That’s a good question. I’m not comfortable saying what I think the company is worth. It’s a decent amount.
We are actually in the process of becoming an esop (employee stock ownership plan) and working through the details. Right now employees don’t own any of it. I’m hoping by the end they own the majority, as a collective.
Let’s be clear here too. I’m not some benevolent purist here. I pay my employees basically what the market dictates (a little higher but not lots). My company employs people with advanced degrees and extensive professional experience. Salaries match that.
That being said, I do try to balance out the power when I can with things like this esop. I also took a pay cut during the downturn which meant I made less money than my employees for several years (not including equity which you rightfully point out matters).
There is no doubt I make money off my employees as the “widget” is sell is their time. It’s inherently exploitive to some degree.
And perhaps Clovis’ profit is going somewhere other than his salary, but $175k profit with a $5M payroll sounds like tenuous business. Maybe the company has $5M in the bank or something though.
Yeah, unless we’re talking about 100% long-term guaranteed contracts from people who will not possibly go out of business or just decide not to pay you for some reason, a 10% reduction in revenue and the company is fucked, not meeting payroll, layoffs, pay cuts, morale through the floor, and eating capital or going into debt.
So, unless we’re missing the $5M or more somewhere, everyone will be better off if the company is a worker owned coop. Clovis’ worst case scenario is he now has to work for $160k and if business goes a little bad he gets a modest pay cut instead of going way into the red. The other people working there are a little worse off in some ways, but not much and not really, and better off in other ways.
Does the business stick with the company? If I buy your company am I locked in with contracts? Do I know your key employees will stay there and not become competitors?
Exactly. By creating an esop I get to spread risk and provide for a handoff when we want to leave the company.
Employees get ownership rights and a stronger feeling of being on the team which will hopefully lead to increased satisfaction and ultimately productivity and profit for all. They also take on some extra risk with things like cash calls in down times.
Right now, as I said, I basically sell my employees expertise. Nothing stops them from taking that elsewhere at any time. Their contracts do contain non-compete clauses which are of dubious legal standing anyway. I’ve never tried to enforce one.
What keeps them working here is they want to. Period.
This thread reminds me of when Obamacare took effect. This guy had like 300 employees and rather than pay the $400K that he could afford, he instead sold his business. He owned very expensive cars and paid his employees the bare minimum and claimed none of them wanted health insurance in the first place. Of course he doesn’t mention that they couldn’t afford to pay for health insurance making $9/hr or whatever. People like this guy can go fuck themselves.
To combat inequality and the corrosive relationship between big money and politics, you need to build political will. Building sufficient political will to combat the power of the 1% means inflaming passions against the rich so that some percentage of the population doesn’t immediately dismiss the idea of guillotines. And, to be clear, I am not calling for guillotines, but I am condoning the behavior of other people who call for guillotines. And I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. I actually think it is a problem if you don’t have any people mad enough to want guillotines because it means you don’t have a critical mass of supporters where you are almost certain to have outliers.
A lot of people are stupid and the only way to get them pointed in the right general direction is to feed them a narrative that might be inaccurate when it comes to individual rich people. It’s more efficient that way. You don’t need to get people to vote the way you do for the exact same reasons that you do.
Friendly historical reminder that while in the beginning the revolutionaries used the guillotine to execute royalists/aristocrats, pretty soon they were using it to execute each other. And every faction left and right got a turn, even the executioners got executed. Some people (Hebertists) got executed for wanting too many executions, can you believe that?
clovis, what do you do exactly? I need to know in order to determine if you’re evil. Are you doing amazing shit that no one else is doing better, or are you, say, cornering some protected bullshit market through trickery and scumbaggery? Because I know small businesses owners who make about the same in both categories.
I have no idea what that means. I guess you could say the Kochs are in environmental consulting. Anyway, that isn’t the point. It’s just a rhetorical about creating value versus rent seeking.
For example, I doubt many people would consider Antonio Stradivari, the violin maker, to be the evil rich. By most accounts, he died fairly well off from the sales of his instruments (only 1,100 produced). They were made (mostly by) his own hand, ingenuity, and skill.
