October is Employee Ownership Month, a designation most Tennesseans have probably never heard of. I certainly hadn’t, until it changed my life.
For most of my career, I had an understanding of how work
was supposed to go. You show up, you work hard, you hopefully get paid a little more each year, and you do it all over again, every day, until you retire. If you’re fortunate, like me, you get to do that at a place you love, with people you love. On the surface, that’s the best you can hope for, right?
The truth is that I’ve always felt this natural boundary to work. A hard line formed by the plain truth that my ability to innovate and be really good at my job could only be rewarded at predetermined annual intervals with a (hopefully) generous raise, a pat on the back and maybe an impressive-sounding new title. If I developed something new and suddenly saved my company a bunch of money, or opened up an entirely new revenue stream, I wouldn’t directly benefit from it.
That value flowed into a balance sheet and ended up who knows where. Combine that fuzzy financial gain with the friction of starting any truly new initiative, and my motivation to dream big was limited to what I could tweak and control in my role.
I thought work had a ceiling. Ownership changed that
I didn’t know there was another way until my company,5by5 Agency, flew our team to Disney World.
Our founders told us we were celebrating the agency's 10th anniversary, marking the work we’ve done for and with changemakers over the last decade. The night before we were supposed to go into the parks, they gathered us for dinner and told us the real reason we were there: 5by5 was becoming employee-owned.
I didn’t fully understand what that meant that night, but in the weeks and months after, I got a crash course in employee ownership. Our founders sold the company to a trust owned by the employees. Every year, the employee-owners (that’s me) get more shares from that trust. Most importantly, the value of those shares goes up as the value of the company goes up. At first, we would be 30% employee-owned. But just a few months later, 5by5 joined3LS Inc. – a fellow Nashville-based family of employee-owned companies – and we became 100% employee-owned.
The moment I became an owner, not just an employee
Suddenly, I had a real financial stake in the success of the company.
Now, I am not a numbers person and until a year ago couldn’t even tell you what “P&L” stood for (shorthand for profit and loss). But if my financial future hinged on how the company grew, I needed to know how it worked. Now I’m not just thinking about how I can do my job more efficiently; I’m thinking about initiatives that can make the whole company more efficient. I’m walking into my colleagues' offices with ideas. I care about clients' results in a different, even more personal way. The invisible ceiling I had felt for years was suddenly gone.
The benefits of ownership don't stop at the office door
But here's the part that has surprised me most – and the part I think matters most for Tennesseans reading this: The change didn't stay inside the office.
When you own a piece of something, you think differently about it. You're not just an employee of a Nashville business anymore. You're invested in it. And that investment has a way of rippling outward.
When an employee-owned business does well, it’s not a group of faceless investors that benefit – it’s the people that work there. My neighbors, the parents of the kids my son plays with, the people I go to church with. I never would have thought I’d be an advocate for a business ownership structure, yet I tell everyone who will listen about the transformative impact employee ownership can have on a community.
A Tennessee opportunity hiding in plain sight
According to theNational Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO), Tennessee has over 109,000 employees working at employee-owned companies and $14.1 billion sitting in those plans. Nationally, the average retirement account balance at an employee-owned company with an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) is more than double that of a comparable conventional firm offering only a 401(k): $132,000 versus $64,000. Those are real people, like me, whose retirements look different because of this model.
But here's the number that stays with me: There are still$40 billion in Tennessee business assets expected to transition hands in the next decade. Many Tennessee owners and leaders have no idea that they can entrust their business to the people who helped them build it. The people who know it best, all while getting compensated fairly and leaving a legacy of community impact.
That lack of awareness has a real cost for Tennesseans. While jobs might stay when a business is bought by private equity or an out-of-state buyer, the wealth – the real compounding, generational kind – goes somewhere else. Employee ownership is one of the few models that keeps it here. It keeps Tennessee dollars in Tennessee communities, flowing back to Tennessee families and individuals who earned them.
So if you're a business owner thinking about what comes next, what your exit looks like, what happens to the people who helped you build what you've built, I'd ask you to add employee ownership to that conversation. Not because it's the easiest path, but because it might be the most meaningful one.The Tennessee Center for Employee Ownership exists specifically to help business owners explore it, and they're right here in our market.
And if you're a community leader, an elected official or just someone who cares about where Tennessee is headed, employee ownership is worth your attention. The businesses being built and sold in this state right now are shaping what the next generation of Tennesseans inherits. Employee ownership is one of the most powerful tools we have to make sure that inheritance is a meaningful one.
I'm someone who showed up, did good work and got paid – and then found out there was so much more my career could do. I'm grateful someone offered it to me, and I think a lot more Tennesseans deserve to have it offered to them too.
Austin Evans is an account director at5by5 Agency, part of the3LS Inc. family of 100% employee-owned Changemaker companies. He leads the agency's for-profit, for-good portfolio, supporting businesses and organizations that are leveraging their success to make an impact in the world.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: My company made me an owner. Tennessee can benefit, too | Opinion
