Thinking and Acting like Owners: ESOP Employee Accelerators in 2025

As a former employee owner, TEA’s Aaron Moberger remembers wondering “What can we do to make the most of our ESOP?” and “How do we make sure our share value increases every year?” From their first days on the job to their retirement parties, these questions are on employee owners’ minds. The answer comes in the form of highly engaged ownership cultures; in other words, employees thinking and acting like owners. So how do we promote and foster that ownership culture? That could quite literally be the million-dollar question. 

The Employee Ownership Foundation created the ESOP Employee Accelerator program to do exactly that. The Accelerator program is an engaging one-day course designed to help employee owners approach their jobs with an ownership mindset by teaching core business and ESOP concepts and applying those lessons in a business simulation. After attending an Accelerator, employee owners will have a better understanding of business operations and decisions, and an appreciation of how they can impact their ESOP. We also added a module called Communicating Your ESOP, which is a discussion-based session focused on internal company ESOP communications. To learn more about the curriculum, you can visit the program page on the EOF website, which dives a bit deeper into each of those components: ESOP Employee Accelerator | Employee Ownership Foundation.

We know that time away from the production line, the job site, and your customers is lost productivity, so the program is built to be accessible, local, and affordable. We bring the sessions as close to you as possible, thanks to our generous host companies in cities all across the United States. Kicking off this year’s series, our first workshop is just a few days away at The Arlo Washington DC, which is right around the corner from The ESOP Association’s headquarters. With seven more events booked and another dozen hosts committed, it is shaping up to be a busy year for the Accelerator program!

With gratitude to our hosts, promoters, attendees, and staff, we look forward with excitement to this year’s Accelerator workshop series. If you have any questions, please reach out to Aaron at amoberger@esopassociation.org. We hope to see you soon at an Accelerator near you!