Keeping It Local: Preserving Business Legacy Through Employee Ownership

Learn & share your perspective on how employee ownership can anchor local businesses and provide opportunity to Madison County residents
About this Event

Keeping It Local: Preserving Business Legacy Through Employee Ownership

What happens when a local business owner is ready to retire, sell, or step back?

And what happens when people in our community have the skills, relationships, and ideas to start a business, but do not have a realistic path to ownership on their own?

Employee ownership offers practical options for both.

Join Tennessee Center for Employee Ownership and local leaders for a conversation about how employee ownership and cooperative business models can help preserve local businesses, support new entrepreneurship, and create more opportunities for Madison County residents to build wealth through ownership.

We will explore two connected questions:

How can local businesses stay local when an owner is ready to transition?
Employee ownership can give business owners another option for succession, helping preserve jobs, customer relationships, and a company’s legacy in the community.

How can more people have a pathway to start and own a business together?
Worker cooperatives and other shared-ownership models can help entrepreneurs combine skills, resources, and leadership to build businesses that create opportunity for the people doing the work.

This event will introduce several ownership models, including employee stock ownership plans, worker cooperatives, and other approaches that can support business succession, entrepreneurship, and community wealth-building.

Together, we will explore:

• Options for business owners who want to sell, retire, or transition their company
• How worker cooperatives can support new business formation and shared entrepreneurship
• How employee ownership can create wealth-building and leadership opportunities for workers
• What local attorneys, accountants, lenders, advisors, workforce partners, and community organizations can do to support these pathways
• What a stronger local ecosystem for business ownership and community wealth-building could look like in Jackson and Madison County

This is an introductory conversation for business owners, employees, entrepreneurs, professional advisors, lenders, workforce and economic development leaders, community organizations, local government partners, and anyone interested in the future of locally rooted businesses.

Come learn, ask questions, share your perspective, and help shape what employee ownership and cooperative entrepreneurship could mean for Jackson and Madison County.