The CEO who sold her company to its own employees breaks down what an ESOP actually costs — the valuation you give up, the debt that slows your growth, and why the work starts after the deal closes.

Private equity is not the only way out. Kerry Siggins runs StoneAge, a Durango, Colorado manufacturer of high-pressure industrial cleaning equipment that is now 100% employee-owned. The founders had competitive offers from private equity and from strategic buyers inside their own industry. They turned all of them down.

They get specific. Kerry walks Doug Foley through what an ESOP actually is — the trust, the annual valuation, the ERISA rules, why management doesn’t get to set the stock price — and then through the part most founders never hear: you will probably get less money than private equity would have paid you.

She’s direct about the tradeoffs. Preparing for an ESOP takes about a year. The transaction involves a real negotiation between the selling shareholders and a trustee representing the employees. And it takes another year after close before people understand what they own. She explains why most ESOP companies go through a stretch of slower growth — the free cash flow that used to fund capex and acquisitions now services the debt owed to the founders — and why StoneAge deliberately chose to grow slower until that debt is paid down.

The second half turns to the thing she says made all of it work: a culture where people can say hard things to each other. Kerry lays out her framework for difficult conversations — clear, kind, and helpful — why she’d rather be accurate than right, how she screens for feedback tolerance in interviews, and the survey model that finally convinced her employees leadership was actually acting on what they said.

If you’re a founder weighing private equity against taking care of your people, this is the honest version of the other option.

In this episode: skin in the game before the ESOP and why the founders turned down private equity and strategic buyers, what an ESOP actually is and how the trust, the annual valuation and the ERISA rules work, why succession has to be settled before the transaction rather than after, the shift from quarterly distributions to a retirement benefit and why ownership stops feeling real, the valuation tradeoff and why an ESOP usually pays less than private equity, the timeline of roughly a year to prepare and two years before people get it, keeping the founder on the board and writing the culture down so it can be tested, the debt problem and why most ESOP companies slow down before they speed up, whether you can still acquire while servicing shareholder debt, clear, kind and helpful as a framework for difficult conversations, why she’d rather be accurate than right, hiring for the ability to take feedback, Own It chats and the survey model that killed lip service, and the advice she’d give the version of herself who thought she had to prove she belonged.