Your Business in the Future: Workshop at the PenBay Chamber

All that work has built the business, but where does it go from here? Converting your business to employee ownership might be the right next step for you and what you’ve worked to create.

A free workshop at the PenBay Chamber will help you learn whether employee-owned cooperative might be right for you and your business, either soon or sometime in the future.

Ownership by employees is a good solution to the problem of retaining critical staff, restructuring for growth or the right choice for succession, a way for your business to live on when it’s time to retire or find new challenges.

Rock City Café and Roastery recently completed the conversion process to an employee-owned cooperative, enabling its founder Susanne Ward to gradually make a transition toward retirement while maintaining the culture and structure that have served it so well for twenty-five years. If you go there today, chances are that at least a few of the folks who work there also have an ownership stake.

A good candidate for employee ownership is any mature business that has a reliable and effective cohort of employees, a good track record, and the capacity for long-term health and growth. Things change when the people who do the work are directly involved in how well the business does.

This workshop will look at how cooperatives are created, how the employees share the ownership, how to create a viable management structure, and how to finance the transition. There are different ways to accomplish these goals—we’ll be looking at most of them.

The workshop will be presented by Rob Brown, Director of Ownership Solutions for the Cooperative Development Institute, and Ken Greenleaf, Business Advisor for MaineStream Finance. Free to everyone, and we’ll have coffee and snacks.

For more information contact Rob Brown at rbrown@cdi.coop or Ken Greenleaf at kgreenleaf@penquis.org, 974-2437.