The power of employee ownership

we're at an inflection point in U.S economic history Baby Boomers who own the vast majority of small businesses with payrolls are retiring in the next 10 to 15 years and so we have this opportunity with the greatest wealth transfer in America's history to intervene and to change the trajectory of wealth of business ownership the time is now since its founding Prudential has really at its heart been focused on on building equity and how do we build Financial Security and financial well-being for everyone fast forward to today as we think about the work of the foundation and what we are driving to help contribute to that mission employee ownership I always say has this superpower and that it can achieve so many things it really lies at the intersection of of so many of the challenges we're facing and it's one of the solutions to so many of these challenges the truth of the matter is is they need Savvy business owner knows that every single one of their workers is essential it's essential to the operation of the business and I like to call small businesses Community institutions we don't have to compete against some other city for the businesses that are already here for the workers who are already here and want to be here this is to me a no-brainer type of approach to both maintain the stability of our property tax base maintain the stability of employment of prop of sales taxes uh wow expanding the economic equities in a community in a way that can help to help a city to achieve all of its other goals our employment goals our education goals our Public Safety goals Etc 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 intergenerational wealth and give the opportunity to your workers to then have their own intergenerational wealth that is a powerful message I'm going to give credit to project equity for making it possible to make the conversion to an employee owned company seeing the people I've hired um grow and develop and take on the responsibilities they've never had before it was just a wonderful experience I mean people ask me you know you regret leaving I say no because I have such a great legacy I mean an alumni association if you will for all the things that I've been able to accomplish they've accomplished even more half of the small businesses in our community are owned by Baby Boomers most of them want to sell their business in the next couple of years and most of them won't so the question is what happens to those jobs what happens to those buildings what happens to that tax base what happens to the sales tax what happens to that wealth what happens to the community that centers itself right around that business if we are able to activate employee ownership in the way that we think that we can then a good number of those businesses will be sold to the workforces thank you [Music] foreign