know kim we're going to give a scan and see if any hands are raised you can also put your questions in the chat as well fantastic you got some questions popping in there how do i make sure the stock doesn't get diluted that's mandy lawrence to everyone um that's a great question so there are ways it's it's something that we look at on a regular basis we're always making decisions that are creative to value so when we're looking at things like acquisitions mergers uh strategic partnerships even our real estate venture uh it was mentioned earlier today that we just moved downtown rochester at 260 east broad street at the butler till building and this is a building that we own and i can quite confidently tell you that being in esap enabled us to have the financial wherewithal to be able to have equity in our own building and we make decisions that again are only a creative to value and we do have a finite number of shares so we have 12 000 shares and i better knock on wood somewhere uh because we have our share price has only gone up and so we have outpaced just about every index out there we've outpaced apple stock our former cfo used to like to look at berkshire hathaway stock we've outpaced berkshire hathaway so again knock on wood cross fingers but every single year our stock price continues to go up for the benefit of our employee owners yeah and i will oh great i think tara had a question about employee retention and if you can bear with me i will absolutely get there because i think being in esap is part of our employer brand there's a lot of conversation around what your employer brand is how are you differentiating the employee experience versus some other company out there i mean i think employees have more choices than ever today and being an esop is certainly part of ours and so from a culture perspective become employee ownership this is how i think about it so i may be the ceo but i am not the sole proprietor or the sole owner of butler till and i answer to all of our shareholders which in our case means i answered every single one of our employees so you take that kind of management model or that management hierarchy and i think about it just like flipped on its head um i may be the quote unquote boss but really i answer to 250 other bosses and so i believe in creating a culture that is radically transparent so just like you would understand the financial statements of any stock that you owned in any company we make all of that information available to our employee owners so on a quarterly basis we have an employee owner's forum meeting where we share the quarters financials so and we're not only talking about revenue here we're talking about revenue we're talking about expenses we're talking about the bottom line we're talking about investment income so it really helps increase the financial literacy of all of our employee owners in fact we share just about everything aside from individual salaries so people have a lot of understanding on how the business is working our financial performance and back to the question around retention i think it gives people confidence in the sustainability of the business and that's something that i feel very strongly about people want to know that the company that they're working for is going to be around next year and the year after that and the year after that i think the other thing about employee ownership culture is that i've everybody has responsibility in it so we came out early on when we were talking about what it means to be an employer owner and i think initially there was this sentiment that employee owners had rights you know as an owner i should have the right to have a say in this decision or that decision and i should have a right to say in how the company is run and that's absolutely true but there are also responsibilities that come with ownership and we try to enforce that and make sure that people feel accountable to the performance that they think about what the work they're doing or how it contributes to our business success and to regularly make recommendations to be proactive and so we have this uh bill of rights and responsibilities that we call it for all of our employee owners so that they can understand yes what are your rights you have the right to competitive salary to exceptional benefits to better training and development opportunities than you're going to get anywhere else but you also have the responsibility to contribute as an owner thank you kimberly by the way there's another question from greg sadwick can you explain again where the money actually comes from for the owner to get paid for their stock as they are making that stock available to employees absolutely so there's an external loan so just like you would with any other investment we got a loan from a bank we've had a long relationship with tompkins bank of castile in fact and so the bank is in the butler till borrows money from the bank to pay back the owners and then over time we paid down that loan so when i mentioned that we paid down a loan earlier than i expected that's the loan that i was talking about and so for a period of time the company has some debt some liability as we pay down that bank loan and then as that loan is paid down more of those shares are released with a higher equity value and then we have a question andy lawrence if you want to unmute maybe you can ask the question because i'm having trouble understanding what you're asking exactly here it can really first of all great conversation thank you very much for sharing you're welcome you mentioned the term here maybe i just misstated it you mentioned this term creative to value a creative a creative just that yeah okay i was like that's where maybe i got confused i was like okay sometimes it's creative also though well i was thinking well how does this creative content these projects that you do for these companies right how does that translate to value right i can see the building you mentioned is is okay well that's an asset and i know that that can increase in value and that can be the basis of you know you know your your the value of your stock but how does this creative content kind of factor into that yeah yeah so we have a um like i mentioned a third party evaluation company uh stout valuation and it's a conversation that i have with one of their principals quite regularly so whereas we're thinking through business decisions you're kind of thinking of it through that lens will this decision either dilute or create more value and you know i think about the acquisition of digital hive that we made last summer that was definitely a contributing factor we said what is this going to do to the esop is it going to increase value especially when you're making those types of decisions because all of the employees of digital hive became employee owners of butler till and so we essentially added 50 more employee owners somebody before asked the question about dilution of course the more owners there are the fewer shares there are to go around but as long as the share price continues to go up we're able to maintain that nice balance the other significant factor within esop and something that i spend quite a bit of time thinking about is our repurchase obligation because we do have an obligation to pay back the value of the shares when anybody leaves the company so there's quite a bit of work that's done annually not only to assess the value of the company but try to project our repurchase obligation well well into the future we look at it in terms of 20-year time frame so i always want to make sure that we have essentially a cash reserve to pay out employee owners as they leave the company at least for the next 20 years that's kind of my time horizon like i want to make sure the company is in good hands and is sustainable well beyond my tenure but that's a significant concept when it comes to esots we also have tara lacastro asking any suggested resources or decision making diagrams on esops kind of an esop 101 absolutely there are several great resources and a couple of large national organizations so the nceo or the national center of employee ownership is a great reso great resource they've got a great website and they have several annual conferences there's also the esop association um again great conferences and they have a uh i'll call it a local i think it's like a tri-state chapter that includes new york new jersey probably connecticut and delaware and they have a regional conference and then there are some other emerging associations one called eo employee ownership so again that kind of is an attestment to the fact that there's more um business constructs for employee ownership other than just esops but that's where i would start and i just threw the nco nceo in the uh chat for people that want to look at that yeah perfect perfect and that's exactly what we did when we started this esop journey as we started by going to conferences and just learning more and talking uh to esops who had done it well in esops that hadn't done it so well so let me talk about that for a second because that was a big consideration for some companies and for some owners becoming an esop is simply a financial transaction they're looking to take equity out of the business perhaps they're looking to retire they might not have a strategic buyer in mind and so they decide to go the esop route which just basically means that you need to find a bank that's willing to help with this transaction transaction give the company a loan so you as the owner can take the money and i suppose right off into the sunset um that is a way not to do an esop well and it leaves the company in potentially really dire situations but if it's a thoughtful approach the company can go on to be even more successful as an esop than it was under the original founders and so i went on a road show visited multiple esops all over the northeast to kind of understand how people managed this uh transaction and the transition become between being founder owned and being employee owned so that we could figure out how to do it right which leads me to culture so i know that that's a big topic so having an employee ownership culture i think has helped our business tremendously i talked a little bit before about accountability but there are some pretty practical things that we do just to encourage that sense of accountability and that ownership culture and i think that these are concepts that really can apply to almost any business you don't necessarily have to be an employee-owned company you just have to believe in transparency and creating an environment that allows people to do their very best work i mentioned before our employee ownership forums we do those quarterly they tend to be a little bit more financially oriented but we also have a monthly all company meeting where we celebrate our successes together and sometimes share challenges uh but to give everybody kind of a forum a platform to be together and talk about our business together we also solicit a lot of feedback from our employee owners so we do an annual employee engagement survey and i'm held accountable to those results and so we strive to have extremely high employee engagement scores which of course leads to both retention as well as job satisfaction and the likelihood to recommend butler till either to a potential colleague or even a client in between those annual employee engagement surveys we also do what's called we call pulse surveys so depending on kind of what's happening in the business or in the economy we might send out a poll just to gauge response to things like uh competitive benefits for instance we did this late last year to really understand as people were reevaluating the work experience what benefits were most important to people and i think being an employee-owned company it creates more of an onus to have that conversation like i work for our employees so it matters to me what benefits they want and so we actually took some pretty progressive steps to become self-funded from an insurance perspective which allowed us to offer uh a high deductible plan with no premiums so 100 percent company paid premiums for our employees if they chose that particular plan we also moved to 12 weeks of paid maternity and paternity leave so for birthing and non-birthing parents which i think is pretty progressive and then like many companies we've just continued this idea of flexible work schedule so allowing people to maintain a hybrid approach to work if they're here in rochester to continue hiring more remote employees and even those people here in rochester just allowing flexibility in terms of days of the week and hours that they're working in the office so that they can maintain that kind of work-life balance that is so elusive to many of us oh jeff it looks like you have a question but i can't hear you yeah i'm sorry i was just saying there's a lot here beyond the esop there's a lot of culture you've worked on that goes way beyond that and have you have you taken any notice or have you kept track of the data on the affected head on on retention there or on attracting the talent you're looking for so i can tell you this um so we're in the advertising industry and by and large the advertising industry has one of the highest rates of turnover than any other industry even in good times so to speak it's it exceeds 30 percent so on average you're looking at 30 and now even 40 turnover i am very fortunate to say that at butler till we strive to maintain below 15 turnover and knock on wood and cross fingers thus far we have been successful in doing that so it's definitely helped with employee retention as far as attracting new employees talent acquisition is a huge topic for us we hired a hundred people last year which is just incredible and we have some fantastic recruiters but i think articulating a very clear employer brand uh employee ownership being part of that story has really helped make butler till an attractive employer for people looking for an environment that allows them to do their very best work that's a creative environment that values their talents that gives them opportunities to learn to grow to develop to have a career path uh beyond just the job that they were hired into and when you made that transition right going from uh to more traditional company to an esop and this i'm not sure if the culture all developed over time or if it was there originally uh did you find that there was an effect to your to your current employees because it's not for everybody right it's it's probably not for everybody and actually i think that's one of the things that we've been talking a lot about in terms of how we recruit and who we recruit i want to make sure that we're recruiting people that understand the value of what we've built and want to be a part of it and i get that it might not be for everybody i mean if you're somebody who wants to be an individual contributor who just wants to you know plug away at your keyboard in a basement somewhere then this is probably not the place for you because we thrive on collaboration and being together and learning and growing from one another to your point jeff i think that sue and tracy kind of laid the groundwork for employee ownership before they even knew that that was going to be their path and so they had created this culture of um if not quite ownership then certainly a culture where everybody felt a part of something bigger than themselves and had created this you know this great place you know a place that has employee ownership in our dna again even before the official transaction which i think has helped make us even more successful and i you know i don't have the statistics per se i mentioned before that most esops tend to outperform their competitor but i can say from butler till's vantage point for the last 10 years we have had remarkable employee retention very low turnover as i mentioned record high employee engagement scores and so regularly 85 to 90 percent of people say that they are engaged or highly engaged in our company we have had thus far knock on wood no trouble attracting really highly qualified talent we've got exceptional client relationships very low client turnover and i think the increase in share price kind of speaks for itself so while i can't necessarily say it's a hundred percent um causal it's highly correlated to being an employee-owned company i would say okay now now the tough questions start we just came out of this pandemic right and people went to remote work you just purchased a building downtown yeah and so how is it going are people willing to come back to work are you struggling with that i know a lot of companies are in people actually leaving companies if they're actually being forced to come back to work because they enjoyed remote work so much so i'm curious how that's going that has been a big topic and of course we were building this building during the pandemic so i think we broke ground in 2020 in fact uh so it has been really interesting of course we had some construction delays as you can imagine but we officially moved in last october so october of 2021 and i'd actually think it's the reverse we had the opportunity because we were kind of midway construction we were able to reimagine a little bit the space and how it was going to be used and so we recognized that this was going to be a hybrid work environment indefinitely that we would always have remote employees whether they lived in rochester and were working a hybrid schedule or if they worked out of rochester i mean 20 percent of our workforce does not live in rochester new york so we have a very distributed footprint when it comes to our employees all the way from gosh tulsa oklahoma florida colorado maine pretty much you name it i think that we have employees in 16 or 17 different states so when we thought about this building we said how can we create an environment that is amazing to be in physically so how do we do that every single desk is sit to stand we have ergonomically correct chairs we have fantastic break rooms with free coffee and an outdoor patio with gas fireplaces and grills and we have um all of our artwork is from artisan works so it's it's a beautiful highly functional place to be in but it's also equipped with all of the technology that would enable you to connect seamlessly with anybody who's not in the building because we wanted to make sure that the employee experience for our remote employees is just as positive as it is for those people who are working here at 260 east broad and so all of our conference rooms for example are outfitted with technology that's immediately zoom enabled so if you walk into any one of our conference rooms we have big screens we have the cameras and all you have to do is walk in log into the meeting and up pops all of your remote employees that are participating in that particular meeting which is pretty cool so we really spared no expense when it comes to technology so for all those wondering you can go to the butler till website to look for an application we have like 16 open positions i didn't really think about this as a recruitment opportunity but certainly if anybody is interested we will take your call but but here it brings up another question so it is this remote aspect that it's still hybrid it's some remote some not but but we're coming out of that and the culture you've established there isn't it hard to replicate that culture when you're not together as often i i think that it is and i think that that's what most companies are starting to experience during the pandemic we were extraordinarily productive and i actually um attribute that to employee ownership and that sense of accountability man everybody just jumped right in and we were going to do whatever it took to continue to be successful despite this global pandemic and so we had two of our most productive years on record but i think what's starting to wane is kind of that collaboration uh that sense of community and people i believe are tired of being isolated that many people are looking for kind of that return to in-person interaction and so our policy i don't even know if i would call it a policy but more of a philosophy is that we believe that in order for butler till to be on the same trajectory of growth and success we need the majority of people to be in the office the majority of the time which means that as rochester is our headquarters that we're asking people to come into the office three days a week so right now we're testing a hybrid model of tuesday wednesdays and thursdays in office and leaving mondays and fridays as kind of choice days or flex days work from anywhere days and thus far it seems to be working pretty well i think it allows people the flexibility that they're striving and that they came to appreciate during covid but starting to get people back into the habit of working alongside one another did you do any other special activities to try and keep people together when they were still remotely things that you came up with that were helpful yeah we had um of course like all companies when we were 100 remote we did everything from the virtual happy hours uh uh kind of lunch and learn opportunities those types of things and then as we were able you know we started by trying to have select in person opportunities so whether it was a particular event a learning opportunity trying to find ways to bring people together either in small groups or as a larger agency and thankfully we're in a situation now where we can you know really be in person for the most part most of the time and you said 20 of your employees are not in rochester correct yes you hired them as remote employees to be remote employees yeah some of both so when we acquired digital hive their headquarters are actually in syracuse so we've got about 25 people at our facility in syracuse before the pandemic we had a new york city office that housed about a dozen people our new york city employees have grown to about 25 or 30 in and around the new york city area so we're contemplating actually what it's going to mean for them and whether or not we will reopen a physical location in new york city or around new york city so that is still to be determined so those are our two largest kind of contingencies outside of rochester and as i mentioned we have people who were either just hired as remote employees or in many cases people who had started here in rochester but maybe their spouse had a job opportunity somewhere else and we allowed them to continue working for our company in a remote capacity now not all of our people that are here are here in rochester we have a lot of online alumni as well and they're in different places around the country uh i bring this up because i'm from rochester originally i grew up here and i remember coming into the city and this will age me but i remember coming to midtown plaza to see the christmas decorations and the monorail running around the top and that was kind of a special thing and the city went through a tough patch but but you're here and you're you're building you've got a brand new building downtown in a very uh important area for the city i think can you give us i mean is there anything tied to this around trying to revitalize a little bit of rochester was this is that involved absolutely uh and it's a combination of employee ownership and being a b corp i mean we believe strongly in giving back to the community and being part of the community and so when we started thinking about our quote-unquote forever home we knew that we wanted equity and whatever building we moved into and we knew that we wanted to be downtown so we actually sent out an rfp to many different building owners and developers ultimately decided to do a joint venture with buckingham who is our landlord at eagle's landing in henrietta and we started thinking about this this space and you mentioned the monorail so in our lobby we actually have one of the old monorails i think you would be surprised at how small it is they are so small only a child could fit into it but we love being here in downtown and our building you know again back to kind of the intention behind the building it was it was meant not only to be our headquarters but to diversify our income sources too and so it is a multi-use building so butler still occupies floors two and three those are commercial spaces uh digital hive our subsidiary has a small portion of the ground floor and then the rest of the ground floor is actually for commercial tenants we've got some really exciting things coming up that i can't share but i think it's going to be uh pretty impressive and contribute to the revitalization of downtown once the ink is dry and then on floors four and five they're residential and our residential um spaces were actually leased before the building was even finished and so if you think about uh kind of the strategy behind this now we have income income sources both from our commercial tenants as well as our residential tenants and instead of paying a lease or rent to a different owner we're essentially paying it back to ourselves which i think is pretty cool that's awesome and there are other there are other things happening downtown are you working in groups that are trying to foster this kind of attitude and other companies there's definitely a sense of community so we've had conversations with andy galena and of course all of the amazing things that are happening at innovation square and the metropolitan and the sibley building so i i do feel this kind of sense of community and i think we're right on the cusp unfortunately last fall it was still a little premature i think to really get the community back together and back in person as we were still kind of undergoing the effects of the pandemic but i think this spring is going to be remarkable uh and that handful of nice days that we've had thus far kind of lead me to believe that people are going to come out of the woodworks there's going to be the food trucks people are going to be walking around people are going to be visiting these awesome new businesses that we have around town so we've got a lot of great restaurants bite next door original grain native branca and hopefully more to come and the fact that the governor just announced a hundred million dollars to help fill in the rest of the uh interlude as well right that's fantastic i hope so i think that that will be game changing as well so it really is exciting uh it's exciting to be a part of it um it's really exciting for our employees again you know back to kind of creating an environment where people want to be i genuinely think that people are going to want to be downtown thank you so i'm going to open up again we don't have anything posted yet if you've got questions or concerns or things you want to know about kimberly's past or about the how she got to where she is or certainly about what they've done at butler till either raise your hand or throw it in the chat we have a pretty good audience here and usually they're vocal when they're in person but they're a little quiet when they're in the in this space it looks like no problem and i will address one question that i think kind of came up earlier um being an employee-owned company has the advantage of not having to really answer to anybody but ourselves so we do have a board of directors but they're incredibly supportive and so we are masters of our own destiny which makes business decisions a little bit more interesting perhaps but a lot more freeing and so in the early days of the pandemic when there was total uncertainty where we had clients calling us to pause campaigns and to you know cancel contracts because they just didn't know what was going to happen we made a commitment really really early on that we would not have any layoffs and we would not have any furloughs and that was a decision that was we could make because we're an employee-owned company and it was in our purview to do that and again we had a very supportive board of directors and there was no question so i it felt great to be able to give our employee owners confidence that no matter what they had a job which you know i think means a lot and you talk about employee retention employee engagement and employee satisfaction goes a long way by the way you mentioned you know before sharing in the wealth right and what i mean is sharing in the success sharing in the growth but in a way there's value in sharing and the pain and i don't mean that no no to sound glib but when you're going through something as employment company and everybody knows they're going to feel a little bit of it but they they're there together that means something right absolutely absolutely and um you know by and large we've been very successful company but it doesn't mean that we haven't had our own set of challenges and to see people come together to help one one another out we we say step up not out to lend a hand when another team is you know has a really heavy workload like it does make a difference in the experience of all of our employee owners that you can help each other out peter posted a question which is his favorite one to ask and that's what's the single piece best piece of advice you've ever received from somebody oh wow single best piece of advice i i guess it would be hard to kind of boil it down but in the context of this conversation i always think about the fact that you know as a marketing firm as an advertising agency we make no products so our people are our products and so you invest in your people and it will come back tenfold so i don't know if i got that quote exactly right but that is a sentiment that i have embraced and you know my husband has worked for wegmans for many many years i know it was a similar philosophy of bob wegmans take care of your employees and they'll take care of your customers it seems like such a simple construct to me um but i've i've seen it come to fruition in real life and sometimes i'm baffled by the fact that more companies don't live by that same philosophy that's awesome thank you and barley um i have a question about the b corp um i mean there's quite a few people that i don't think actually know what b corpse are and just in general how does it work for you for for butler till like what is it an annual sort of requirement to qualify as a b corp and i guess the second part of that question is is does it bring you new business i mean do b corps do business with other b corps yeah yeah so i think generally businesses look to do business with like-minded businesses and so being a b corp and also being women owned so we are a diverse supplier so that's another kind of feather in our cap and both of those certifications happen on an annual basis so for b corp you're actually certified by a third party called b labs and there's a pretty rigorous process that a company has to go through sharing financial information sharing information about your facilities about your supply chain and ultimately you're given a score um to become a b corp certified company and again it's it's for-profit businesses that believe in business for good and so it's you know whether you call it triple bottom lining whether you're looking at your kind of financial impact the community impact and the impact for your stakeholders both clients customers or employees it means that you have a different kind of litmus test for making decisions some of which are not purely financially motivated and then same thing for becoming a women-owned company or a women business enterprise a wbe that's an annual certification as well makes it a little tricky being an esop because technically we're owned by a trust and we kind of have to jump through a few more hoops with the government in order to maintain that certification but as long as we are primarily owned by women and we continue to be led by a female we're able to meet those requirements you know you mentioned it had to be scored the b corp right you had to have a an evaluation and you received a score did you pass the b corp score the first time you were interested in going for it or is there a process and actually that was um it was a legacy actually from a company that we acquired in 2015 called brand cool they were a small marketing consultancy here in town and that was really part of their ethos something that was important to their founders and at the time we were doing quite a bit of business in the energy sector and so it was you know a big deal in that space and once we got turned on to it it became such an integral part to our culture it's something that we never wanted to give up the challenging part of a b corp is it's not only your initial score but you actually have to continue to show progress year after year so it's not a static score that you're held accountable to you actually have to demonstrate that you're continuing to make improvements again in your facilities in your employee benefits in your supply chain but to give you an idea people who aren't familiar with be corpse ben jerry's method soap toms shoes to a few king arthur flower and there are quite a few b-corps here in rochester too but as far as i know we are one of at least very few if not the only company that can say we're 100 employee owned we're a women business enterprise and we're a certified b corporation so we consider that a bit of a trifecta that's awesome by the way we do have a couple questions in here so vicky cottrell asks how are shares allocated is it based on employees salary or tenure with the company or both um so they're allocated based kind of on a weighted average of salaries so your salary relative to the entire salary expense of the company those are how they're initially allocated and then once they're allocated to you though those shares continue to increase in value and you're allocated new shares every year so if you've been with the company for 10 years you're doing you're doing pretty well you've had a chance to not only benefit from several years of those allocations but also the tremendous share growth that we've had over the last 10 years another question from henry lee how do you handle politics within the company if it ever comes up that's a good question um we it's a really interesting question i'm asked that a lot i most honestly say we don't have a ton of politics i think at butler till you'll find we're a very kind of nice and collegial culture we do have several mechanisms to provide feedback so i mentioned the employee engagement survey we also have an anonymous survey link in our intranet site so people can put forth questions anonymously if they choose and we just try to really be open and transparent about the answers not every employee likes every single answer i have to share but hopefully they know that we're doing uh everything making every decision with their interest in mind thank you so we're actually a little bit short of our time but unless you've got something edition you want to share i'm going to pass over to peter to see if he's got any questions he wanted to ask we didn't get sure yeah that would be fine uh you certainly asked answered all my questions plus more you know it's what you're doing is really impressive and what you talked about in terms of taking care of the employees they'll take care of you is so true that's you know when you look at the successful businesses and the ones that you've named all of them have great they take really great care of the employees and i think for everybody on the call that should be a great lesson for everybody if you're not doing it start doing it and if you're doing it do it better absolutely and you know i think one of the things that we've gotten better at over time is trying to translate that value into value for our clients and our customers because initially you know we came out and said oh we're 100 employee owned and you know blank stares across many faces because you know what's in it for them why why should they care why should our clients care if we're 100 employee owned um but when i start talking about the fact that we have higher employee engagement and satisfaction which means more attention to your business and by the way lower turnover so it means you're not going to have to retrain a new team of people every six months and that our financial performance is intrinsically linked to the personal financial uh performance of our employees it it it's a compelling story because we empower our employees to make decisions that are in the best interest of both our clients and our business kimberly we've got a lot of smart people on this call with us and uh just to give you a piece of time here talk about the openings that you have oh the job openings why not thank you um i think we have job openings in every single department at virtually every single level so some of the quote unquote hot jobs that we're hiring for are in our analytics department in our channel activation team so social media specialists content marketing specialists i know that we have an account director position open and things are changing um if not weekly then or if not daily almost weekly you know as new business comes in and we continue to experience just the tremendous growth that we've had so i believe most of our job postings are on our website so if there's any interest that's a great place to start or reach out to me directly what a great place to work by the way the first time i heard of butler till several years ago when we had two students in our class at the same time that were both working at butler till and maybe it was an accident but they were both phenomenal students so maybe it wasn't i don't think it was an accident yes those students were amanda devito and kristen paganin and we had a really good uh if a prayer man who knows those people especially amanda devito the personality is uh certainly one you wouldn't forget so but we thank you for sending us students like that and we thank you for helping us out today this was really phenomenal we really enjoyed you coming here so thank you for showing us it was it was a pleasure really this is a topic that's near and dear to my heart so if anybody has any questions afterwards if you're considering employee ownership i would love to talk to you more excellent fantastic kimberly thank you very much it's been very impressive to hear everything you've got going on and the new things that are going on and great lesson for everybody and i hope everybody heard all those job openings you have so that's great uh greatly appreciate it now let me tell everybody a little bit about tomorrow thanks for joining us so much you're really welcome you guys have a great afternoon thanks so much cheers thanks again bye kimberly now folks for tomorrow we've got a great day set up for all of you with two topics the first half hour tomorrow will be joined by two guys from foundry digital another fast growing company in rochester remember how the internet changed everything i mean everything well web 3 is poised to do the same they'll talk about web 3 and deo's decentralized autonomous organizations and how they shape the future and now shaping the future of our business and the second half will be with chip suresky about raising money a lot of you sit on boards of non-profits or will in the future you and your emba degree are immensely valuable for non-profits especially the ones you want to help and chip will talk about new ways of raising money very important to non-profits and i don't mean small money i mean millions of dollars so we should have a great day tomorrow the connection the link you use today works for tomorrow and again thanks to everybody who's been helping me jeff great job today chris did a great job today great questions everybody see you tomorrow at noon thank you bye everybody