Howdy to any and all reading this! Today I am launching LaborShares.org: the open-source small business acquisition framework that aligns workers, sellers, and entrepreneurs through shared-ownership transitions.
I’ve been on a journey since the Fall of 2023, when I first learned about the concept of “Employee Ownership,” (EO) to contribute to it’s widespread adoption. I’ve studied, set up countless calls, and worked on several experiments, this being the latest of them.
The “elusive experiment” which I have dreamt of for a while but which I’ve not been able to get launched is a platform similar to AngelList, but for EO. AngelList makes venture capital easy with smart contracts that are built into their cap table management platform; I want to make converting small businesses to employee ownership easy with smart contracts that are built into a different kind of cap table and deal management platform.
Now, I’m launching LaborShares.org to build the groundwork for that dream experiment, all open-sourced, and I am starting on a super-niche that I know well: enabling EO Search Funds.
Over the years, I’ve become quite entrenched in the search fund community (shout out to searchfunder.com) and even launched my own EO-focused search at tarsprings.com. The idea is for an entrepreneur to find one of the many small businesses with a retiring owner and unclear succession plan, put together a deal to buy the business where the searcher is incentivized to run it (despite that lack of succession plan), while equally incentivizing the existing employees to help them grow the company. That last part is accomplished through broad-based employee ownership.
My hope is to recruit other passionate EO advocates to this work so that we can make EO conversions the easiest, most lucrative, and most legacy-building option for workers, small business owners, and entrepreneurs alike. The idea is to start by providing a few simple tools, and go from there:
- Documentation: To explain in plain-English how business owners, searchers, and others can leverage this idea.
- Financial Models: To help jump-start understanding and actual deal-making.
- Letter of Intent (LOI) Templates: To offer a concrete first-step towards making EO-search deals come to life.
If you’re interested in getting involved in this work, please reach out. I am particularly interested in recruiting some folks who are great communicators, who have legal backgrounds, and investment banking/deal-making backgrounds.