The Future of Employee Ownership: Five Themes from the EO Equals Summit

Employee ownership is gaining attention at a moment when the American economy is asking fundamental questions about work, wealth, business succession, and who gets to participate in the value businesses create.

But attention is not the same as access. And the promise of employee ownership is not the same as the infrastructure required to make it available to more people.

At the EO Equals Summit, business owners, workers, advisors, investors, educators, philanthropists, economic development leaders and representatives of major institutions engaged in facilitated conversations led by employee ownership experts. Over three days in Chicago, they explored how each of them could advance employee ownership from a promising alternative to a more familiar and accessible part of the American business landscape.

The question is no longer simply whether employee ownership works. It is what happens when more people understand it, more institutions support it and more business owners and workers can access it.

Five themes emerged.

Employee Ownership is Moving from the Margins to the Mainstream

The stakes could hardly be higher. In February 2026, the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility published The Great Ownership Transfer: A New Era of Business Stewardship, examining the wave of small and midsize business transitions expected as baby boomer owners retire. McKinsey estimates that roughly six million businesses will face ownership transitions by 2035. More than one million could be viable candidates for sale or employee ownership, representing up to $5 trillion in enterprise value. At stake are up to 12 million jobs and about $250 billion in annual local spending power.

Those figures describe a succession challenge and point to a larger question: Who will own these businesses next, and what might that ownership make possible for workers, communities and the broader economy?

This was a thread running through the Summit. In opening remarks, Project Equity CEO Evan Edwards connected the coming transfer of business ownership to a broader concern about economic participation:

“We desperately need an economy that values all American workers, where having one job is sufficient to thrive. We need an economy that will allow workers to do the essential work, and be able to actually participate in the economy—not just survive.”

Employee ownership is not the only response to that challenge. As Edwards put it, “Employee ownership isn’t the only strategy, but it’s an important building block.” The opportunity is to make that building block available to more owners and workers and to recognize its potential contribution to business continuity, wealth building and economic resilience.

The Summit brought that opportunity into focus from several directions. Selling owners discussed what it means to consider the future of a company beyond the terms of a transaction. Advisors and wealth managers explored how employee ownership might become part of the standard succession conversation. Leaders from philanthropy, healthcare, higher education and economic development considered how ownership could contribute to community wealth and local economic stability.

Felipe Witchger, founder and executive director of the Francesco Collaborative, framed the issue in human rather than purely financial terms:

“When capital goes into employee ownership, we’re not just financing a transaction. We are placing a bet on the humanity of every single person in that company—not just the top 20—everybody.”

For employee ownership to become a mainstream economic strategy, it will need to enter the conversation earlier, more often and in more places: in succession planning, business education, wealth management, economic development, and the work of institutions invested in the long-term health of their communities.

The Field Needs Infrastructure to Turn Awareness into Action

Storytelling can help people see employee ownership as a possibility. Once someone becomes interested, what happens next? That question surfaced across conversations about awareness, education, advisors, business transitions, and worker experience.

Awareness is necessary, but it is only the beginning. A business owner who learns about employee ownership needs a trusted advisor who can explain the options. A worker needs a way to understand what ownership means in practice. A student or emerging business leader needs to encounter these models long before they face a succession decision. An economic development organization needs to know where to turn when a critical local business is at risk of closing or being sold outside the community.

The Summit’s conversations about raising awareness, education and activation brought together people who operate at different points along that path. Representatives from large financial institutions, advocacy organizations, higher education, and economic development discussed how to reach business owners earlier and help advisors recognize employee ownership as part of their responsibility to clients. Their perspectives differed, but they shared a concern that many owners begin thinking about succession too late.

As Gwyneth Galbraith of JPMorganChase put it, “The majority of business owners don’t have a clear plan for their exit, and starting too late can limit their options.”

The infrastructure challenge is about creating clearer pathways that connect information, trusted relationships, technical assistance, capital, and action.

EO Advantage is one part of that work, helping advisors develop the knowledge and tools to support employee ownership. EO Equals is another, the starting platform for owners, advisors, advocates, funders, educators and economic development leaders to learn about employee ownership and see how it connects to their work.

The field does not need everyone to become an expert in every aspect of employee ownership. It does need people to know where their role begins, where another person’s expertise is needed and how to move a promising conversation forward.

Capital and Ownership Structures Are Expanding

For employee ownership to grow it needs the right capital.

That ecosystem is beginning to take shape. New capital providers are entering the field, established institutions are developing specialized expertise and funds are emerging to serve businesses that do not fit neatly into traditional financing models. The result is a capital landscape that is becoming more diverse and more responsive to the range of businesses pursuing employee ownership.

For years, the question of whether a business could become employee-owned could hinge in part on whether its transition fit the financing structures already available. A maturing capital ecosystem is beginning to reverse that relationship. Rather than asking every business to fit the capital, capital providers can increasingly develop around the realities of the businesses and ownership models they serve.

Capital makes the transitions possible. The ownership structure and the people inside the business determine what that transition becomes.

The Summit’s conversations about innovation in EO forms reinforced why flexibility matters. Employee ownership encompasses ESOPs, worker cooperatives, EOTs (employee ownership trusts), and emerging models, each with different requirements and possibilities.

The changing landscape is evidence of a field becoming more sophisticated about what employee ownership requires.

The opportunity now is to keep growing the breadth of what’s possible: capital that can meet businesses where they are, structures that give owners meaningful choices, and financing that recognizes both the economics of a transition and the people who will live with its consequences.

The Transition is Only the Beginning

A successful ownership transition is an important milestone. It is not the end of the story.

Across the Summit, conversations underscored that expanding employee ownership requires more than getting owners to the point of sale. It requires greater awareness of employee ownership as an option, along with the advisors, capital, education, and other infrastructure needed to help businesses get there. But it also requires sustained support after the transaction, when ownership becomes a lived experience for workers and a new way of operating for the business.

The experiences shared by worker-owners made the work more tangible. Their stories described the practical work of building an ownership culture: communicating expectations, developing shared responsibility, strengthening decision-making and helping employees understand what their ownership means in everyday life.

The potential post-transition impact, however, is both tangible and measurable. Summit speakers pointed to evidence of greater worker wealth, lower employee turnover and stronger business performance, including higher profitability. At the same time, participants from higher education and research institutions noted a critical gap: we need more and better data on what happens to employee-owned businesses and their workers after a transition. Better longitudinal data could help the field understand, document and communicate the full impact of employee ownership.

For advisors, the post-transition period represents both an opportunity and an ongoing responsibility. Their role does not end when a deal closes. They can help businesses navigate implementation, develop ownership practices and address the new needs that emerge as workers become owners.

Taken together, these conversations expanded the definition of a successful transition. The work begins with awareness and preparation, continues through the transaction and takes shape over time in the relationships, practices, decisions and outcomes that follow.

Different Players Have Different Roles

The Summit’s value was not only in bringing leaders from different sectors of the economy together. It was in helping participants understand how employee ownership connects to their own work and what they can do next.

Sessions offered a clearer view of the roles different institutions can play and concrete examples of how they are already using their influence to advance employee ownership. Higher education leaders explored how employee ownership can be integrated into classrooms, entrepreneurship programs, research and local business ecosystems. Employee ownership capital providers helped participants understand the financing structures needed to fund more transactions and compete with other forms of capital. Funders and economic development leaders shared strategies for advancing employee ownership as a tool for wealth building and equity.

Advisors explored how to introduce employee ownership into client conversations, evaluate different ownership models and use tools such as ExitPro to begin succession planning earlier. Public policy leaders examined the role of state technical assistance, grant programs and public investment. Community and economic development leaders shared how regional networks can bring relationships, expertise and resources together to better support business owners.

The result was a more detailed map of the field and the roles different people can play within it.

That is the significance of the Summit. People left with a stronger understanding of the models, resources and relationships that can make it possible, along with examples of how to put that knowledge into practice.

What We Heard. What Happens Next.

Over three days, participants gained a clearer picture of the field and the practical steps that can move it forward. They explored how to introduce employee ownership into succession conversations, how different ownership models work, what kinds of capital can support different transactions and how institutions can help more people encounter employee ownership as a possibility.

These conversations helped turn a broad idea into a more practical map.

• For business owners, employee ownership can become part of an earlier and more informed succession process.
• For advisors, it can become an opportunity to raise with clients rather than a solution they encounter only when a sale is already underway.
• For capital providers and foundations, the Summit illuminated opportunities to support both transactions and the infrastructure around them.
• For educators and institutions, it offered examples of where EO can fit within existing curriculum, programs, and partnerships.
• For workers and community leaders, it provided language and connections for asking who owns the businesses that shape their local economies and what other arrangements might be possible.

The next step is not for each participant to identify the point of connection between employee ownership and their own work.

That might mean starting a succession conversation, learning more about the models, introducing EO into a curriculum, developing a new capital facility, supporting technical assistance, or connecting a business owner with someone who can help.

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