This page provides an introductory level of detail of the main concepts for the employee owned company.
100% employee ownership
The company will be entirely owned by the owner-employees. No passive investment is allowed. If you do not work at the company you cannot own any part of it. This is for several reasons:
- “Own your job”: Employees own any automation that takes their job, instead of some investor.
- Spread wealth and grow the middle class: Combat the growing wealth concentration.
- Governance (corporate policy and behavior) is controlled by the employees.
Focused on automation
Regardless of what type of business the company is in, a prime focus will be to automate as much of the business as is practical. This applies to physical processes as well as knowledge work. This will typically pair automation experts with subject matter experts in whatever process is being automated. Automation will utilize software systems, AI, robotics, industrial automation equipment, etc.
Long term employment
When an employee-owner has their job role automated, they stay at the company and move to a new role. Everyone in the company is in this same situation, so the employees are involved with empathy and understanding in deciding what new role an employee will move to. The goal is to enable a return to the time when a person could stay at a company long term.
Provide satisfaction while growing the pie
The goal is to provide satisfying employment to as many people as possible. This means the employees will have meaningful and satisfying work and earn competitive compensation. Profits will be used to provide some additional bonus to the employees so their compensation is marginally higher than average. However, profits will primarily be used to grow the company so more people can join.
Applies to any type of business
The company can engage in any type of business activity; manufacturing, retail, service sector, or professional. In general, all work involves some process, and any process can be automated in theory. The employees will decide what business activity they want the company to engage in.
Initial prototype: Automated Mobile Pizza
Since no passive investment is allowed, somebody needs to provide the initial investment to bootstrap the company. That somebody is me. I am doing this to benefit society. I am not looking to get rich, but I also don’t want to lose money. The “trick” to this is to choose a practical business to get the employee-owned business idea started.
I am developing an automated mobile pizza trailer. I am doing this using the resources of my existing company, FLEXWEST. Once I have it completed and it is producing revenue with me operating the pizza trailer, I will launch the new employee owned company and hire the first employee.
I have chosen to start with this pizza business because I believe it is practical to develop it myself, with minimal risk and investment. My background is in embedded systems engineering and manufacturing, so I have all the skills and equipment to build the pizza trailer and automation equipment from scratch. I am currently learning to make pizza, and am designing the trailer and some of the automation equipment.
Automated pizza is nothing new, and yet a large percentage of pizza production uses very little automation. Production of the frozen pizza sold in supermarkets is almost entirely automated, with humans mostly involved only in equipment maintenance. There are pizza vending machines that make pizza from scratch.
Large retail pizza chains use mixers to make the dough, or buy their dough balls from suppliers, and they typically use tunnel ovens for baking. Most of the remainder of their processes are manual, such as hand tossing the pie and adding sauce and toppings.
Family owned pizza shops use minimal automation, mostly limited to mixing machines for dough.
There have been several large startup companies which have attempted to do something similar to what I am doing, and most of them have failed. I think this is due to these major factors:
- Impatient and detached venture capital investors: Investors may not understand the details of the resources, effort and time it will take to become profitable. When progress does not occur as expected, they cut off funding and the company fails.
- Use of off the shelf automation equipment: In a rush to get something working, expensive general purpose automation equipment (often collaborative robots, PLCs and industrial computer vision cameras) are used. These may be suitable for prototypes and proof of concept, but may be either too expensive or too slow for deployment at scale.
- Outsourced production of custom automation equipment: Startups will usually need to outsource production and possibly design and integration of automation equipment that is purpose designed for the application. This can be very expensive, and introduce additional delays and expense due to communication overhead with vendors.
- High overhead: Rent for fancy buildings and offices. Teams with more people than necessary, and ratio of management to engineers that is too high.
I am avoiding the above issues by doing the initial work myself with my resources. I will weld and build the trailer myself, and design and manufacture most or some of the automation equipment, using my machine shop. I will design and produce the automation software and electronics. The reason I am starting with mobile pizza is to avoid the overhead of rent.
Not everything will be automated, and the level of automation will increase over time. The pizza business will likely branch out from mobile pizza to also include retail restaurants, vending machines, etc. If the pizza business grows large enough, the business may vertically integrate some of the supply chain, for example use automated indoor agriculture to grow tomatoes for sauce, mushrooms and basil for toppings. If volume increases even further, we might merge in a struggling family owned dairy to automate production of milk and mozzarella cheese.
Once the employee owned company is up and running, it will likely expand to include other business activities unrelated to mobile pizza. The pizza business is just something I think is practical to get started. The company could expand into making industrial equipment, furniture, clothing, application software, etc.