The Best of ESOP Is Yet To Come

I took the time recently to read through the list of companies receiving The ESOP Association’s Silver ESOP Award , recognizing 25 years of ESOP sustainment in each firm.  It’s an impressive list: partly impressive because 25 years of sustaining anything is noteworthy, partly because the companies mentioned there are a who’s who of success in our ESOP community, and partly (mostly, for me) because of what it signifies in the way of corporate legacy.  Maybe I can explain best by relating a personal story.

My corporate ESOP years were spent at Foldcraft Co., a furniture/decor manufacturing and marketing operation in rural Minnesota.  The Foldcraft ESOP is now 23 years old (soon to be among that Silver list!) and early on the members of the company participated in some fairly progressive stuff in the name of the ESOP: open books, innovative means of participation, corporate holism, TEA and legislative activism, ESOP advisory committees, even income-generating public ESOP huddles, all of which contributed to a  TEA Outstanding Employee Owner of the Year award in 1993 and a TEA Outstanding ESOP Company of the Year award in 1998, among other recognitions. 

I retired from Foldcraft in 2005 to pursue activities both ESOP and foundation-related.  But I left wondering the same kinds of things, I’m sure, that the company’s founder, Harold Nielsen, must have wondered upon his exit: How and what will the company be in the future?    Will the company’s challenges be addressed better by the next generation of leadership?  Will the good things we did be sustained?   What have I left behind?

Last week, I received at least one answer to the questions, as Foldcraft Co. was recognized as one of TEA’s 14 recipients of The AACE Award (Annual Award for Communications Excellence).  These are highly coveted and competitive awards for excellence in teaching/preaching/telling/selling/ communicating the “magic” within ESOPs.  It’s the first AACE Award ever for Foldcraft.  It’s the latest marker that tells the company that it’s continuing to do good things around the ESOP.  For me, it’s one of the most satisfying ESOP-related moments of the past 23 years and I had absolutely nothing to do with it.

The value of this is in the legacy.  The adoption of an ESOP can be a wonderfully exciting, motivating thing for members of a company.  But the longer-range success of an ESOP is whether those noble, inspirational notions that gave birth to the ESOP are sustainable, maintainable, from one generation of stewards to the next, whether the philosophies that gave rise to wealth-sharing, equity-building, involvement, opportunity and all of the other empowering elements of ESOP can be perpetuated successfully, in answer to ”What have I left behind?”  The 2008 AACE Award for Foldcraft generates perhaps even greater satisfaction for me than the earlier national awards because it represents the next generation of ESOP owners at Foldcraft and the depth of the ownership sensibility in them.  The company has never been, is not now, and never will be a workplace heaven.    But it still clearly has the drive to become all that it can be and to take all of its members along for the trip.

Silver recognitions and national awards are always nice, of course, but their only true value is the degree to which the actions behind the awards have changed and improved the company.  Foldcraft members can never know precisely what might have become of the company without the ESOP, but they can experience the reality and potential of the enterprise the way it is today, the impacts they can choose to make today, and the way they need it to be for tomorrow’s world.  Along the way, as they wonder about what Foldcraft might have been like sans ESOP, the awards and recognitions give them some affirmation that they’re at least doing some of those things that have made for other great ESOP companies.  (Significant stock appreciation in a wobbly stock market environment also affirms those initiatives!)

 The lesson for me is that Foldcraft continues to get better as an ESOP and as an economic enterprise of business men and women.  And perhaps the even broader lesson is that the entire ESOP universe has the unequivocal opportunity to get better and stronger over the coming years, as long as those of us who are part of its community see the value in its legacy. 

Today, I couldn’t be prouder, even if I do say so myself…. 

 

 

~ by Steve Sheppard on May 16, 2008.