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Thirteen years ago, I was working as a cashier in a candy store. I wasn’t making enough to pay rent so slept in my car in a Walmart parking lot.
It was really tough, I’m not going to lie. I saw no way out of that parking lot. But then I got thrown a lifeline. I landed a temp job separating aluminum and steel scrap at a local manufacturing plant where my grandfather was a production manager.
From Day 1, I sensed something different about the company, AMBAC International, which makes fuel injection systems for heavy-duty commercial and military use. Folks were way more interested in a 20-year-old kid with no clue and no professional skill set than I ever would have imagined. Even though I was just a temp separating scrap metal, they took time to explain the company to me, to take me on the shop floor and show me the ropes.
Power of ESOPs
I put my head down, worked hard and got hired full time. I quickly realized the reason everyone was so invested in me was because they owned the company. That’s right, AMBAC is partly owned by its employees, through an employee stock ownership plan, or ESOP, which provides tax incentives to companies that share ownership with employees. It’s one of about 6,500 ESOP companies in the country, according to the National Center for Employee Ownership.
At most jobs, I would have been trained for my daily duties and that would have been that. But because of the ESOP, my coworkers invested so much time into me becoming stronger professionally. I’m talking about the workers on the shop floor, not just management. I may not have been eligible for the ESOP as a temp worker, but from the minute I started, they saw the connection between my work and their wallets. Everyone wants the company to do better, because when it does, their ESOP accounts grow in value.
I was trained to have a holistic view of the company and how we operate and learned how all the details of everyone’s jobs intertwined. The mentality that everyone is as strong as everyone else from the shop floor up to leadership was drilled into me. My previous experience handling finances was limited to the candy store cash register, but once I started full time, I got comprehensive financial training, sitting with a more tenured employee to learn what each line of the P&L meant and how the daily duties of each employee affected those numbers.
When COVID hit, our business dried up. Many companies were furloughing employees and making layoffs, but we got together and did everything we could to keep everyone working full time, including dropping our landscaping company and buying a lawnmower. Years before COVID, we decided not to take an annual raise and instead put that money into buying new machinery. It was a decision all 52 employees made together because we were lacking in a certain capacity that was harming our bottom line.