From the East Bay Express: Last week, the Cheeseboard’s longtime home committed to a new strategy for fighting economic inequality and building the local economy: city support for worker cooperatives. The Berkeley City Council voted unanimously on Fe.26 to include co-ops in the city’s small-business revolving loan fund; give co-ops, along with women- and minority-owned […]
From Nonprofit Quarterly: Here at NPQ, we have noted that a business ownership succession wave—often called the “silver tsunami”—is rising. According to the nonprofit Project Equity, nationally “baby boomers own 2.34 million businesses, employ 24.7 million people, and have combined annual sales of $5.14 trillion.” Sadly, 80 percent of these businesses lack succession plans. Slowly, awareness of the looming crisis […]
Read the full article at the San Francisco Chronicle Tom Adams and George Chittenden, owners of Adams & Chittenden Scientific Glass, have been coasting toward retirement. The prospect of retiring was once daunting, Adams told me, because he and Chittenden didn’t know what to do with the Berkeley glassblowing company they started together 25 years […]
From the Times of San Diego: In California and nationally, historically low unemployment rates are not a sign of prosperity, but indicatethe arrival of an economy that specializes in creating low-paying, temporary jobs with no benefits or job security. According to a Princeton University study, such positions were responsible for 94 percent of American job growth […]
From Entrepreneur: Baby boomers own about half of all privately-held companies with employees in the United States. The 2.4 million business owners who belong to this aging demographic (one-third of whom have already passed 65) will need to develop sound and sensible exit strategies. As they look to the future, there is an elegant solution […]
From Forbes: Project Equity approached Kline and the City of Fremont with a plan to both understand the threat they faced with ageing business owners and also to help get the word out that there that employee ownership could be a viable succession plan for them. “We talk to a lot of businesses to try […]
From the Detroit Free Press: We’ve known for a long time that baby boomers are hitting retirement age. Those retirements will drain from the workforce a vast amount of skills and experience. But the loss to the workforce may go beyond the loss of the boomers themselves. Since a huge number of privately held companies […]
From the Minnesota StarTribune (pdf): The deal-making crowd is understandably excited about the fees to be earned in helping baby boomers sell their businesses on their way into retirement. None of the business brokers and bankers appear to have yet pointed out what the nonprofit group Nexus Community Partners has been saying, that this big […]
From Marketplace.org (pdf) Baby boomer entrepreneurs hope co-op model will keep business going Berkeley’s reclaimed trash company Urban Ore has diverted tons of garbage from the dump and into the hands of customers, and the company has become a key part of Berkeley’s recycling ecosystem. But it could disappear. That’s because the owners of the […]