Why did your business become employee-owned?

so I started maximum fund I mean the roots of Maximum fund go back to my College radio show but it essentially was a sort of business structure around my creative Endeavors as a podcast host and uh over many years with help from people like Jan and bickram it grew grew to a pretty substantial sort of small to midsize podcast Network um and I never had a I had a great passion for helping independent creators make money from their work uh but I did not have a great passion for being a business guy um and when Co happened I sort of uh my family life was very difficult and I just didn't think I could sustain my role at as the place where the buck stopped at maximum fund by that point bickram was substantially running the business side of the operation but I just didn't want to be the owner anymore and I thought about selling got as far as um scheduling meetings with investment bankers um and didn't feel great about it um there had been some rounds of people acquiring podcast companies for more than they were worth and I had thought about selling at those times and had never felt really good about it since we were so sort of mission driven and ultimately I I called my father-in-law who has worked for about 25 years at a a fully worker owned hardware store in the Bay Area called Jackson's Hardware and I said to him hey what do you know about worker ownership because I knew he'd been on the board he's worked there 25 years is a the number two guy there or something big giant hardware store and he said well I don't think I don't know if an ESOP which is what they were is the right structure for you but um I think it might really make sense and I found project Equity by searching what is a co-op on the Internet or something um and uh found that uh found that uh uh our structure was the best both for um sort of achieving our goals in terms of how the company would run and in terms of achieving my goals as the selling owner of um getting a little bit of up upfront Financial stability which helped me with my family situation so our founder um am Marly Merl she is an elder she um purchased a piece of property she was in real estate and this was back in 1991 and the owner of the real estate property had a little business J Glass his name is Louis jaru and so he told her I'll sell you this piece of property if you keep the business alive because I have nine employees and I do not want them they have families and so she purchased the company uh became uh actively involved in the construction and grew the business and she has tons money and so her kids are pretty much set and so she decided that she wanted to keep her Legacy alive and we became her Legacy because she fell in love with the employees she went from nine employees to over a 100 currently in 2017 we became uh ESOP employee owners for 100% And now uh we have a total of 311 employees 128 are employee owners we have uh several locations in Vegas Arizona Fresno San Bernardino fabrication and our corporate headquarters are here um so our journey uh Nang ma was our founder over at Proof Bakery um she started the business in 2010 um and she I'm yeah she decided to go to culinary school when she was in her 30s um because she wanted to learn how to make bread commercially and aside from that though she's told me many times that her ultimate goal was she wanted to learn how to run her own business um and that was really what drove her um in her process during those 10 years um and she's also said that she wanted proof to be a co-op from the beginning but she didn't have the resources or the experience to know how to do that so in a way she was kind of biing her time waiting for the opportunity to come along um and then she went to a National Conference when was this 2018 2017 yeah it probably was around then yeah yeah met project Equity at a booth outside um and started the process of um evaluation she wanted to make sure that there was a core group of people that were going to stick around and actually see the process through which we had started Co hit and then it took oh gosh about a year and a half to two years for it to fully transition um but yeah we have 23 24 employees right now 24 um and we're over the 75% threshold of ownership which is really exciting with a few more joining in the next couple months