Photo / Tim Greenway
Kevin French is CEO of Landry/French Construction, which has had an ESOP ownership structure since 2016.
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Succession planning top of mind for employee-owned firms
PHOTO / TIM GREENWAY
Jared Levin, president and CEO of Mainely Tubs, pictured at the South Portland headquarters.
By RENEE CORDES
Decades after founding Mainely Tubs in 1978, Jim Van Fleet transferred ownership of the Scarborough-based hot tub, swim spa and sauna dealer to all of the company’s employees in 2016 via an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, or ESOP.
“Rather than just selling the business to another party, he wanted to find a solution that would reward the team members who had helped to make the business such a success and ensure that his customers would continue to be taken care of,” explains Jared Levin, the company’s president and CEO, who leads 125 employee-owners.
Today, Mainely Tubs likes to have two people identified as potential successors for each management role and is already working to pinpoint a team ready to take the reins in 2027.
ProSearch, a Portland-based recruiting and staffing agency founded by President Ed McKersie in 1994, became an ESOP in 2017.
“A few years earlier, I began to think about how I could transfer the company to the employees who had been so instrumental to our success over the years,” says McKersie. After looking at other options, he saw the ESOP route as “the best way to accomplish my goal of selling the company to the team.”
When McKersie eventually retires, there’s no plan for one individual to step into his role.
“I have found it more important to try to empower several people to take on a more active leadership role, so decisions aren’t made by me as much as before we became an ESOP,” he says. “This is part of building an ownership culture.”
Succession planning also drove Landry/French Construction to become an ESOP in 2016.
“We felt it would be great for employees and provide them with another retirement source,” says Kevin French, chairman and CEO of the Scarborough-based firm founded in 2010. “Some of our employees who have been here since the start already have six figures in their ESOP account.”
While French has no immediate plans to retire, he’s looking to make a few leadership changes to provide more flexibility with his schedule as he spends more time in Florida following a recent acquisition in that state. As for his eventual successor, “I would prefer to promote within and feel comfortable we have the right people,” he says.
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