Inspired to diversify their employee-owned business, Malco Products has revived an abandoned factory and its iconic brand from the bottom up. The U.S. has been bleeding manufacturing jobs for decades. Back in 1980, for example, more than one-third of men with a high school degree worked in the manufacturing sector . But those numbers soon began a rapid decline fueled by a combination of factors ranging from the rise in automation and rising competition with nations like China to an increase in the so-called “skills gap” that left many manufacturing jobs unfilled due to a lack of workers qualified to fill those openings. That’s why, today, manufacturing jobs make up about 8% of total employment , according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It’s become apparent that we celebrated the end of the pandemic a little early. Believe me, I was one of the first people who couldn’t wait to rip my mask off. I hate wearing them. You can imagine the sense of relief I felt when I finally got my second shot. Then, as the COVID numbers dropped, and dropped some more, we could finally take our masks off. It seemed like we had really turned the corner on this thing.

The War for Talent is now in full swing. As the economy continues to reopen, companies have begun hiring again in earnest—driving the unemployment rate closer to pre-pandemic levels. At the same time, the number of open jobs in the U.S.—an estimated 9.2 million—is now breaking records. It’s one of those rare times in recent history where the number of job openings exceeds the number of unemployed people actually looking for a job.

The Company's Largest Shareholder Think about how most people you encounter daily don’t really enjoy waking up and going to work every day if they go at all. When many (or most) people reach a certain age, they find it more comforting to think ahead to retirement than focus on what they might need to do that day at work. And yet there is an associate at our company, SRC, who still chooses to come to work even though he’s seventy-one. His job on the factory floor pays him about $31,000 a year. He doesn’t continue working for the pay; he shows up every day because he sincerely loves his job.

As a grandfather to eleven beautiful grandchildren, I spend a lot of weekends out on the soccer and baseball fields watching these kids tear around. I think that’s why a scene from the movie Parental Guidance, starring Billy Crystal and Bette Midler, continues to stick with me. Billy, who plays a professional baseball announcer, is sitting in the stands, watching his grandson pitch for his Little League baseball team. The grandson rears back and throws a pitch, and the hitter swings and misses. Billy is ecstatic as he calls out, “Strike one!” Then, as the hitter swings through the second pitch, Billy yells out, “Strike two!” Now he’s really excited as the third pitch comes in, and, as the batter misses yet again, Billy stands up and calls, “Strike three! Yer outta there!” But nobody else seems to notice as the pitcher, catcher, and umpire all get back into position. That’s when Billy calls out to the umpire, “Hey, Blue, three strikes! He’s out!”

Why the online streaming company doesn’t believe in keeping secrets from its employees. In his new bestselling book, No Rules Rules, Reed Hastings digs into some of the cultural aspects that make the company he co-founded, Netflix, so successful. In the book, which is framed as a kind of conversation with Erin Meyer, a professor at the INSEAD business school, Hastings writes that one of the cultural values he instilled in Netflix from its very beginning was that there weren’t going to be any secrets. As he puts it, embracing transparency and letting go of secrets—what Netflix calls “sunshining”—brings incredible advantages in terms of building trust and empowering employees to think like owners. What’s interesting is that Hastings acknowledges it’s easy for leaders to say they are pro-transparency. No one goes around saying they want to promote organizational secrecy, right? But why then, he asks, do so many organizations not walk the walk when it comes to sharing things like the company’s financials with their employees?

For owners of closely held, service-based businesses contemplating the total or fractional sales of their companies, attracting and retaining key employees is critical to creating and sustaining value for the long term. A service-based business faces the unique challenge of proving its continuing viability to a potential buyer since its assets are people. A business that can keep its best employees during and following a transaction will be much more likely to keep its customers, thus retaining its value.

I’d like to tell you a story. Let me begin with a disclaimer, it’s not about winning big or how The Great Game of Business® instantly made us hugely profitable and loads of fun. It’s a terrible story about losing. Also, I have not been involved in open-book management or The Great Game of Business very long. Truth be told, I’m about as green as anyone can be. Here’s the 10 second backstory – AMBAC International has been manufacturing precision engine components for over 100 years. The men and women on the shop floor know what they’re doing. I’ll tell anyone they’re the best in the world, and I’ve got the data to back that up. But, the shop floor wasn’t really connected to the ‘business’ and everyone suffered from poor corporate performance as a result. In fact, we were in real danger of losing the company.

What is an effective way of developing a sense of ownership? Over the years, I have talked to several business owners who want their employees to think and act like owners. They want them to be engaged and passionate about their jobs and the workplace culture. They want them to enjoy coming to work. Workplace culture in an employee-owned company should come easily, right? These owners often see setting up an ESOP as a way to change the organization’s culture and instill the aforementioned traits of thinking and acting like an owner. Two or three years later, I talk to some of the same owners, who once saw the ESOP as a cure for their cultural problems and now blame the ESOP and the employees for their inability to create an ownership culture. They say: “I started this ESOP thinking that it would make all my employees care about their jobs. The dream of an ESOP ownership culture hasn’t done anything. In fact, their behavior is worse now.” One would ask: “Why is it worse?” The answer is that these owners were using leadership to manage employees before the ESOP, and after the ESOP, they quit leading and managing them at all because they thought the ESOP would do this for them. I’ve heard of several cases like this. So, if the ESOP is not going to be the magic potion, what is?