 Hi, everyone, and welcome to Building Back Better, how investing in employee ownership creates resiliency for workers, businesses, and local economies. My name is Allison Powers. I'm the manager of Cooperative and Community Initiatives at Capital Impact Partners, and I wanna introduce my colleagues, Allison Lingang, co-founder of Project Equity and Todd Leveret, co-principal of APIS and Heritage Capital Partners. Today, we're gonna talk about how employee ownership has been gaining traction as a tool for business wealth, for building wealth and assets for workers with low wages and communities of color. This is especially relevant as a country faces a wave of small business closures as baby boomer retires, baby boomers retire, and of course the health and economic crisis that we've all been facing. We feel that convergence to employee ownership where the business owners sell their business to the workers, preserve jobs, stabilize communities, and ultimately create more resilient businesses. And we're excited to talk more about this with you today. First, we're gonna introduce our organizations, give you some background and context on employee ownership, and then I will moderate a discussion. Hopefully we'll have time for a question or two at the end. So first I will introduce my organization and then hand it over to Todd. Again, my name is Allison Powers. I work for Capital Impact Partners. We are a mission-driven organization, a CDFI focused on engaging communities to increase equity and opportunity. We do this through a variety of tools, including deploying capital, capacity building, grant-making, and policy. We have dispersed 2.7 billion since 1982 in affordable housing, aging, education, healthcare, food access, and cooperative and employee-owned businesses. We are invested in this space for similar reasons as our partners, quality jobs, small business resilience, wealth creation, and we also have a deep focus on equity and bridging the racial wealth gap both in our external work and also internally. We are one of the larger CDFIs and, but we also have grants so we can support smaller, more innovative projects. So now I will hand it over to Todd to talk about Apes and Heritage. Thank you so much, Allison. Good morning, afternoon, evening to everybody. My name is Todd Leveret and I'm co-founding partner at Apes and Heritage Capital Partners. And we, along with our partners at the Democracy at Work Institute, are doing what we see as our reimagining of entrepreneurship and wealth building in the United States by focusing the powerful tools of employee ownership on BIPOC and immigrant workforces. And so what does that mean? What do we actually do? Well, Apes and Heritage Capital Partners is actually an impact-focused fund sponsor that is now operating and running Legacy Fund One, which is a soon-to-be $50 million impact fund that invests in closely held, privately held, small businesses in the United States with large BIPOC workforces. And we convert those businesses over to employee-owned enterprises using a mix of the ESOP form of corporate governance as well as the co-op principles of culture inside a firm. So really bringing the best from the world of employee stock ownership plans, ESOPs, the best from the world of co-ops, democratic governance, democratic management, and bringing it together to help build wealth for workers of color, as well as build high-quality jobs for workers of color and help keep businesses and jobs anchored in the communities in which they exist today. So really happy to be on the line with you all today and I will pass it over to Allison. Excellent, thanks to you both and thanks everyone for joining us today. I am Allison Lindgain. I'm the co-founder of Project Equity and we are a national nonprofit, super, super lined with the work of both Capital Impact and APIS and Heritage. We exist really because we believe that there is an incredible untapped power in employee ownership to bridge some of the biggest challenges that we have in our economy around income and wealth inequality and specifically racial income and wealth inequality. So we'll get into a bit about the power of employee ownership and why we're such firm believers in it but we see that some of the biggest gaps are our number one awareness. People just don't know about employee ownership so we do a lot of raising the awareness, talking about it, engaging. And we do also believe that there is a capital gap and so we'll get into that as well and I'm just super excited to be talking about this topic with you all. So back over to you Allison or should I jump right in? Why don't you jump right in to the slides? Wonderful. Trying to get to my next slide. So give me a second while I make sure I know how to navigate. Here we go. Okay, so I'm gonna open by sharing a quick story about employee ownership to demonstrate what we mean by employee ownership offering us the chance to build back better and to create resiliency. So this is California Solar Electric. They're one of Project Equity's clients. They're based in rural Northern California. Early in the pandemic they furloughed their entire workforce as many small businesses did so they could tap on a plan. Now while on furlough, the team came together to figure out how to keep their company afloat in spite of the massive disruptions. And so they innovated. In fact, they launched a brand new line of business. They became resellers for battery energy storage. They were not only able to rehire but they grew their team and increased their wages by over 20%. Cal Solar is not alone. This is not a single unrepeated anecdotes. Study after study on employee owned companies show this resiliency. And during the pandemic there were studies that showed that employee owned companies compared to non-employee owned companies retained four times as many jobs, prioritized employees safely and generally did better than their non-employee owned peers. And this is because of the employee engagement and focus. So looking at workers more broadly and we know the storyline, right? People who we started during the pandemic calling essential workers actually lived teetering right on the edge. I won't read the stats on the slide, but we know that income inequality in the United States is shocking but wealth inequality is even more shocking. And this is the gap that undergirds it all that really holds people back that is so hard to overcome in a low wage job. And that with just a little bit of improvement can make such a tremendous difference for individuals, for their families and their communities. Racial income and wealth inequality underpins the core of what is broken and presents our biggest need. Employee ownership in contrast, excuse me, employee ownership in contrast creates the quality jobs that build intergenerational wealth. A 2017 study from the National Center for Employee Ownership shows that median wages at employee owned businesses are 33% higher. Workers stay at their jobs half again as long. So these are more stable jobs and workplaces and wealth as measured by household net worth is nearly twice as high. What we are talking about is a transition where the broad in which the broad base of employees becomes owner. The seller gets liquidity at a fair price and really relevant to this conversation about capital, the employees do not need capital themselves for these transactions to happen. Essentially the business pays off the employee stake over time from the profits. Profits today are in addition shared with the workers. Another client of ours a slice of New York based in Silicon Valley. They're basically two pizza shops with over 30 workers. They distributed over half a million dollars of profit to their workers the first two years after they became employee owned. Another quick story here, Sarah Vegas of Niles Pi which is a company in the food service business. She shared that her first profit sharing check which was over $9,000 was the biggest check she had ever received. She's worked in food service her whole career which is a notoriously challenging sector whether you think of it from a low wage perspective or schedule or jobs stability. And this single profit sharing check translates to what would be a 30% increase over a $15 minimum wage. So the conversation today is not about whether employee ownership delivers impact but instead we're focused on how can we get more of it so that its deep impact can be spread further. And we're talking today about the roles that capital can play in creating more employee owned companies. So we wanna just kind of close this opening with a brief video and bear with me while I stop my sharing and move over to another screen. One second here, almost there. Well, my friend, Ren Bo-Hiran, did join me on the screen. I've had the pleasure to be helped his company a slice of New York transition to become a worker cooperative in 2017. And they've done incredible things since then including not only surviving but actually really innovating and managing to thrive in the midst of this pandemic. So Ren, I wanna welcome you and just start off by asking you to share a little bit about how a slice of New York has spared during the COVID-19 pandemic. Right, hello everybody, pleasure to be with you all today. And it's been a crazy time for everyone I would say but it's a time where we all have to learn to adapt. So even before shelter in place had gone through my colleagues Kurt, Joseph and I all proactively met like a band to make a decision to prepare for a shutdown. So once the shutdown actually hit, the key moves that we made were to stop selling slices to reconfigure the layouts of our shops as well as stop dine in. The main goal of this was to keep everyone safe. Now this was a definite hit in our profit and loss statements and to add to damage we lost our lunch rush due to shelter in place and had to eliminate items such as salads and taff de beer from our Sunnyvale shop. But what we found was that people were ordering anywhere between two to four whole pizzas at a time between four to nine o'clock with at least four to five lines and hold at the same time with wait times up to almost two hours. So we had to collectively rewire the way both our shops functioned in terms to find a recipe for success and a streamlined process. And one of the coolest things that actually happened was one of our owners as well as our non-owners collaborated together and proposed that we should make a personal tenants pizza that could be taken out fresh or taken home frozen so that we could minimize that loss between not being able to slain slices out to our actual guests. Wow, and your name is a slice of New York and I think the tagline is New York pizza in the Bay area. So I know that slices are a big deal for you guys. So that really shows a significant adjustment and a lot of innovation. It really does. And, you know, coming back to the pop and loss statement, you know, we were learning a lot through our data analysis Angela who's our CFO and she was collaborating with us to help us take a look at the key performance indicators, KPIs that were generating profits for us. So anywhere between how many pizzas we were actually selling and what kind were they, what should we be prepping on and focusing on in order to have a more streamlined and refined process and to actually prepare for one big massive dinner rush rather than just waiting for the time to pass by. We had to reallocate all of our hours. What I think was one of coolest moves we're trying to provide in terms of live data analytics with those shops is to get the key data points that our crew would like to know by simply using an iPad or a tablet in order to understand what is making us profitable. And, you know, what we found is when people are seeing what we're losing in profit, they want to find out how we can try the profit back up by actually seeing, you know, where are we actually making a sales app and where can we compensate? Wow, yeah, that's really, I think, one of the greatest promises of employee ownership is that it engages everybody across the company and it makes everyone more successful. Okay, so we just, we wanted to lay some groundwork with you all before we get into our conversation about why we're such firm believers in the power of employee ownership and to have folks really get a sense of, you know, what makes it so powerful? So hopefully that's, hopefully we've accomplished some of that and I will look forward to continuing the conversation. Great. Well, sorry, Todd, did you want to interject? Okay. Well, thanks so much for that context setting, Allison. I'm going to speak for just a few minutes about CDFIs, community development, financial institutions and the landscape and then I will moderate some questions. If you, the audience has any questions, please feel free to put them in the chat and hopefully we'll have a few minutes at the end. I know somebody already asked one in the chat, which I collected. So as I said before, I work for Capital Impact Partners and we are a CDFI or Community Development Financial Institution. CDFIs are dedicated to delivering responsible, affordable lending to underestimated communities. I think one thing that is special about CDFIs is they also include some sort of technical assistance or kind of hand-holding during the loan process and they have a deep understanding of their target sectors or communities. There have been a small group of CDFIs that have been working in the employee ownership space for a long time and I think they're unique because they collaborate really well together, which is kind of the cooperative employee ownership ethos or spirit. But for most of the CDFIs, this is a new and emerging model. There have been several of our CDFI partners who have gotten in touch with us to try to better understand the model and the issues around the model, such as the personal guarantee, which we do not require. And just to say that there are many CDFIs that are really interested in the model, especially those that are already doing small business lending and employee-owned businesses are really not that far of a stretch. I mean, there's a lot more similarities than differences. One thing we tell CDFIs when they approach us that something that's really important is partnering with a technical assistance provider that really understands the model. One of the primary ways to mitigate risk, I think for a CDFI or an investor is to have strong support structures and technical assistance both during the transition, but also on an ongoing basis. I also wanted to highlight a transaction that we did this year, a employee-owned, what is now an employee-owned business called Award Lumber in New York State. We worked with our long-time partner, the Cooperative Fund of New England. It was a 130-year-old business that had been family-owned, but then they ended up selling it to their 40 workers. This transaction had many partners and funding sources, including multiple lenders, technical assistance providers, state agencies. There was a lot of collaboration and flexibility that was needed to get the deal across the finish line, and I think this is something that this kind of working together and CDFIs are good at. And this transaction really has to develop a new loan product for employee-owned businesses and which will help to really institutionalize and increase our lending in the space. In general, I think this is a really exciting time for employee ownership. There are much more CDFIs engaged in the model, as I've said, and also some really innovative new funds, which we're gonna get a little bit more into today that have been created and that really coupled capital and technical assistance together. We're also seeing more investment by philanthropy and also investors that want to direct more investment directly into employee-owned businesses. There's also some promising legislation that would allow employee-owned businesses to much more easily access SBA programs and loan guarantees. And so in general, it seems that employee ownership is really having a moment, especially during this recovery and how we envision what we want a more sustainable, just economic landscape to look like moving forward in the future. So now I will ask our two panelists, Todd and Allison, a few questions about their specific initiatives. The first being, how have you centered racial and social equity in your work? Todd, would you like to start? Yeah, I'll go ahead and start off. Great question, Allison. You know, the racial and social equity piece, really the racial equity piece in the racial wealth gap was really the impetus, that statistic that the average white family in the US has between seven and 10 times the wealth of the average black and Latinx family and by some measures, 30 to 40 times the wealth depending on what you're taking into consideration. That was the beginning of all this work. I began my employee ownership work with a small nonprofit in Detroit called C2BE, went to another nonprofit, National Nonprofit, the Democracy at Work Institute, which is our incubating partner and TA partner. And now we, the Democracy at Work Institute, really focuses on how employee ownership can be used to help groups of folks who haven't had access to allow the traditional benefits of the American economy from people of color to immigrants to folks who may live in rural communities, really focus on how to bring the promise of employee ownership to those people. And so my mandate was to figure out how to help scale up employee ownership models with larger sized companies, companies that may traditionally be more the target of M&A or private equity. And so all that to say, that fact, the racial wealth gap is what we were looking to address in a way that was not only clearly impactful from a wealth buildup, but that was also scalable and sustainable. So how can we create an investment model where there would be uptake, not just by folks in the kind of the nonprofit world or the impact world, but can we create a model where, and this is part of our longer term vision, three, four, five, 10 years down the line, your large pension funds, large insurance companies, municipal actors and players are saying, hey, we're able to invest in a model that's going to address the racial wealth gap and the wealth gap generally. Note all the workers in the firms that we look to acquire will benefit from the employee ownership. We again, focus on those firms with large workforces of color. But how do we help build wealth for these workers? How do we help keep jobs stabilized in the cities and the states and the communities where they are? How do we help keep those companies and those jobs there? And we really, we're starting to see that that vision is coming true. So long way around it, racial wealth gap is where we started and is where we'll always be. So Allison. Allison, you're muted. Yeah, just love everything that you were just saying, Todd, and just tremendous amount of alignment from project equities perspective. We got started in this work almost eight years ago formally and with a real focus on targeting industries with frontline workers, with the assumption that by doing that we could target companies with majority or significant workers of color. And depending on the industry and the geography that's can be easier or harder, but we have found that it's actually more complicated than that, as you might imagine. And especially when you're really trying to target black workers in particular. So black workers in the US make out up about 12% of the total employment and they're underrepresented in small business employment. In fact, one in five black workers is employed in the public sector. So it really takes a targeted effort to identify you can't just look for any company with frontline workers. And so the work that we do at Project Equity we're very data driven to try and target companies. And we've taken the approach of kind of doing a heat map or looking for hotspots if you will, which we do in a few ways. One is geographic hotspots where there's a combined density of black workers and black owned businesses. So the overlay of those two, meaning you're more likely in small businesses to have a concentration of black workers. And in our work we have, we do have some regional focus areas and the regions that make up our black employee ownership initiative include Miami, Atlanta, Milwaukee from a density perspective, Los Angeles just from a numbers perspective. And we're also looking at other regions based on further industry specific targeting. So for example, Texas is an important state for black workers in the manufacturing sector. So then the other way we think about this in terms of hotspots is supply chains that have minority business enterprise preferences, whether they're government or private sector. We have an active pilot right now with Kaiser Permanente, which is one of the largest health systems in the US in partnership with Oberon Cooperative to figure out how to engage with companies that are suppliers. So partner with the company Kaiser Permanente targeting their suppliers. Suppliers generally targeting A either diverse suppliers, but B also suppliers that could become diverse suppliers. Alison Powers was talking about the demographic shift of business ownership in the United States. We know that one out of every two privately held companies with employees is on track to need a succession plan because their owner is 55 or older. So when you think about supply chain resiliency, whether it's in government or private sector, we need to be taking into account that probably one out of every two of those companies is gonna need to do an ownership transition. So let's put the opportunity of employee ownership in front of those businesses and get them to transition and also help the diversity of the supplier, the supply chain within those companies. And then just one other quick mention is that we have a partnership with Morehouse College and we'll be publishing a white paper probably in the first part of 2022, really to outline how communities, private sector, the nonprofit sector can leverage employee ownership transitions to increase economic security and support equitable wealth building in the black community. Thanks so much to both of you. My next question is around the current opportunities and what is your vision for a new economy that is based on restorative just economy? Go for it Ted, I think you are on mute. Great, I'll start the first one after you. I'll pick up after you. Sure, yeah. So restorative just economy, like that's why I'm in this. That's why we started project equity. The reason ultimately that I am such a firm believer in employee ownership is frankly, it's the only strategy that I have found that enables any worker, not just somebody who's highly educated and has lots of sort of social network connections, but any worker to get a job. And through that job, have the kind of access to opportunity and wealth that white color workers who are also mostly white take for granted in their jobs, right? So opportunity both professionally and opportunity from a financial perspective. And it's a setup that creates these opportunities in a win-win relationship between the employer and the employee. And it doesn't require outside regulation for companies to do well by their workers. So it's this model that like when I first heard about it, I heard about it after I'd gone to business school and I'd been working in mission-driven companies for a decade and a half. And I was like, oh my gosh, where's this been on my life? Somebody commented that. Why haven't I heard about this before? So it is this opportunity that truly is a win-win win. And so that's why to me the question really is, great, how do we get more of it? How do we scale this model that has such powerful benefits? And frankly is I think one of the ways that we can make some important changes in our economy to make it more just and make it more restorative. Excellent. And you know, Alison, what you were describing, I think a lot of people, that was what the American dream was supposed to be now, whether the American dream was really accessible to everybody in America and who was, there's a deeper story there, but I think this concept, that's not a new concept of you, if you leave your house and leave your family and go to work and put in a full day's work and you do that to the best of your ability, you should be able to provide adequate housing, have adequate food, adequate healthcare, give your children the opportunity at education or to go into the trade that you went into. Like this whole kind of concept of working, the dignity of work itself and being able to live a dignified life and have your family live a dignified life if you're willing to go out there and put in the energy and effort, as opposed to the, sometimes it seems like the new American dream is that one of us can become a billionaire at some point and you know, we really don't know what happens to everybody else. What you're describing, I think is what we're all trying to, that concept really make that a reality for everyone or make it available to all working people across the economy through what we're trying to do. So I think that vision of folks being able to go work and live a dignified life is that larger vision for a new economy based off of these principles. I'll say this, I think it's important to note that as a developing country, the US is behind a lot of other places in the world as far as developing an economy that has a significant sector based around the employee ownership and don't get me wrong, there's six, 7,000 ESOP companies across the US. There's a lot of companies that aren't majority employee-owned but have employee ownership aspects to as part of the job benefits. I think the world of Silicon Valley and their use of options to incentivize workers in some way speaks to the power of aligning incentives of workers and companies. There's several hundred cooperative businesses, probably more, actually probably more than several hundred, four to 500 cooperative businesses across the US. So it's there, it's there. I think what we're seeing now is an opportunity for this part of the economy to be more vocal and to start bringing more companies and more workers into the fold in a way that's equitable and a way that's just. And so that's Alison and Allison, you know this, if you don't call out racial equity, if you don't call it out, if you don't make it a part of your mission vision, if you don't have your metrics, if you don't track it and you don't measure it, all the things you're doing to create a better economy are just as likely to leave out all the folks who've had the most difficulty in accessing the economy and the benefits that come with it. So, you know, the fact that we're all calling it out and I think we need to push everybody else to call that out as well. And I think it's happening more than it's happened in the recent past. So really excited about that. So I'll stop there. Well said, well said. Yeah, people seem so hungry for it right now because, you know, we all knew about all the cracks in our society, but the pandemic made them so, I mean, made them canyons and just so obvious. So I love hearing about your visions for the future. I'm gonna pivot and ask some questions around the role of capital. I was wondering if you could talk about some of the barriers to access capital for these sort of transactions and, you know, what sort of gaps you're trying to fill. Sure, why don't you go, Todd? Yeah, I'll kick us off. I saw somebody in the chat, they made the statement, why have I never heard of this before? Like, why is this, you know, one of the first times I've been hearing about this concept and I kind of tell this story and I'll make it quick. So I have an undergraduate business degree from Morehouse College, by the way. And my co-founder and co-principal at A&H also went to Morehouse College. So no better school to be partnering with on anything in this country than Morehouse College. So, you know, undergraduate business degree was on Wall Street, worked in finance for Large Bulls Bracket Bank, went to graduate school, got a graduate business degree and a graduate law degree. And really the first time in my life that I heard about employee ownership as a real option for business owners, for workers, for communities, for investors, the first time it really came into the view, into my site, was working at the C2B, the small nonprofit in Detroit, Michigan. So I think when we talk about why, you know, what are some of the barriers to not just capital, but what are the barriers to the whole ecosystem of employee ownership? A lot of it is knowledge, is getting this knowledge out there in the world. I spent a lot of my first year at DOWEY traveling across the United States, talking to people about employee ownership. Bankers, owner, you know, boners, government officials. And the first question they ask is the question that the person in the chat asked, why haven't I heard this before? Because it's so intuitive. You're gonna get better companies if the interests of the workers and the interests of the managers and the interests of the board and the interests of the company and the investors are all aligned. And so we can get better companies. We can actually create the broader wealth spectrum, allow more people to be able to, and you know, I'm getting back on my soapbox. So the role of capital. So capital, one reason capital has not been, some of the barriers is information and knowledge. How do you, you know, if you're a debt provider, how do you underwrite this type of transaction? And people have figured it out. Folks have figured it out. I'm really excited to say, Allison, you mentioned kind of the uptake of CDFIs. You know, we're in partnership with LISC, who's gonna help us provide the senior debt for the transactions that we're looking at. So folks know how to underwrite it. People are able to learn how to underwrite these transactions. And if you're an investor, kind of the whole idea of how do we, how do we get involved with these transactions while still keeping their employee on? People have, people have figured it out. We're figuring it out. We figured it out. Project A was figured out. A lot of other folks out there. It's just that putting those players on, you know, putting shining lights on those players is important. And the role of capital in short, you know, when you're dealing with these larger businesses, like we're dealing with inside the Legacy Fund, you know, these are, you know, M&A transactions. These are private equity transactions. These are businesses of significant size and cash flow with owners that have spent a lot of time, energy, and life building up this business and are looking to move on to the next stage of their life. Allison, I think you referenced kind of the silver tsunami. You have this whole world of baby boomer owners who are trying to retire. And they may love the idea and concept of selling their businesses to their workers or they may not even care, right? Some just wanna move on to the next stage of their life. And if you don't have that mechanism, that capital that's there to allow them to peacefully sell their businesses to their workers and go on with their life, then they're not gonna do it. So there have been a lot of owners that have done it for more of an altruistic space. But when we're talking about scale, when we're talking about institutional capital coming to the space, we need to be competitive with private equity just to be blunt. We need to be competitive with private equity. And as we always say at A&H, the question is not, how are we competitive with private equity? It's how is private equity gonna be competitive with us? Love it, love it. Yeah, so yeah, just to maybe add a couple of points. Super, I agree with everything that you're saying, Todd. You know, the capital gaps really are lack of awareness is one, right? So everything that Todd was talking about about educating others, you know, I think pretty much every fund that I'm aware of that specializes in employee ownership or in co-ops has a please come join us mentality to other small business lenders of, you know, participate, co-lend like we'll sell you our seasoned loans like however you wanna be involved that you can gain from hand experience, we're here for you because there is this recognition that, you know, all of these specialized funds, we're not gonna address the capital gap to really bring this model to scale. Instead, you know, we're addressing the short-term capital gap and the need for capital targeted for this in a very specific, you know, M&A style focus on identifying these companies and getting them through and turning them into employee-owned companies. But for this to actually be, you know, what we're working towards is having it be normal, normalized, self-generating, so that it isn't specialized anymore. We're not needing sessions at SoCAP to talk about it where people say, why have I heard about it before? So that it will take the whole small business lending infrastructure to be able to be comfortable with it, understand the risk profiles, understand that you cannot lend in this space requiring a personal guarantee because, you know, when you got 50 owners, 100 owners, who's gonna hold the personal guarantee and how is that fair? So there's a shifting in mindset that, you know, the risk models, all that kind of stuff. Then there's also some regulation change that needs to happen, you know, banks have a specific credit box, a specific set of regulations. And in particular, we need, I'm gonna do a little plug here for the Capitals for Cooperative Act. We need the SBA to not require a personal guarantee for loans to co-ops. And I will note that during the pandemic, both the PPP Paycheck Protection Program and the Idle Economic Injury Disaster Loan, which were both, you know, crisis specific loans to small businesses, both of them waived that personal guarantee for cooperative lending. So we're super hopeful that that can serve as a precedent for it to be waived for the SBA 7A loan. You know, there are other things that come into play for cooperatives that benefit the risk profile and so that we can not use the personal guarantee. So personal guarantee is really important. Familiarity is really important. And I wanna call out a comment that Rodney made, which I wanted to lift up as well, about there was recently a great company in San Diego called Taylor Guitars that transitioned to become employee-owned. And one of the things that I just was so excited about in some of the press coverage about that transition. So it was that financing came from a pension fund. And the pension fund was quoted as saying, something like, you know, we invested because we saw employee ownership as a low risk investment. And I was like, finally, it's true, like it's true, it is low risk, right? Like all data study after data study after data study, you talk about how employee-owned companies outperform their peers and do all these things. And yet the capital space sees it as risky simply because of lack of experience with these kinds of transactions. So, you know, a pension fund coming in and saying we invested in employee ownership because it was a low risk investment to me that is turning the corner in terms of where we need to go for capital to be unlocked for employee ownership. And I wanna jump in, you said so many great things and also the shout out to the social capital partners team that led that Taylor Gadar's transaction, great team over there. And I always say it's about, you know, talking more on the banking side, finding side, it's about perceived risk versus real risk, right? So what comes to people's mind when they think employee ownership, when they hear cooperative, when they hear these things? And you know, people always picture, oh, it's, you know, people sitting in a circle seeing Kumbaya, you know, and it's, we're not gonna get our money back. And it's like, you know, these are businesses, like employee owned businesses, you know, have shown themselves because of that alignment between workforce and management because they're able to come together during things like a global pandemic and figure out what do we need to do to keep these jobs here and not have this company shut down as opposed to again, some traditional, you know, investment firms or even companies that are saying, hey, we're now beneath the margins that we need, we're gonna shut this thing down and we're gonna move the jobs overseas. Like it makes a ton of sense. I will say on that perceived risk, a lot of times from an investment standpoint or a finance standpoint or a banking standpoint, you know, the question of, you know, the idea of an owner leaving a company that's been there and now it's, you know, it's worker, are the workers going to be able to continue to run and operate this company? I think a lot of the intermediaries in this space, like ourselves, like Project Equity, you know, serving as what we consider to be, you know, stewards, we're gonna come in, you know, help transition the business over from an owner over into employee owned business, whether that's finding additional leadership from within the workforce, which is our preference, whether it's help filling in a leadership gap using folks from our team or bringing leadership from the outside, that difficulty that comes from an exiting owner, these teams that serve not just as capital sources but also as stewards of these businesses to get them to a point where they're able to continue operating and grow independently, I think is one thing that now that we're seeing that in the space, we're gonna see a lot more capital and we have seen a lot more capital excited and able to go forward. Great points, Alex, great points. Yeah, and I completely agree with everything you're saying, Todd, in terms of that support. So, you know, just capital alone is not what these businesses need, right? This is a transition and it's, if you're really doing the transition well, you're not just transitioning ownership on paper, you're transitioning an ownership mentality within the business, right? So it's the businesses that really, really outperform in some of the metrics that we've talked about, you know, are the ones that have yes, ownership on paper, also a significant voice by the employees in terms of the strategic direction of the business and also a deep ownership culture. So you want employees like back to that example of the solar company that we opened with, you know, you want employees, when they're on furlough and receiving unemployment, you want them to care about that business succeeding and do everything that they can to make that happen. And that's about culture. And so investing in that culture, you know, it's not a flip a switch from one day to the next. So, you know, some people call it post transaction support, you know, we call our program thrive where we work with companies two years after the transition, at least sometimes more than that, where, you know, this is an important piece of the puzzle to kind of bring the reality of what employee ownership can bring to life. Thank you all both so much. I, we only have two minutes left. So I guess at this point, I'll just ask, you know, if anything you want to add, I just want to say one quick thing that, you know, Allison, you talked about that shift in mentality and I think it's the same thing for our invest CDFIs or other folks that want to get in the space. It's just, I mean, we work with folks who want to get rid of the personal guarantee and we have never required it. And for us, it's just not even something that is in our vocabulary. We discussed, we never missed it. We've lent almost $300 million in the space and it's never been a problem, but it's just, it's a shift. And so I think that that's just all the, like Todd said, all the mechanisms are in place. It's in done. We know how to do this. It's just accessing the information and getting it out to a broader audience. So I want to thank you all so much for coming. I'll just give Todd and Allison a chance to kind of say a final word and sign off and just want to thank everyone so much. We're all collaborators in the space and we are, please reach out. We're happy to discuss or connect you with partners. Todd and Allison. Go ahead and keep this up, Allison. And I saw in the chat, make sure you let people know how to contact, how to contact. Okay, great. Yeah, so yeah, I just want to really thank everyone for joining the session and for your curiosity and interest in employee ownership. And I think all three of us are resources. We're here to help you learn more if there are more questions or interest in learning more. And in terms of the capital work, I just will say specifically for Project Equity, we have two capital initiatives. One is in partnership with the national CDFI shared capital. They focus on lending to cooperatives of all types, including employee-owned businesses. And we also just launched a new fund called the Employee Ownership Catalyst Fund which is designed to provide a really broad range of flexible capital for companies that are either on the path to becoming employee-owned or are already employee-owned or need transaction financing, whatever it may be. Over to you, Todd. Excellent, I'd like to thank everybody for joining our session today. Two things that stand out to me from the conversation. One, and just in life, one, if you're not, if you don't call out racial equity, if you don't call it out, whatever impact strategy that you're looking at and you just assume that it's gonna happen by proxy, it's probably not. Make sure that if that's important to you, whatever you're investing in, whoever you're investing in, it's not afraid to write it down, to put metrics and goals and really tie it into their mission and strategy. And the second thing, it goes back to what Allison was saying, when you're looking at racial equity focused, excuse me, employee ownership focused and centered strategies, if there isn't time, money, effort, energy allocated towards the technical assistance piece, to really helping transform a mindset of a worker into a worker owner, if that's not there and we achieve that through our partner democracy at Work Institute School for Democratic Management, if that piece is not there, really interrogate that employee ownership strategy in a very rural way and ask why that piece isn't there. So those are my two big takeaways. And again, thank you, Allison. Thank you, Allison. Always a pleasure, always a pleasure. Thank you so much, everybody. I'm just was trying to get, Todd, if you could throw APIS and Heritage, website on the chat. And again, good to see you all. Thanks for, I know this is the last session of the day. So thank you so much for joining us and have a great evening.