What is it like to work for an employee-owned business?

everything's basically the same we know we still go to our regular positions bake what we got to bake make what we got to make um but now we just have this little extra things that we got to think about like um know what's going to benefit everybody we think about everyone now we don't just think about ourselves and I think that's a real Beauty in it um it's like bringing more people together and like a community I mean I know that sounds like cheesy but um I don't know it just feels that way you know like uh feels like a dream come true in a way um it's just awesome um like I know we started our 401k plan um so you know we're just thinking of ways to to help better people in their personal lives and in our work lives all around so you just started a 401k plan how many bakeries do you think have 401k plants not many not many small businesses that I can think of it's mostly like corporate um restaurant groups that would have benefits like that I think especially within Hospitality given how much of a a head down and just constant drive to work experience it is um it's nice to have a different flavor um to come back to other than just doing like creative menu development constantly um one thing I've really appreciated is the the level of transparency that comes along with ownership um like for example we're going through some transitions with staff right now and instead of having things be hush hush and you know one small group of people trying to figure out how to fill in gaps and solve those problems there's been a lot more conversation going on and as anybody who's worked in a small business knows like nothing stay secret for long um there's constant conversation about everything but um the approach has been less of like how how do we make this as like smooth as possible and figure this out to more strategizing between different parties like hey this role the former person in been really stressed and overworked like what can we do to maybe break that up and make it more feasible for the next person that comes in or like who do you think within our team would be a good fit for that and this is happening between like management it's happening between staff between the board of directors and so it's been nice to have what feels like a an overall supportive effort to try to put the best person into that position and I I've never seen that happen outside of this experience before so it's been it's been really gratifying yeah um I I want to give a little bit of both sides I told David I was going to do that um so I started at JW when I was 22 and for full transparency I took the job CU it paid me 50 cents more than what I was making at my previous job and they gave me this whole spiel about ESOP and oh this and you're going to get this for retirement I didn't get I didn't hear anything that they told me I was like where do I sign the paperworks like make an extra 50 cents at 22 it's a big deal you know um but they sent me to this uh employee owner conference and it really sparked um something that was in me about what my dad or I've seen in my parents when you watch them like work at a company and you know they spend all this time there the work ethic that you know got instilled in me I'm like oh this it's kind of making sense so every day the way it translates is I have my day job and I know what I need to do for that but then it's like that's just not enough so how can I think of let's solve this problem now but how can I solve it for the future because if they're not being efficient I'm not efficient I don't want to do something twice so how can we all work together to get to that right and we're also pretty transparent with our numbers as a company as well um which I think is kind of neat um as much as possible obviously but when we're looking at that it also gives me a sense of okay so if I'm saving even half a percent on something how does that translate to the bottom line and how does that affect my ESOP stock at the end of the year when we're evaluated um and then the way I look at it now too is when I look at my statement that I get every year which I just started opening the envelope last year uh 10 years in now um I was like oh wow I I have money in there like this is cool now I'm like all right I can that's money that I don't put in right like I don't do anything I get a paycheck I work as best as I can in my role and that's free money I get to do whatever I want that for retirement um and then we also do have a 401k which is really neat too so I can decide what I want to do with that so I get two forms of retirement as in this company that I work for and I you know I talked to some people just like said small businesses like the 4 1ks are not always there so it's pretty neat um so yeah I think the word that's coming to mind for me is powerful like I think it feels really powerful to be part of our employee Co-op because as everyone so far who's spoken has pointed out um we have just total transparency so you know we are all aware of what this company is bringing in and where our challenge points are and what we need to improve on and you know we have many many different shows on our Network and all a lot of us producers are kind of working independently in small teams of one or you know a couple people um and their hosts and you know we're kind of just on our own little excuse me our own little islands and we're not thinking about or we're not constantly thinking about like how does what I'm doing affect what another show is doing and like how does what I'm doing affect what the business team is doing and you know there's it's really nice to have like aside from the general reason of collaboration is always going to make your business better and I think not that I'm a business person but like having that collaboration is wonderful but having that like mission of our Co-op and knowing that we are collaborators because of the def like because of our worker ownership yeah honest communication is what Jaclyn just said um all of that really helps so you know it's not something that changes my day-to-day but you know it does it like gives me more to think about you know when I'm making decisions about like what to do with our show or like when we have our fundraisers every year you know um like how ises what I'm doing how can I Loop in other people cuz if we're succeeding then the rest of the company is succeeding and the rest of my my fellow co- worker owners are succeeding I um so maximum fund has always done business in a really different way than our competitors and our peers right the entertainment industry is really weird um and the podcasting industry has been particularly weird over the last decade as it's gone through a lot of booms and busts related to huge amounts of speculative capital from uh larger entertainment companies and from media companies um Spotify and Amazon and apple and so forth and my goal with maximum fun was always how do we build something that doesn't have to scale infinitely how do we build something that is sustainable how do we build something that supports work that we think is really good but we don't think is going to become Joe Rogan and have you know 10 million people and uh a lot of iasa or whatever um and we're not anti- iasa um yeah I'd hate to alienate any iasa enthusiasts in the audience we are recording Okay I uh I'm a professional podcaster I've said much worse things while things were recording um but for me it was always what is the business structure that can support this work long term right I always wanted to do this as my life's work essentially and I wanted my friends whose work I love to be able to do it as their life's work and so when I considered selling the central consideration was there was no one I was going to sell to who was going to maintain those values and there was no one I was going to sell to who was going to retain our employees and so the question and our employees people like Jan and bickram were people who were working extra hard for less money because they also believed in the same principles and you know you have to work extra hard when you're working on something that you know isn't going to be the most financially successful thing you know it's going to be medium financially successful and so for me as I have transitioned from founder to uh worker ownership the thing that I am the most grateful for is that what was um my responsibility or to some extent a responsibility that I shared with bickram who is our managing director for many years um is now something that we all share amongst each other and it's this responsibility for building and sustaining something that we actually really believe in it's not happen stantial that we work here it's not happen stal that we do this work and this system allows uh both allows the the business structure to reflect our values and also allows us to build something value driven that is sustainable in the long term in a way that might not otherwise be possible like my my father worked for decades as an as an organizer and in nonprofits and in the end I he I think his feeling was gosh I wish I had built something that sustained itself without charity and um because he believed in the mission but he wanted to be able to he wanted the card of drive itself right and um often when we do something that we care about we do it just by sacrificing and instead this gives us the opportunity to build something together that can be sustainable long term so because as with your founder I felt like it was my legacy um it's the thing that I've spent the last 25 years of my life doing uh I feel really good about sharing it with these people that I love and care about and value and Trust um and that's the biggest feel difference for me is that instead of feeling like at the end of the day it's like it's a like a paternalistic like I have to take care of these people or somebody might lose their house or if something goes wrong I might lose my house um instead I feel like I'm sharing something with everyone and that we're all really truly working together and I'm not a benevolent dictator or something but actually we're all making the choices together I just want to add to we just had someone that I know we haven't been employee owned for this long but the Legacy part we just had an employee owner retire after 30 years and at the end of this month there's going to be another one at 31 so like to be when you know you don't really even 20 years you don't really hear that anymore too so yeah my my father-in-law you know he didn't go to college one of the smartest hardest working guys I know he didn't go to college he worked retail at this hardware store um you know right out of high school he worked at a hardware store and he he went to Jackson's 30 years ago he just retired and one of the things that I saw from the minute I started dating my wife we've been together since we were 17 was that this was an operation that was built for the benefit of the people who work there right that um you know it's a huge hardware store people went and bought their Lumber there or whatever uh because they knew that and I felt I mean like when I was 19 I was with my wife at the time we were dating still and every other year Jackson's brought all its employees on a trip to Hawaii and they said your children and their Partners can come too so I went to Hawaii with everyone that works at jackon and I felt that feeling that now that my father-in-law has retired just six months ago I think gosh how many people who work retail their entire career get an opportunity to have a real career to have uh something that they're invested in with their co-workers uh that they benefit from that investment and ultimately you know not only did he have a full career he also had a a full and productive retirement um that he never would have had the opportunity to do it he stayed at the hardware store he he worked at uh you know for the five years before he went to Jackson um in a way the transition had the smallest change on my day-to-day in so far as like I was always worried about the business before and I'm still worried about the business today yeah um I mean viam I always I always kept the book secret from you as CEO previously but but but like the thing that I was not anticipating and that really um hit me as I was going over this year's budget with the worker owners and we we had a set of small group meetings where like I was like okay so this is this is how our p&l looks this is what I'm expecting for this year this is why this number looks like that is a lot of what the other folks on the panel have said that that degree of transparency is great I I'm assuming it's great for you all for me as somebody who historically held that information myself and and like bore the burden of that frankly myself it's been so wonderful to feel like I can share that with the people I work with the people whose lives are impacted by it that you know that we are in this together and that um and that like I really feel as though we are now part of a team it's similar to what Jesse has said we are now part of a team that's working on this this problem together and we all have different roles and you know our roles are continuous with what they were before but we all see the bigger picture um and are able to support each other there's there's a loneliness in being at the top of a small business like there's a loneliness in operating that and I feel much less of that loneliness now yeah I I think something that all three of our businesses share is that I don't think there are many people who got into any of our businesses because they uh because they were looking for a career in managing Capital right right all of us all of us are are in our work because we're workers right in in various ways our you know but uh you know there I'm sure there's a lot of Trades people of various kinds that work in in glazing there's you know there's uh people who went to culinary school and people who've worked in kitchen since they were 16 working in baking um so many of our people got into our business because of creativity right and when bickram and I were running the company together um you know bickram came to us because while his background was in business Consulting he really wanted to do something he believed in and I know that's why I was running a business cuz I and so I think there is something really special for us in being able to share uh both the gifts of running a business and the responsibilities of running a business that a producer like Jennifer previously did not have a reason to read a p&l and so the fact that Jennifer and our fellow board members and to some extent other members of The Cooperative um are involved in the business side because it is in their interest to be is a really big deal um and is very meaningful to the operation of our of our company that those skills are now distributed uh those skills and responsibilities and and gifts are distributed among many more people yeah this is obviously true for every business but at least within food um I can't tell you the number of times I've seen single proprietor business owners just like crumble under the stress of what owning a restaurant does to you um and so I kind of swore it off to myself for I was like I'm never going to do that like the cost just isn't worth it for a little bit of notoriety um and so when the opportunity of proof kind of came along it just seemed so just logical and like the best step forward I was like wow if you can just take all of that burden and put it on 20 some people like that just instantly makes it so much easier right um and obviously like it takes a while to get there I think one of the biggest hurdles we've had is like um warming every body up to the amount of like agency that they have and like what's possible um and how much of a say you can have in things and um yeah at the end of the day like decisions don't feel as scary because it's not all on your shoulders and to me that's one of the biggest reasons why I continue to stay is cuz I'm like you know what we we aim high and we strive for a lot but at the end of the day like I'm not on the chopping block if I make a mistake because everybody got the same amount of Buy in on this some something David that we saw in our industry in the last few years is as the industry has gone through a few rounds of shocks as the kind of speculative Capital dried up and then there was a big advertising shock a year and a half or so ago a lot of the creative people in our industry have unionized um I think that is really wonderful and productive um but I I think that because we were able to transition to worker ownership um the kind of fear and distrust that drove workers to say we need to protect ourselves um is unnecessary in our shop I mean there exist obviously uh worker owned companies with unions but um I think the reason that uh the reason that we didn't have to go that route um spend our ources in an adversarial situation is because um rather than me asking the employees to say trust me I'm a good guy um which and I to be I'm a very good guy but but like rather than me asking that of my employees rather than me saying to Jennifer you know Jen we went to college together like you know I'm you you know I'm trustworthy right that transparency and that distribution of responsibility means that everyone feels comfortable trusting each other in a a way that wouldn't be possible otherwise