After reviewing the list of ESOPs in Existence for At Least 25 Years, Steve Sheppard reflects on his personal ESOP experiences in The Best of ESOP Is Yet To Come. He discusses his personal satisfaction in watching his former company change, improve, and evolve, as they were one of the 2008 AACE Award Winners:
The value of this is in the legacy. The adoption of an ESOP can be a wonderfully exciting, motivating thing for members of a company. But the longer-range success of an ESOP is whether those noble, inspirational notions that gave birth to the ESOP are sustainable, maintainable, from one generation of stewards to the next, whether the philosophies that gave rise to wealth-sharing, equity-building, involvement, opportunity and all of the other empowering elements of ESOP can be perpetuated successfully, in answer to
"What have I left behind?" The 2008 AACE Award for Foldcraft generates perhaps even greater satisfaction for me than the earlier national awards because it represents the next generation of ESOP owners at Foldcraft and the depth of the ownership sensibility in them. The company has never been, is not now, and never will be a workplace heaven. But it still clearly has the drive to become all that it can be and to take all of its members along for the trip…Foldcraft members can never know precisely what might have become of the company without the ESOP, but they can experience the reality and potential of the enterprise the way it is today, the impacts they can choose to make today, and the way they need it to be for tomorrow's world. Along the way, as they wonder about what Foldcraft might have been like sans ESOP, the awards and recognitions give them some affirmation that they're at least doing some of those things that have made for other great ESOP companies. (Significant stock appreciation in a wobbly stock market environment also affirms those initiatives!)
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