An estimated 600 US firms a year are now sold to their employees, a path that trades founder control for preserved local jobs, patient capital, and a workforce with a real financial stake.
Tricia Salcido called a meeting in January and told the roughly 30 employees of Softstar Shoes, the Oregon shoemaker she had run for years, that the company was theirs. One of them asked what that meant for their job on Monday.
It meant, Salcido explained, that the people who had been building shoes for her were now building a business for themselves. She would stay on as chief financial officer to help with the transition, but the future of Softstar no longer ran through a single owner. It ran through the staff.
The 56-year-old founder framed the sale as retirement planning, not distress. The decision preserved what she said a sale to an outside buyer would not: a factory in rural Wallowa County, Oregon, a workforce that already knew the craft, and a set of business-improvement suggestions she had started hearing from employees who, until that moment, had no financial stake in whether the company improved. Workers had begun pitching ideas on costs, sourcing, and scheduling that Salcido said she had never received during two decades of running the place as the sole owner and chief executive.
The mechanics of how a company moves from one owner to its staff vary, and the differences matter. Some employee buyouts use an employee stock ownership plan, a US trust structure that lets the company borrow against future earnings to buy out a retiring owner on a defined schedule. Others take the form of a worker cooperative, in which the workforce holds a governing share of the business directly. A third route is an employee ownership trust, a model imported from the UK in which a holding entity owns the company on behalf of the staff. Each structure shifts who makes decisions, who shares the profits, and who absorbs the losses. None of them are turnkey. Each requires patient capital: either seller financing, in which the outgoing founder accepts a multi-year payout instead of a clean cash close, or specialized employee-ownership funds that have grown alongside the trend.
For founders, the appeal is not just the price. It is the shape of what gets preserved. A sale to a private-equity buyer or a strategic acquirer can mean cost cuts, relocation, or a rebrand. A sale to the staff can mean the factory stays, the brand stays, and the people who already know the work keep making decisions about it. The trade is that the founder gives up control of the timing and direction of the next chapter.
For workers, the trade runs the other way. An employee buyout can mean a real share of future profits and a real voice in how the company is run. It can also mean a share of the losses, a longer wait for any return, and the governance work of running a business that used to be someone else's problem. Softstar's employees have started exercising that voice: suggestions on sourcing and scheduling that Salcido had not heard as chief executive are now being raised in a setting where the people making them will benefit if the changes work, and pay a price if they do not.
The macro context is the retirement of the baby-boom cohort of founders. A 2025 study from Ownership Capital Lab estimates that roughly 600 US firms a year are now being sold to their workers, while investment funds available to finance such deals rose 78% to $865 million in 2024 from $500 million in 2023. A 2025 McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility report estimates that the baby-boom owners of about six million US small and medium-sized companies will retire between now and 2035 — a "once-in-a-generation wave of ownership transitions" that McKinsey labels the "Great Ownership Transfer." More than one million of those firms are viable candidates for sale or employee ownership, representing up to $5 trillion in enterprise value.
That scale is what turns Salcido's exit from a single case study into a working model. It is also where the caveats belong. The path is not for every business. It depends on a workforce that wants ownership, a price the company can carry on its current earnings, and a seller willing to wait for the payout. Employee buyouts have failed when the financing did not pencil out, when governance disputes splintered the new ownership group, or when the founder's exit left a skills gap the new owners could not close. The prevalence figure of roughly 600 deals a year, drawn from a single 2025 study and summarized in the BBC's coverage, has not been independently corroborated at the headline level, and the success rate of completed transitions is not yet well documented.
For retiring founders weighing an outside sale, employee buyouts are no longer a curiosity. The structures exist, the financing pools are growing, and a small number of US firms a year are now completing the transition. The cost is patience, shared governance, and shared risk. The benefit is what Salcido says she was buying all along: a business that stays local, stays in the craft, and stays in the hands of the people who already know how to run it.