Latest / Construction ESOP Collective / Construction ESOP Collective Trailer | Employee Ownership in Construction
Transcript
- Chuck Mazzanti: nine and I met the night superintendent and he asked how many vacuum trucks they had and I said, How many do you need? Because I need four and I said, ⁓ no problem, I got you. And problem was I only had one and I only had three employees at time and I was like, ⁓ man, I gotta figure this out. I gotta figure out fast and you know, we wake up, you know, fifteen years later we bought a business for a you know a little over five million dollars total that's turned into having an equity value of three hundred million. And that's all for the benefit of the employees. If we go with the finance side and try to apply it an academic approach to safety, it's gonna fail or it's gonna struggle. Because it's not an academic problem, it's a human problem. It's a human systems thing for us. It's an opportunity for us to really Kinda put our money where our mouth is. Everybody says, you know, your your business is family or you know, we're all we all want to you know have an owner's mentality, but actually we were able to put shares in people's hands. And ⁓ and say here you go. This But also be thinking about the why. Do they value the leadership team? They want to reward the people that actually built the business. And I'm gonna also throw this out there, have they built the business that can run without them. And you know, I am absolutely a capitalist. I believe in capitalism. I believe you should get a rate of return for the risk you take, but I also believe, probably because of my upbringing, my parents were blue-collar workers, that you should share in that upside for the labor that has to do the work. I cannot do everything that our 2,000 employees do. I can't do it without them either. I can't do it without capital, and I can't do it without the labor that does the actual work. And and so we're all in this together. What you just heard is a sample of the real conversations we have here. I'm Chuck Mazzanti and this is the Construction Aesop Collective. Every other week, real conversations with Esop construction companies about what's working and what's not. Follow to stay in the loop.