After 20 years of building Shaw Solar in Durango, founder John Shaw chose to transition the company to an employee-owned worker cooperative, giving 14 employees the opportunity to become owners.
With financing support from First Southwest Bank, the company created a path to preserve local jobs, share ownership and build a stronger future for the people who helped make the business successful.
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Transcript
Shaw Solar’s primarily a solar contracting company based in Southwest Colorado. And we started out with solar only, but we have moved into batteries for both residential and commercial applications, as well as car charging and heating and cooling. We’ve been in business for 20 years in Durango. When I first started thinking about having the company go to an employee ownership model it really felt to me like almost a duty to offer that to the employees who helped build the company, because by no means did I build it on my own over the 20 years that we’ve been in business. While there were other opportunities to sell, that just didn’t feel appealing and that the employees who helped build the company could take it to the next level. First Southwest was instrumental to being able to do the employee ownership conversion. Honestly, I checked with several banks and all of the banks would be in a cluster over here and First Southwest was over here. They were interested in the employee ownership model and were very willing to work with us on helping that happen. So I’m just unbelievably grateful working with Eric and Charlene at the bank.
This is a necessary option for many companies. We found that six out of 10 companies are looking to sell in the next 10 years, or, or the owners looking to retire in the next 10 years, but we found on the other side that only 15% of businesses actually sell. So we would like to empower employees to pick that up and, and to solve that gap and and buy more companies. The employee ownership commission can help with try to decide what’s my company need and what am I looking to get out of the company? What am I looking to leave with my employees? So it really has to do with getting in front of the right people and having the, and I, I encourage people to have a consultant that can help weigh the pros and cons and to decide what direction to go. Employee ownership is important because it preserves jobs in a local market, especially in our rural communities, which we care about the most. And it also helps with wealth enhancements. So employees that once worked for an hourly wage can, can partake in some of the profits of the company and, and, and gain more wealth.
There’s a lot of opportunity for the new owners to actually have a good financial stake in the company. So there will be dividends paid out to the individual owners. So idea being helping people stay in rural Colorado, helping them buy houses, helping them be part of these communities. The
Baby boomers are retiring and that’s where we’ve found that there’s, there’s so many businesses out there that never get sold or never get transferred anywhere and they just end up, they just end. And we’d like to preserve those businesses and keep them local.
In 20 years, I hope people who look back at this won’t think it was a novel idea, putting the ownership in the hands of the trusted employees who helped build these companies all over Colorado and beyond.
