Business View Magazine May 2023

160 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 5 fisherman happened to ask him if he’d ever considered doing an ESOP. By the time they got done talking, the gears were already in motion to make the benefits plan a reality. “Joe came back and said, “ I have a thought,” Terzich-Garland recalls. “We’ve been talking about how we could get our company to last over time, to where we can really get employees invested in our mission. Why don’t we start an ESOP? “In the end, we agreed it would give us an opportunity to bring our staff together, to train them in a way where they can align their values with our company values, and provide a benefit to the employee to participate in an organization and to have a retirement plan secured in the way that we run our company.” Terzich-Garland believes the ESOP already resonates with her core staff but that more time would need to be invested to increase employee awareness of value alignment overall. “Here’s the struggle—as an owner and as a trustee, making sure that the ESOP is sustainable, when you tie in money, or a retirement plan, and you don’t talk about it often, then it kind of gets forgotten,” she reports. “We have to invest training time to cultivate the type of culture where we identify our employees’ values and have them align with the company’s values. Because unless those two things correlate, I don’t think that employees are going to think beyond, Oh, I’m part of an ESOP. They have to see the value they’ve navigated in the workplace. They also have to be committed, to wanting to be navigated by that value, as a way to ensure the sustainability of the ESOP from which they will benefit. Until those things are tied together, I think they’re seen as separate things.” “One piece of advice I would give to anybody considering an ESOP is that you must tie the ESOP in with the mission and values of the company such that you bridge that gap between the ESOP and the employees’ values and their own worth in the company,” she maintains. “If you don’t, then they’ll just get a statement every year, and that’ll be it.” PREFERRED VENDOR/PARTNER n ABA Technologies www.abatechnologies.com ABA Technologies, Inc. is a behavior-based learning and development company. With over 20 years of operational success, ABA Technologies delivers premier online academic products, and incorporates behavior-based learning solutions for its corporate clients. In addition to its academic work, they provide a robust, science-based methodology about learning to embed for each company and its leaders solutions to ensure investments in training lead to significant results, measured by desired performance. Utilizing up to date and ever-evolving technologies, the company works with clients worldwide to pinpoint needs and build high-impact skills that address those needs. n Zabarsky & Associates, LLC www.zaretirement.com