The following is an excerpt from an article originally published in Bloomberg. Reporter Paul Keegan spoke with Ownership Works Founder Pete Stavros about why sharing value with employees pays off, and how he’s helping even more workers become owners through Ownership Works:
“Why did you start Ownership Works?
We got a lot of calls from other firms saying, “Hey, this sounds exciting.” We helped the CEO of Harley-Davidson roll out this model last year when the company gave out stock grants. Ownership Works now has 60 partners representing an interesting cross section of the economy— investors, corporations, foundations, labor leaders, pension funds, groups that don’t normally talk to each other much.
How many private equity firms have joined?
We’ve announced more than 20, including TPG, Silver Lake, Warburg Pincus, Leonard Green, Berkshire Partners and Goldman Sachs. When a private equity firm says, “I’m gonna try this and if it works, I’m gonna roll this out throughout my entire portfolio,” that’s when you can really scale this. Just the top 20 private equity firms probably have 5 million employees in their portfolio. If each employee earns $50,000 in equity wealth, that’s a quarter of a trillion dollars, basically doubling the wealth of the entire bottom half of the country.”
Read the full article in Bloomberg.
