AUA: How Do You Make Employee Ownership Actually Feel Real?
About this episode:
Original Air Date: June 7, 2026Plenty of companies make the move to employee ownership—ESOPs, EOTs, buyouts—and then wonder why nothing really changes. The shares transfer, the announcement goes out, and then... people still feel like employees. The ownership is technically there, but the culture hasn't caught up.
In this mini episode, Rodney and Sam respond to a listener who's seen this gap firsthand and wants to know which parts of the operating system to examine first. Drawing heavily from The Ready's own experience as an EOT, Rodney and Sam make the case that ownership culture lives in three places most companies underinvest in and why checks and balances between long-term purpose and short-term operations are the structural move that makes distributed power meaningful.
Mentioned in this episode:
ESOP (“Employee Stock Ownership Plan”)
EOT (“Employee Ownership Trust”)
The Ready’s own EOT transition
The Ready’s OS Canvas
In this episode:
Rodney Evans
Sam Spurlin
Listen now:
Episode transcript:
Rodney Evans:
Hey y'all, welcome back to At Work With The Ready. I'm Rodney Evans and that guy is Sam Spurlin.
Sam Spurlin:
Hello everyone and hello to you, Rodney Evans.
Rodney Evans:
Hi, Sam. Every other week we tackle one tough thought provoking listener question and share a few ideas that might help. So let's dive on in. Sam, what do you have for us today?
Sam Spurlin:
All right. This week's question is, if a company moves from a single or few owners to an employee owned model, what other areas of the operating system would you examine first to move past the basic financial transaction of selling company shares?
Rodney Evans:
So love that you asked, I have enough thoughts on this to fill several podcasts and maybe a book. This person gave us a little bit of extra context and said they've seen a few companies move to ESOPs and EOTs to transition. And basically there's a little bit of a struggle in creating the quote unquote ownership culture. So I think a couple of things happen in these transactions. So I have first person experience because The Ready is an EOT and we went through this process of essentially buying the company from Aaron. The first thing is that I think people try to do this the same way they try to do anything else transformational, which is basically comps. They're like, "We're going to tell you about our new values and our new purpose statement, and then we think you're going to give a single shit on that basis," which they are not.
I think the two real fields of the OS Canvas that you have to change to bring this to life are sort of like, actually maybe three, are the least soft ones and they're structure, compensation, and authority. I'm going to just start for practical purposes with structure. When you're doing the design work around employee ownership, you have a really cool opportunity to create checks and balances inside of your own company. And so in our EOT, for example, the trust stewardship committee, which is elected and the members of that can be anyone at The Ready, their job is to basically protect the purpose of the trust. So the established purpose of having this trust, which is a very long, stable view. Whereas the board, which is a different group of people, is responsible for the operational and financial health of the ready in the nearer term. Those things are intentionally designed in tension with each other and both of them are vested with real power.
Both of them have to consent to any major decisions around investment or a sale or an acquisition or a buyout or anything else. It's an authority move, but it's also a structural move to basically say, "We are going to create ownership of the decisions as a proxy for ownership" of the company. Because what do you really own when you own the company? What is it? The thing that makes it meaningful is power and power rests in what you can call the shots on. And so we did a lot of thinking about how to distribute authority over the decisions that matter and decided to have this sort of structural way of keeping the long-term and the short-term intention with each other.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Another place where my mind goes and kind of thinking back to my time at the ready is information and mastery, particularly around financial stuff. So if you are now an owner of the company, do you understand ... Well, first of all, do you have access to the finances, which you need to and should, and do you understand what you are looking at? And I think that is a whole body of work that takes real effort to get good at and people need to care about it. And I think the more literate, financially literate you are, the more you can start to feel like an actual owner in this thing that you are an owner in.
And then the last thing that came to mind for me is around, and you had mentioned comp, but the way that I was thinking about comp is that I think something like moving to an EOT feels more real the first time you experience profit share. And then we get to have a conversation about why this was less or more than we thought it was going to be and what we do next time around to either get more of this good feeling that we're having or to shift it so that we can have a better and more fun time a year from now.
And I think if you haven't really had the results of any sort of employee ownership shift felt that way yet, it's more theoretical and anything that's just theoretical, it's easy to kind of ignore or downplay.
Rodney Evans:
I'm so glad you said the thing about financial literacy because this has really been like a lot of work actually at the ready. And I wonder how many other companies that go through this transition spend the amount of time that we have spent in thinking about how to talk about our business model, how to involve all owners in creating our new business model, in having the financials be fully transparent. Ashley and I worked really hard on creating one unifying metric that's our overall organizational health score. And like we have re-weighted the levers of that this year based on what we're trying to do now, which is different than what we were trying to do last year. And every person at The Ready looks at those numbers and knows what those numbers are. And I think you're right, because to just like tie your points together, it's like, we're a small company, but much larger companies than us make this move.
It's like, we want to be thoughtful and to have ownership participation in the idea that we might be making a certain investment instead of funding profit sharing, or we might be biasing toward more base comp at the expense of profit sharing, or whatever the things are. And actually one of the things that we governed this year that I would highly, highly recommend to anyone who is going through this process is we governed an Owner role at The Ready and it has a set of accountabilities that every single person working at the ready, regardless of their role, is expected to uphold. And one of them is understanding the financials of the business. And I think that it's like if you want to have an ownership culture, these moves that you and I are talking about are really useful like behavioral nudges, but also you have to clarify what the owner role actually means and like what is it accountable for? What authority is it vested in? What scaffolding does it require to bring it to life? You have to do that work around it so that it's not just like words on a page.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I love that. All right, that is it for this mini. If you've got a question of your own, hit us up at podcast[at]theready[dot]com.
Rodney Evans:
We will see you back next week for a full episode of At Work With The Ready. Thank you for being a listener.