Episode Transcript
Hello, my friends. This is Brett KK of the EO Podcast Network and host of the ESOP podcast. In this episode, Jesse Tyler is joined by Molly Mead and Jenny Maal of Praxis Consulting Group. Which is a highly regarded firm that focuses on organizational and leadership development and strategic planning, as well as many things that fall under the rubric of culture and communications. Jesse and I have both been fortunate enough to have previous episodes featuring team members from Praxis. John Swaggart has been a guest on both of our podcasts, and I've been joined in the past on the ESOP podcast by Alex Moss Lynch, Schwang Lu, and Nelson Parish iii. And former Praxis team member Matt Hancock was actually my very first guest on the podcast way back in episode two. I'll include links to all of these episodes in the show notes for today's episode. And you can also go to www.ownertoownerpodcast.comandwww.esoppodcast.com and inter praxis in the search bar and the episodes will pop right up. I hope you enjoy today's episode. Welcome to the Owner to Owner podcast with your host, Jesse Tyler, part of the EO Podcast Network. Welcome to the Owner to Owner podcast. It's great to have you with us again. I'm Jesse Tyler. I work for Hypertherm Associates, now a 55 year old global manufacturing and technology company that is almost 2000 owners strong. My role and work for Hypotherm Associates focused on this is on. The employee or the associate experience and engagement across career stages. I do a lot with onboarding, welcoming new hires, helping them get up to speed and do a lot of training, leadership development and participatory decision making forums like problem busters, focus groups, listening sessions. And I have a, a great fondness for the experience and the voices of employee ownership. So the goal of this podcast is to have a wide range of discussions. About ownership experiences, ownership resources, culture topics to bring more insight into the culture and to the individual owner experience. So our listeners here, their peers and ownership, and in this episode, they hear some voices from. Preeminent consulting firm Praxis that helps empower the employee ownership community. And I'm gonna let Molly and Jenny introduce themselves in a moment, and in their words, describe Praxis, which has been a, a longtime partner of Hypotherm Associates, a great relationship. So this podcast grew out of friendship with Brett Keasling, who has done many episodes of the EO Podcast Network, the ESOP podcast, and he's given me some. Room to explore around. So we usually, most of the time feature employee owners and my personal fondness for going into ESOPs and finding the voices you would never hear otherwise, manufacturing, back office, everything in between. We also like to take some side roads and talk to folks in the industry and get their perspective and insights in the context that they're not often encouraged to share that and for an audience of employee owners and perspective employee owners. So to kick us off, I wanted to welcome Molly and Jenny. Jenny. You and I have been working together on a project that that likely will come up during this conversation. So if you would like to start with who you are. What you do and where you work, and we'll, we'll be off to the races from there. Great. Hi everyone. I'm Jenny Masal. I'm a consultant at Praxis Consulting Group, and Praxis is an organization development consulting firm that primarily works with employee-owned companies. And our work is really about aligning leadership strategy and culture in order to help organizations tap into the power of ownership. And me and Molly, my guest here, both do a lot of financial literacy work. I. Think we would describe our work as focused on how you make the most out of the performance potential of ESOPs. So how do you create a culture where employee owners take responsibility for the performance of the company and through that, you know, hopefully drive higher performance outcomes that they benefit from? Through the esop, and so we're excited to be here today to talk about the range of financial literacy work we do with employee-owned companies. That's great. Really appreciate it. And, and before Molly introduced herself, just for context for listeners, the first time I ever heard any reference to employee owners in financial literacy was a, Praxis was talking about this at conferences before it became. Such abroad and thankfully recognized critical, important topics. So it's kind of fun cause I'd met Molly years ago, and I'm not sure if she was the consultant that brought it up first, but it was, it is, you know, practice goes way back and, and it's neat to kinda let you, and in this time have you both share this about what I, I personally feel is one of the most important topics on, on the table right now with employee ownership. So Molly, you have some neat history with employee ownership and with Praxis and the community. Could you share a little bit of insight? Please. So I'm Molly Mead. Welcome to the listeners on this podcast. I am a senior consultant at Praxis, and I don't think senior consultant really matters. It's, I don't think there's really much of a hierarchy at Praxis. We do organization development, and that's kind of a fancy term for what we do is make organizations stronger. And so, you know, and primarily we work with employee owned companies and we do leadership development, strategic planning. We often, when a company first becomes employee owned, We explain to the, the new brand new employee owners what it means to be working for an employee-owned company. What else do we do? We, we actually do a lot of succession planning. So, you know, as people are starting to retire, you know, thinking about creating a, a strong bench of next stage leaders. That's great. Thank you. So just sort of a general question, what's your experience with helping ESOPs with financial literacy? Molly, you're first. All right. All right. So I've done a, a bunch of financial literacy work with, with C employee-owned companies, and I think it's. It's really important, you know, an an, an employee owner has a stake in the game, a financial stake in the game. And once they understand how to read the company's profit and loss statement, sometimes called an income statement, once they understand cash flow and how long it takes between one. Sale is made and when a dollar, you know, actually comes in the door, I think they sort of understand things they can do almost every day to make the company more, more financially profitable. We often talk about costs. And, you know, and then we have people, you know, at the end of each session we have people sort of generate ideas about what they could do to make, make the company they're working for more financially successful. And again, they're sort of motivated to do this because if the share price goes up, you know, the, the shares in their Asop account, you know Yeah. Go up. Yeah, ma making the big connection, I think, you know, you're seeing that and appreciate it. So, Jenny, I'll go back to you. Do you want to add anything to that? Yeah, I would just add that a lot of the companies we partner with in this work are companies that have already started sharing financial information in some way. They're. Maybe not sharing detailed financial statements, uh, but maybe they are, or maybe they're sharing some type of operational or performance dashboard and they're kind of feeling like they share this information and, and nothing happens with it. And actually maybe people just like throw away that information or completely ignore it. And so, you know, they're kind of companies that realize that just sharing the information isn't enough. That in general, Kind of, almost every employee, regardless of level in the company, hasn't been trained in making sense of complicated financial statements, and so they really wanna start building that baseline understanding so that employee owners can be. More engaged with the information they're sharing in to Molly's point, like as they engage, start to think about ways that they can help drive that performance to be even stronger. So I was brought in by a company where they were sharing their profit and loss statement in E every quarter. And what they realized was a lot of those profit and loss statements were going into the waste basket. Mm-hmm. And they were like, wait a minute. Right. So they, they kind of brought me in to sort of explain what a profit and loss statement is. And, you know, we do all of this very experientially. We have people. Before they construct their, the company's profit and law statement before they understand the company's profit and law statement, we have people create their own personal profit and law statement. Right. And I think that helps them sort of better understand the company's profit and law statement. And I would just add that I think, you know, sometimes companies that aren't sharing this type of information, they're really nervous that once they start sharing this information, Employees are going to misunderstand it and make assumptions, and so they're going to see what the revenue is and assume that's how much money the company has as profits. Right. And I think it is true that sharing information without building that education can lead to a lot of assumptions and misunderstandings about what the numbers mean. But I would say kind of this fear that you show employees. The profits and they get angry at the company like never happens. In fact, what we see is that you share the profits of the company. You show them how much work and cost it takes to generate $1 of profit from every dollar of sales, and employees come away with like such a deeper appreciation. For the work, it takes the company to make money and what the sources of, or what the uses of those profits are when they earn them. So again, there's like some very normal anxieties that company leadership can often feel that might prevent them from initially wanting to share information or do this type of work. And I think what we see time and time again is that. It's worth the investment. It takes time and effort to like build that education and understanding, but it really gives employees a greater appreciation for what goes on in the company. And I think they start to take, you know, they start to make sense of the things that the company is always hammering home to them about not wasting supplies or materials like they, they start to, yeah, just grasp why that is, why it's so important in a much more tangible way through this type of work. Yeah. Jenny and I worked with a company that was like, Really reluctant to share their profit and loss statement, but we sort of convinced them and, you know, I think they, they realized, you know, at, you know, after the trainings were done, it was, you know, really, actually really important to share that p and l with the, with their employee owners. That's great. If it helps for perspective, I'm one voice at Hypotherm associate. I'm kind of a cultural ambassador. I'm, I've been there for 16 plus years and absolutely love the company, but this is my opinion, so I wanna make sure I'm not speaking, you know, clear for my voice, not the company. What I've seen is we are very. Generous with the information we share, and it's been a fascinating experience with Jenny and practice's. Help to align everybody for, these are the definitions, these are how we want to talk about it. And ours might be a little bit unusual from what you've described so far, is that we don't wanna overwhelm people. We're willing to share it, but we don't wanna make the terminology too far out of reach. And so it's been very interesting over the last few months kind of navigating that and people are very supportive and. But it's been very interesting because what I throw out for you to consider is, you know, in, as you're sharing your experiences, it's one thing for, like Molly saying, going to somebody who's, who keeps it very close to the vast, and Jenny's saying, you know, when, whenever that you get over that fear, there isn't the hatred. There isn't the the unrest. I just as a culture person, find it really interesting and the nuance that comes with. The how you want to talk about certain terms, how far you want to take that? Do you wanna do different, you know, 1 0 1, 2 0 1, 3 0 1 level? Those things I can get a little geeky on. So I just throw that out there just as, as you're to have for you, for you to have in mind as we have this conversation that it can be just because people wanna share it, you know, I guess to ask it directly, you know, just in your experience, just when people say Yes, we're ready to share more, are they all set? Or you find, do you find that other companies have a similar kind of experience where you're sort of different tenures, different terminology? What's, what's your experience been with that for both of you? Let's see. So you know, there was one company that referred to their profit and loss statement and another company that was. Was all about income statement. There was one company that talked about share value and there was another company that's talked about stock value, right? So it's, it's kind of synonyms for the same concept, but what we decided to do was stick with what the company's language was doing. So in each of the trainings, we sort of settled on, so the company that was using income statement in that training, We only referred to it as an income statement and did not at all refer to it as a profit and law statement. That's great. Yeah, I mean, I think the, the fundamental goal of developing this skillset is to make it tangible and connected to what matters in people's jobs. And so, right, so that they can take action around the things that they're doing on a daily basis that could help drive performance. And so it's true that kind of people with different functional roles in the company have different metrics that matter. And there are people within the company whose job responsibilities involve, you know, paying attention to some financial metrics that. Are more complicated financial metrics and not the place to start in explaining financials to someone else in the company who's not a controller or like on the finance team. Right. So I think, you know, a lot of our work is really customized. But yeah, I would say it's an introductory level, which means that. It's not necessarily looking at the same metrics or numbers that the controller or the CFO O are looking at, but it's really working with those type of positions within a company and partnering with them to think about, you know, what's most important about the things you're paying attention to, to monitor the financial success of the company. What's most important there for your employees to understand and how do we kind of trickle that down from what you're looking at? Which are very detailed spreadsheet, very detailed financial statements, again, to what's going to just like, resonate and click and connect to people's daily jobs and experiences. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. And you, and you had helped us in the, in the content that you had designed with the case studies and so you. You know, we're settling on the sales profit, cash and operating expenses as kind of the main pillars to start with. And going through a supply chain or a quality scenario and then saying, okay, how does this affect sales? How does this affect profit? And it, and it can sound very straightforward, but just playing around with the draft in working through many layers of approvals, it's gonna be so much fun and absolutely fascinating to see. That as the marker of, you know, the learning tangible identity. I see myself in it. We, we can't wait to, can't wait to run those. So more general question is, how has the focus on financial literacy changed in the last few years? What insights do you have since you were early in? Early in on amplifying this. What, what, what are your observations with that? Yeah. Well, you know, I think it's, it's normal to start with information sharing and education, kind of building that baseline understanding of what's being shared. But what we know is that like just education or training program isn't enough, that there really need to be systems that engage employees. And using what they've learned from the trainings. So I think a lot of our work has evolved over time to really incorporate like idea generation and problem solving in the training. So you kind of train employees and how the business makes money, what does it use its profits for, what are the key drivers of profitability? And then, you know, we wanna create systems where employees can contribute ideas. That would directly impact those important numbers. And then what we want kind of ideally coming out of that type of training is a system where those ideas can continue to be generated, continue to be collected and implemented. You know, that being kind of the. The truest indicator of an employee acting like an owner, right? It's like coming up with an idea that's going to impact the profitability of the company and being able to act on or implement that idea. And that takes both like the systems piece of it, like what are your systems for collective, bro? Problem solving, brainstorming ideas, putting ideas into action. And I think it also takes like deep management skills of how do you as a manager kind of take the information that's being shared, use it in your team meetings, in your team huddles. Bring it into kind of the focus of your team conversations and then also really kind of have the skills that engage your team members to problem solve around financial challenges. Again, execute on those ideas together. It's a very different way of managing people than maybe what's. More typical in a traditional company. And so to us, I think that's really kind of what we're seeing more of and think there needs to be even. That's great. More emphasis on, in the financial literacy work, that it's, it's not just enough to do the training. You gotta really think about how do you then set people up to use that training in a way that's going to benefit the company? Yeah. I think it's, you know, what I've experienced with Praxis and, and you know, good support is, it's, The training is fine, but it's the plan to use it later that day, tomorrow and the next day. That makes it stick, makes it tangible, makes it their own, so that's great. I appreciate it. So specific, I think you've touched on this in some regard, but I wanna just give you an opportunity, either both of you, what's specific, you know, somebody new to Praxis, somebody's just gotten into employee ownership. They heard it of this practice group. They've heard good things. Sort of with a blank slate. What specific financial literacy training services does Praxis provide? Sort of what's your, what's your starting point with, with the company you haven't worked with? So we actually prefer to work with an internal team. An internal team in the employee owned company to sort of collectively come up with the goals for the training, decide you know, how many sessions. So I worked with one company that decided to do three different sessions. I, you know, Jenny and I worked with another company that decided to do two sessions. So, you know, so basically we do. Profit and loss statement. We're confident in doing balance sheet. We, we, we do a pretty good job with cash flow and then I, I was hoping to do a fourth session where kind of f for people at the manager level to sort of apply the, the concepts that they have learned. But so far nobody has. Bitten on that, but it would be great to do. Right? So, you know, you go through the. Profit and loss statement. You go through a balance sheet, you understand balance sheet, you understand profit and loss statement, you understand cash flow, and it would be just wonderful to do a fourth session where managers sort of apply what they've learned and and think about some business issues in their company. That's great. Resources. I wanna shift us slightly, I don't mean necessarily just financial, but was since that's the theme of our conversation today, are there, if you're willing to share a couple of your favorite resources. I think there's, you know, a lot of room with podcasts and apps and other communications and Instagram and TikTok where people are pinging each other with information. So I wanted to and just. Good old fashioned podcast conversation, you know, a little bit of, I'm, I'm, I'm an Oprah fan and you can have your own feelings about my sharing that, but I'm an Oprah fan and she used to do it. These are a few of my favorite things, and so I'm intentionally channeling that. So, Molly, do Molly and then Jenny, do you have some resources that, you know, whether somebody's new, new to the EO game or been out it a while, just what are some of your favorite resources that you'd recommend for our listeners? So I want Jenny to start first, cuz I'm gonna share a resource that's not smack onto financial literacy. Okay. But I still think important. Okay, great. Jenny? Yeah, I mean, I think starting with John Case and open book management is like a great resource that really makes the case for why, you know, just kind of like that. How can players play the game if they don't know the score? That's a very famous quote, and I think that's kind of what we're talking about, right? How can employees think and act like owners, which is what most employee owned companies want their employees to do if they don't know how they contribute to the success. If the company is actively successful or struggling at any given moment, and you know, what they can do to, to change that situation. So I think open book management, which has kind of evolved into great game of business, are just like really good cases for why to invest in this type of work. But like Molly, I think a lot of kind of like non-financial resources are some of the more helpful. So at Praxis we're really big fans of. The books ideas are free. And the idea driven organization, which are, you know, really about how you build a culture where employees at all levels of the company are driving ideas and innovation. Again, we kind of think that's the point of investing in financial literacy. Like to get the best ideas from everyone at every level of the company. And so those books are a, a couple favorites. Awesome. Thank you for sharing those. Molly, yours. Okay. I love the book Made To Stick. Written by Chip and Dan Heath, they're brothers and they've written this wonderful book about how to convey ideas so people remember them. It's, it's about sticky ideas, but so people remember them, and I think it applies to our financial literacy sessions because we do a lot of ex. Experiential. We're not just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? It's like, we actually are rarely doing any blah, blah, blah. We're, we're having people experience the learning and I think that really helps them remember. That's great. That's great. I appreciate it. And, uh, suggestion for listeners, I bring 'em up most sessions. I bring 'em up cuz of the, the success we've had at Hypotherm when it comes to idea generation, I personally, Believe and have seen many times over years of running problem buster sessions that if you intentionally ask people who are not the subject matter expert to think creatively, have a little bit of fun, that could be a loaded word when you talk about a session depending on your audience, but to relax, have fun, teach a little bit, and then say, how would you tackle it? We've had remarkable success to even had a valuable new product come out of a group that wasn't. Engineers or product designers. And so something to to think about is that you, you take advantage of the resources that Molly and Jenny shared. Always encourage getting owners around the table to say, the customer's having this problem, the company's having this problem. We wanna teach you a little bit about it and have you with no limits. Give us your ideas. And it's completely wild what, what they will come up with. You intentionally go to those who are not usually asked to solve a problem. Thanks. Thank you for sharing those. What is your outlook on financial literacy? In employee ownership culture. So folks go and read the books that you recommended. They read all of 'em, and they, they see you at a future conference, or they hire you to come to your company. What are you seeing? You know, you're looking out, you know, three to five years maybe you, you can craft this to what you're comfortable with, but there's been a lot of progress. What do you, where do you see this going in the employee ownership community? The financial literacy. I mean, I hope that every single employee-owned company does some sort of financial literacy training, right? Again, it's so employees really know how to actually think and act like owners instead of. Pretending that they think and that they know how to think and act like owners. So my dream would be that every single employee owned company would do something around financial literacy. That's great. Yeah, I agree with that. I think there's, you know, some short-term resistance to the idea of what it takes to train all employees, stop production for a day to do that type of thing, and. I like both understand those constraints and think it's like an upfront cost that can generate a lot of cost savings or generate profits in the future, and so it's like a worthwhile investment. That I wish was like, I kind of in my vision is like universally accepted as a, yeah, as a worthwhile investment. That's great. Another resource for listeners is, if you haven't seen it, is we are owners. The, the movie, the documentary, I think it's probably at least 10 years old now, but there is some extreme examples where through the financial. Literacy. It was at New Belgium when they were in esop. It was the one I'm thinking of. The person was able to go and negotiate a better rate for their fuel, their house, their car, and those things. And, and it always stuck with me. I, I actually watched it with some of the financial team and the founders of, Hypertherm Dick and Barbara Couch, and they were really excited about it. Where how could, how could that be any more empowering for somebody than to take more financial control of their own life? So I appreciate the, the work that you do and how you help the ESOP community. So anything else on financial literacy that we didn't talk about that you'd like to offer? I want to give you that opportunity because I. Then I'm gonna switch us over to a little bit more of your own experience in employee ownership as individuals. So, Jesse, I wa really wanna underscore what a good point you made. A, a lot of times we're really focused on the company, but again, we have people create their own profit and loss statement and you know, so I think it really applies in their personal life. They understand, you know, once they understand company cash flow, they can think about cash flow and, you know, in, in their personal life. So I think a, a lot of what we teach actually is great for individual employees. That's great. Yeah. Something I, I've just informally talking to people over the years, I, I believe one of those things that people are afraid to say they would like help with or embarrassed to not. Be an expert at is. I personally believe if you ask the average working American 10 working Americans to explain the basics of how to make a personal budget, that seven to nine of them would probably avert your eyes and change the subject. And I think that's some that's just, you know, it's embarrassing and unfortunate. It's also an enormous opportunity for companies and consulting firms to just. Potentially go right at that because I think people are just too embarrassed to admit they don't really, they get away with it. They can probably be doing a remarkable job, but to actually sit down and describe the basics to the person sitting next to them, I bet nine outta 10 would defer and not want to do that. So hopefully listeners can, you know, kind of ponder that and think of your own view and maybe help break through on that. So with your work in employee ownership, you, between you, I can safely estimate, have. Worked with thousands of employee owners. So I want to bring this kind of away from financial literacy, keep your practice hats on, but really for each, for Molly, for Jenny, it'd be really neat to have that perspective. We haven't had that before. This is, I think, our 42nd episode and we haven't had this perspective on owner to owner, so I was excited about that and I hope you can tolerate by putting you on the spot a little bit personally, and you can, you can go, whoever wants to go first, but as a consultant, What does employee ownership mean to you? Somebody who serves employee owners, what does it mean to you personally? Really what it means to me personally is employee owners are basically able to share the wealth that they are creating, right? It's just. You know, it's just an amazing opportunity mm-hmm. For these owners, you know, and as they get more shares of stock in their account, as the share price, stock price goes up. Right. It's just, just such a great opportunity for these. People to sort of share in the wealth that, that they're really helping generate. That's great. Thanks Molly. Jenny, what does employee ownership mean to you? Yeah, I mean, I think I come at it with a really similar perspective to Molly that it's about. Benefiting financially from the success that you work really hard every day to create. And you know, just to connect it back to like my personal love for financial literacy, like the more someone understands the financials of the business, the more they can help it to be successful. And then the more they stand to benefit. And you know, that's what we want for employee-owned companies to be real wealth generators for the. For the folks who work at them. Yeah. It's not that em, non-employee owned companies don't have families attached, but I think of it differently when I talk to other ESOPs over the 16 years of fascination with this, with this vehicle, how much families, other people will mention, you know, the families and what it makes a difference for the family. And it's almost hard to get an employee owner to just say I and me. Mm-hmm. It's like, it's, there's almost like a force field. It's always we and as, whether it's we the company or our family, or I'm in a better place to take care of my parents, I'm a better place to send, you know, my kid to college. I'm in a, you know, so it's, it, it's almost, I almost think of the ESOP should just embrace that and have, like, Hypotherm I think has, we're just under 2000 global associate owners, but then when you look at all the families with that, we're probably, you know, thousands more in it. So it's, it's, it's feeding that larger, that larger impact. If you were to reduce ownership, employee ownership to three words today to describe it all, you had a form, it only had three blanks. You took your, the love of your career and your employment, and you brought it down, boiled it down to three words. What three words would you use today? Molly, what have you got? I have equitable. Nice. I have, let's see. Democratizing, I think that's one of Jenny's words, and I have, Hmm. I'm not sure my third word. That's fair. Yeah. If, if, if it, if a third one bubbles up, you can Okay. Throw it down. Two. Two is good. Yeah. Jenny, do you, Jenny, I, I'm gonna ask it differently. Jenny, do you have three words you were willing to throw down today? Yeah, I think I would add to Molly's. Powerful. I think radical and inspiring. Powerful, radical, inspiring. Equitable. And democratizing. Democratizing. I like it. We're gonna make you seconded our motion. So I think motion. All in favor? Motion carries. That's great. That's great. I appreciate it. It's always fun to. You're the rare guest that actually just can answer that. It's fun to see, and I don't restrain people. It's, you know, there'll be three words and then often those can be the most amazing sentences that follow mm-hmm. That come, that don't come in the beginning of the conversation. So it's a lot of fun. So I appreciate it. I like radical. So, kind of a personal question. So first, sort of a yes or no, have you had an EO aha moment? The tradition on the o. Podcast Network is. Have you had an employee ownership and EO aha moment. And if you have, we'd love to hear when you realized employee ownership was something unique and impactful. I see Molly nodding, the floor is yours. All right, so. When I first affiliated with Praxis, I knew very, very little. I probably knew almost nothing about employee-owned companies. I had done a lot of consulting to nonprofit organization, but I, I remember, you know, doing a, a sort of rollout communication. This is when a company first becomes an esop. Mm-hmm. And I, you know, sort of communicated to, to the employees, you know, What it meant to them to, to be working for an esop. And that was just this amazing aha moment where I was like, like, wow, you know, again, the employees can, you know, get some of the wealth that they're helping generate. And it was just this amazing aha moment for me. That's great. Thank you, Jenny. Aha. E o, aha. Moment. Yeah, so I mean, I've worked not just with. ESOPs, but with a lot of different forms of employee ownership. And I think one of my favorite employee-owned companies is called Child Space. They're an employee-owned childcare center in Philadelphia. And you know, they're a group of mostly women who. Got into the field of childcare from like a love of providing care to children. It's an industry with pretty low wages, an industry where it's like fairly easy to be exploited as a worker and just kind of the different feeling you get walking into their childcare center because they're getting to do what they love and this like pride of ownership that comes with the fact that they're employee owners. So you just like, you step into an employee owned company and it. It feels different, and I think it's that, that feeling of pride, that's like a buzz in the companies that's just really cool to see in action. That's fantastic. Thank you. Anything around your own experience in employee ownership, sort of your feelings, your observations that maybe my questions didn't get to that you, you'd like to share with the listeners, with your, your years of experience? Give you a moment to think. I'm a, I'm a fan of, Pauses during conversations, so people who can think, so I'm, I'm directly offering you on to give you an opportunity if there's, you know, a certain story or a moment or something that you wanted to share. It's fun, it's fun to hear those. Anything comes to mind? Well, I wanna share, I, I presented at, at a New England conference, I, I've ESOP conference, I think in just. Last, just a month ago, and the session was titled, what does it Mean for me? And I said to the room, I think this is a wrong title. I think it should be, what does it mean for us? And I got a lot of nods about that. Right. And it's sort of echoing, Jesse, what you said earlier, it's not about self, it's really about the collective. Yeah. That's great. Jenny, anything you want to add? I mean, I think, you know, so much of what we talk about at Praxis is how much potential there is in the employee ownership model and kind of the determination that it takes to access that potential. And I think sometimes it gets talked about as like it's so much work, it's so much resources, and that kind of puts people off from even becoming employee owned in the first place. Right? Right. Or kind of committing to the things that would help them make the most of being employee owned, but. But I think what we also know is that it's like not rocket science, right? Mm-hmm. Like there's many companies out there that are really getting great results from being employee owned and they offer really good lessons and, and how to do that at other companies. And so just the idea that yes, this work takes commitment and persistence, but it's not impossible. Yeah. And yeah, there's success stories all over the place. That's great. I appreciate it. I, I think going back to what you, you both shared along the way, is it, it just feels different, sounds different. It looks different when you are in an employee, healthy, employee owned company and you know, for some new hires that can take a little while to get used to. And if you sort of put them at ease and give them that opportunity to relax into it and at the pace they're ready to really feel. That their voice matters. It is quite remarkable what some motivated employees can do and and the effect that, that it can take. So I really appreciate the conversation today. What is the best way, if people are curious to hear more or or it's okay to reach out to you directly, what's the best way for them to reach out to you to. Hear a little bit more or potentially inquire about your services from Praxis, what's the, what would you like them to do? Jenny, you wanna start? What's the best way to continue this if listeners want to? Yeah, well, I think we have some good resources, kind of past webinars and resources on financial literacy on our website, so folks can go to praxis cg.com. We actually just launched a like rebranded website today, so we're excited to have like a more navigable website where people can hopefully find those resources. A little bit easier and folks should feel free to reach out to me and Molly directly. Molly's email is molly praxis cg.com. Mine is jenny, j e n n i e praxis cg.com. And of course our contact info is on our website if folks wanna connect with us and we're, we in the Praxis team are, you know, regulars at all the ESOP conferences. So if you see us in person, feel free to say hi, and we're always excited to talk. That's great regardless and nervous to do so. So appreciate your time in a busy schedule and busy conference plans and scheduling as well. It's been a lot of fun to hear your perspective and add that to the conversation about ownership and, and some new voices and new ways of looking at things. So again, this is Jesse Tyler from the Owner to Owner podcast. We encourage you on the EO podcast Network work, employee owned. Buy, employee-owned Eat, employee-owned, whenever you can ask a lot of questions and contribute to the community. So thank you very much for your time. Appreciate it. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook at EO Podcast Network and on Twitter at ESOP podcast. This podcast has been produced by Brett Keesling for the EO Podcast Network. Original music composed by Max Keesling, branding and Marketing by Bitsy Plus Design. And I'm Bitsy McCann.
