Workers to Owners (Conversions)

Regardless of business stage, giving employees an ownership stake can have significant benefits for owners, employees, the company, and the community. Conversions, which are businesses that move from a traditional structure to employee ownership, can drive company productivity while rewarding the people who are contributing to the company’s success, as well as helping to preserve the company’s mission and values.

The opportunity: There is a wave of baby boomer small business owners in the United States retiring or planning to retire in the coming years.  

According to the NY Times, “Every year 150,000 to 300,000 businesses owned at least in part by boomers become candidates for employee takeovers as their owners hit retirement age. That means that over the next 15 years, retiring boomers could help create two to four million new worker-owned businesses nationwide." 

Our approach: To seize this opportunity, the Democracy at Work Institute has convened Workers to Owners, a national collaborative to bring worker ownership to scale through conversions of existing businesses by:

  •  Developing scalable models and test them with pilot projects
  •  Developing a comprehensive set of tools and standards for the models
  •  Training service providers on the models and standards of practice
  •  Researching potential markets that would result in a large quantity of successful deals
  •  Troubleshooting existing barriers to scale (for example, increase the amount of patient capital available for deals)

From the collaborative Becoming Employee-Owned was created; a coordinated campaign to spur an unprecedented number of transitions to worker ownership through strategic pipeline building, outreach and education, advocating for supportive regulations and policy, developing sustainable funding sources, developing a comprehensive national network of service providers, and more.

In all aspects of our role, we provide strategic focus with regard to communities most excluded from business ownership -- communities of color, low-wage and rural workers.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following donors for their generous support of Workers to Owners: