The mission of the Indiana Center for Employee Ownership, Inc. (INCEO) is to promote better understanding of the values of employee ownership among business leaders, public officials, employees, members of the media, students, academic/academic institutions, consumers, and other persons and organizations in Indiana.

One approach to accomplish our mission has been to provide education and advocacy through social media. Publishing information on employee ownership via INCEO’s website, and the social media platforms of Twitter, LinkedIn, and FaceBook.  Additionally INCEO is a contributor to the Democracy Collaborative’s 50X50 Blog, see our article on Performance Validation’s Journey to an ESOP.

INCEO is supportive of academic research on employee ownership.  Drs. Howell (Indiana Wesleyan University) and Van Doel (President/CEO INCEO) are currently performing a replication study of Dr. Van Doel’s dissertation topic examining stewardship within employee owned companies.  This mixed method study is titled: Business Performance-Does Stewardship Matter.  At present over 150 ESOPs have participated in this research study.  The interview phase will be completed in August with the research concluding by the end of the year.  We hope to present a preliminary summary of our findings at The ESOP Associations 4th Annual Great Lakes Regional ESOP Conference.

Direct engagement with non-ESOP business owners, and minority owned businesses to provide education and advocacy on the benefits of employee ownership to the owner, the employees and the community will be INCEO’s next focus.  We are in discussion with the Democracy at Work Institute to collaborate in informing and assisting minority owned businesses in Indiana, and will reach out to the state and local Chambers of Commerce to offer to speak to their members on employee ownership.   The national and state Chamber of Commerce organizations support and are a proponent of employee ownership.

As reported by Project Equity in Indiana there are 41,770 businesses owned by members of the Boomer generation. These businesses employee over 530 thousand workers, have a payroll of over $18 Billion dollars, with sales of over $100 Billion dollars. What will happen when these owners decide it is time to retire?  Some may transition to a family member, some may be sold, some may simply be closed if no buyer can be found – but many of these may be a good fit for sale to their employees and transition to an ESOP.  As of 2015 (NCEO) Indiana is home to 176 ESOPs, which create wealth and retirement benefits for over 130,000 fellow Hoosiers, and that the total assets in these ESOP plans exceed 11.7 Billion Dollars of assets.  This is an average ESOP balance of ~$90,000 dollars.

I hope you will support INCEO in our vision to increase employee ownership and the number of employee owned companies in Indiana.  We want to keep these companies and jobs local to Indiana and help build wealth within our communities.

– Rick