July 1, 2025 • 13 mins
In this clip, ESCA President Stephanie Silverman speaks at the 2025 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum.
For additional resources, visit our website: https://www.aspeninstitute.org/videos/esca-president-stephanie-silverman-speaks-at-the-2025-employee-ownership-ideas-forum/
Or subscribe to our podcast and listen on the go: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/aspeneop/
For other session videos, visit the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@aspeneop
The 2025 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum took place on April 9-10, 2025, virtually and in Washington DC. The Forum is proudly co-hosted by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program and the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University.
This year’s theme, “From Workers to Owners,” highlights how the experience of ownership changes the reality of work for workers. The forum highlights companies in a range of business sectors and explores how employee ownership fits their business strategy and approach to business leadership. We also discuss the particular role employee ownership can play in supporting business success, and we consider the role institutional investors can play in improving capital access for employee ownership conversions and expansions.
For more information about the Employee Ownership Ideas Forum, including our speakers, agenda, and additional resources, visit our website: https://www.aspeninstitute.org/events/employee-ownership-ideas-forum-2025/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:04):
So and now I'd like to invite upStephanie Silverman, CEO of Eska
Employee owned S Corporations ofAmerica to share a few words.
Stephanie Silverman. Wherever you'd like to.
Be I know there's like really that's a big step here.
(00:25):
I can you got it. You got it.
OK, amazing. Good job.
This is all right. She sticks the landing.
Let me see if it's, I really appreciate the invitation to be
here and I understand it's been a phenomenally well attended
summit and I've been able to geta couple of, I think, really
(00:46):
lovely insights and reminders ofwhy ESCA does what we do, which
is to advocate for the existenceback 25 or so years ago and the,
the, the sustainability of the private ESOP model, the S
Corporation ESOP. It's nice to see our partners
here from places like NCEO, which make a huge difference to
(01:06):
our ability to to do that advocacy.
I, I don't have anything to add to the home care industries
conversation except to say thankyou.
For those of us who have aging parents and have had them.
We know how important that is and we'd love to see more Esops
emerge in that sector of the economy and hopefully we can do
(01:26):
more to, to help that along. I, I only want to talk today a
little bit about why Washington actually even matters to Esop's.
The, the ESOP structure in 1974 was created here in Washington.
It's a creation of statute. And in 1996 and 1997, we created
(01:48):
the statutes that allow private held, privately held ESOP
ownership through Subchapter S companies.
It was a a strange configurationof a statute.
And I was a a baby lobbyist at the time.
I was 12, and I'm not kidding. I don't think I understood what
(02:14):
we were working on at the time. But you know, when you're trying
to make your bones and someone says, can you, you know, create
this structure through a change in the statute, any idiot
lobbyist will say, sure, how hard can that be?
And so we went, and we worked with the Finance Committee and
the White House, and through a series of technical changes to
tax law, we're able to give riseto the S Corporation, ESOP,
(02:37):
which has been a really powerfulway for private companies to
give their employees opportunities that they didn't
have before. In Washington, though, you have
to have a few things to stay safe and sound, right?
You have to have people who careabout you.
You have to be a little bit of asacred cow, right?
(03:02):
You have to be not untouchable, but, you know, an undesirable
touch. So much of that here in
Washington right now, you have to know how to craft an argument
that resonates with the people in charge and not just the
argument that you want to make because you think it's
interesting. Which is a problem, by the way,
(03:24):
that as a member of the employeeownership community, I can tell
you we all have this problem. We, we talk in words that matter
to us and very rarely think about how those messages land
with people who don't come from this world.
And there has to be a subset of people in political power or who
are highly influential with politicians who care deeply
(03:47):
about this statute, right, aboutpreserving this model.
And the problem right now is that that a lot of this is in
imbalance, right? First of all, with respect to
having friends and allies, we have a new administration.
(04:08):
All of us have many thoughts about the new administration.
One fact is true, this administration has not given
employee ownership much of A thought at all.
And that's a problem right now because while people can talk
about how, you know, enthusiastic, you know, a
cabinet secretary may or may notbe, these are not the people who
(04:28):
make the day-to-day policies that change the environment in
which our companies operate. Live or die, get audited or not
right? Suffer restrictions to their
taxes structure, create or or lose opportunities to sell to an
ESOP model or to A to an ESOP aspart of their corporate
transition. And so right now there's a
(04:50):
vacuum of care for Esops in the political environment.
That's pretty typical whenever you have a transition from 1
regime to another. The challenge here is that
things are moving at warp speed.So the other reason to care
about Washington is nothing thatwe do is going to keep pace with
the freneticness of the political movements that are
(05:12):
under foot. This afternoon, the House and
the Senate came to an agreement,if you can call it that.
They all kind of hate each otherright now.
So they agreed that they hate each other and they agreed that
they would work together on thisbudget framework where both
sides will work to find $1.5 trillion with AT in offsets, the
(05:37):
most money that anybody has everendeavored to find to offset tax
policy, right? I mean, really, I've been doing
tax policy since 1986. Those numbers didn't exist then.
They haven't existed until now. But they're all going to find
$1.5 trillion in available resources and to offset the new
tax bill that they want to push forward.
(05:58):
And that new tax bill will continue the 2017 Right Tax Cuts
and JOBS Act and all of the policies that are currently in
place. And it will create many, I
suspect, of the new ideas into statute that President Trump has
suggested, like, you know, no tax on tips.
I look forward to everyone here claiming that their wages are
(06:20):
tips in the future or no tax on Social Security or any of those
things. The the cost of that is going to
be astronomical. So today's agreement is we're
going to find $1.5 trillion in new funds, right, that we've
never touched before. So it's not like you can just
check in your couch cushions forquarters.
(06:41):
They have to be really massive seismic changes to tax policy to
arrive at those numbers. And what they really agreed to
was that there can't be any budget games, right?
That was the Senate wanted to use a, a budget trick so that
they wouldn't have to raise thatmuch in funding.
The House has budget Hawks and they said no.
And so the agreement is no, we're really going to find this
(07:03):
money. Where on earth are they going to
find $1.5 trillion unless they levy new taxes or take away old
right benefits, existing benefits.
And so for the ESOP community, which does really in the in the
S corporation sector at least, live or die on the tax
incentives that we created and frankly, needs more, right?
(07:25):
We need more of that. The challenge is going to be
that eventually they're going torun out of stuff that they can,
you know, use to raise money. And we're on a list right, of
special tax benefits. So A, you need people who care
about you. B, you have to be able to move
at the pace that policy is moving.
And right now policy is moving at an insane clip and it's not
(07:49):
moving forward. It's moving side to decide.
And so I don't know if you saw like this morning's news about
tariffs, which was different from this afternoon's news about
tariffs, which is really different from yesterday's news
about tariffs. But nobody can keep pace with
the way that economic policy choices are being made.
And therefore it's very hard to see where the ball is.
So we we have a care vacuum in Washington, mostly in the
(08:12):
administration that we aim to fill.
We have a fast moving policy environment, right?
And we have a regulatory complexthat has mixed views of employee
ownership. Some would argue that it's not
well educated, that regulatory complex.
The Treasury Department is far more sanguine about employee
(08:32):
ownership. The Department of Labor has been
a little bit persnickety about employee ownership, as one of
the regional officials from DOL explained to me a few weeks
back. Well, you know, we get calls
from unhappy people and so we golook for bad guys and nobody
ever calls us to say I have an amazing job, an amazing ESOP
(08:53):
company. So that's their point of view,
right? So we have different regulatory
perspectives, a care vacuum, a fast moving policy environment.
It's really important that we learn to speak to these
different interests. And so while I want to thank
everybody in this room for caring enough to show up and put
(09:17):
your blood, sweat and tears intothe employee ownership model and
vision and opportunity. And my, my own business is
employee owned through an ESOP. And so I, I really do sit with
you. I want to tell you one thing and
one thing only, which is to please stop talking to
ourselves, right? We have these conversations all
(09:41):
the time. I see a number of you at
meetings with regularity. And by the way, I love this
community. I mean, you all have made
Aesop's what they are today, which are strong and powerful
and inspirational. I'm first generation American.
I could never imagine, you know,my, my mother, my grandparents
(10:01):
who came here with nothing in their pockets.
I could not imagine being in a place where I could own a
business or create a a platform forum where my employees could
participate in that and be encouraged to do that through
policy. But we tell these stories to
ourselves all the time. So I just want to say like, I
got it. Y'all got it right?
(10:22):
We know what our story is, but it's tenuous.
Washington has a tremendously strong history of screwing
things up, and we're not about to stop that pattern anytime
soon, right? So I'm going to ask you from the
bottom of my heart, it's not that you shouldn't talk to each
(10:44):
other, it's just that you need to turn outside and have a
conversation with people who matter.
Write something in your local paper.
Post something online, schedule a meeting with your member of
Congress, right? Find a contact, a kid who was
your neighbor's son, who happensto have an internship in the,
(11:04):
you know, White House National Economic Council.
It doesn't matter. Have conversations with other
people. Because the more we talk to each
other and only each other, the more time we waste trying to
protect and defend what we need to keep whole.
It's Asca's vision that more of this needs to happen, not less.
And we will continue to do more to protect and also to promote
(11:25):
the creation of more employee ownership.
But First things first, Washington is in a frenzy.
We have a care vacuum. It's moving very, very quickly.
And we are, we are a very insular community.
We love to hear our own voices, right?
It's like my whole family, everybody loves to hear their
voices. And that's a group of voices
that don't agree with each other.
(11:46):
This is a group of voices that does.
So let's stop just agreeing witheach other, shall we?
Let's find ways to speak to other interests.
I want to see more companies do what the companies that have
spoken today and yesterday have been able to do successfully.
And the only way we get to do that is to be able to speak to
(12:06):
those outside of our community. I want to close by saying this.
I believe that the community is a really, really important tent
and I know that there are different members of the
employee ownership community. There are think tanks, there are
advocacy groups, there are business oriented groups, groups
that provide technical services.Let's not be so picky about
(12:30):
like, you know, why this group doesn't look exactly like us or
why that group doesn't look exactly like us.
All of these groups have some common denominator.
So let's find what we agree withand work together please.
Because this is a moment that's not going to come again like
this for a while. This is going to be the fastest
moving, most behind the scenes tax policy making process we
(12:52):
have seen, I have seen in my 40 year career in Washington.
So one more time, it's time to stop talking to ourselves.
Thank you.
So and now I'd like to invite upStephanie Silverman, CEO of Eska
Employee owned S Corporations ofAmerica to share a few words.
Stephanie Silverman. Wherever you'd like to.
Be I know there's like really that's a big step here.
(00:25):
I can you got it. You got it.
OK, amazing. Good job.
This is all right. She sticks the landing.
Let me see if it's, I really appreciate the invitation to be
here and I understand it's been a phenomenally well attended
summit and I've been able to geta couple of, I think, really
(00:46):
lovely insights and reminders ofwhy ESCA does what we do, which
is to advocate for the existenceback 25 or so years ago and the,
the, the sustainability of the private ESOP model, the S
Corporation ESOP. It's nice to see our partners
here from places like NCEO, which make a huge difference to
(01:06):
our ability to to do that advocacy.
I, I don't have anything to add to the home care industries
conversation except to say thankyou.
For those of us who have aging parents and have had them.
We know how important that is and we'd love to see more Esops
emerge in that sector of the economy and hopefully we can do
(01:26):
more to, to help that along. I, I only want to talk today a
little bit about why Washington actually even matters to Esop's.
The, the ESOP structure in 1974 was created here in Washington.
It's a creation of statute. And in 1996 and 1997, we created
(01:48):
the statutes that allow private held, privately held ESOP
ownership through Subchapter S companies.
It was a a strange configurationof a statute.
And I was a a baby lobbyist at the time.
I was 12, and I'm not kidding. I don't think I understood what
(02:14):
we were working on at the time. But you know, when you're trying
to make your bones and someone says, can you, you know, create
this structure through a change in the statute, any idiot
lobbyist will say, sure, how hard can that be?
And so we went, and we worked with the Finance Committee and
the White House, and through a series of technical changes to
tax law, we're able to give riseto the S Corporation, ESOP,
(02:37):
which has been a really powerfulway for private companies to
give their employees opportunities that they didn't
have before. In Washington, though, you have
to have a few things to stay safe and sound, right?
You have to have people who careabout you.
You have to be a little bit of asacred cow, right?
(03:02):
You have to be not untouchable, but, you know, an undesirable
touch. So much of that here in
Washington right now, you have to know how to craft an argument
that resonates with the people in charge and not just the
argument that you want to make because you think it's
interesting. Which is a problem, by the way,
(03:24):
that as a member of the employeeownership community, I can tell
you we all have this problem. We, we talk in words that matter
to us and very rarely think about how those messages land
with people who don't come from this world.
And there has to be a subset of people in political power or who
are highly influential with politicians who care deeply
(03:47):
about this statute, right, aboutpreserving this model.
And the problem right now is that that a lot of this is in
imbalance, right? First of all, with respect to
having friends and allies, we have a new administration.
(04:08):
All of us have many thoughts about the new administration.
One fact is true, this administration has not given
employee ownership much of A thought at all.
And that's a problem right now because while people can talk
about how, you know, enthusiastic, you know, a
cabinet secretary may or may notbe, these are not the people who
(04:28):
make the day-to-day policies that change the environment in
which our companies operate. Live or die, get audited or not
right? Suffer restrictions to their
taxes structure, create or or lose opportunities to sell to an
ESOP model or to A to an ESOP aspart of their corporate
transition. And so right now there's a
(04:50):
vacuum of care for Esops in the political environment.
That's pretty typical whenever you have a transition from 1
regime to another. The challenge here is that
things are moving at warp speed.So the other reason to care
about Washington is nothing thatwe do is going to keep pace with
the freneticness of the political movements that are
(05:12):
under foot. This afternoon, the House and
the Senate came to an agreement,if you can call it that.
They all kind of hate each otherright now.
So they agreed that they hate each other and they agreed that
they would work together on thisbudget framework where both
sides will work to find $1.5 trillion with AT in offsets, the
(05:37):
most money that anybody has everendeavored to find to offset tax
policy, right? I mean, really, I've been doing
tax policy since 1986. Those numbers didn't exist then.
They haven't existed until now. But they're all going to find
$1.5 trillion in available resources and to offset the new
tax bill that they want to push forward.
(05:58):
And that new tax bill will continue the 2017 Right Tax Cuts
and JOBS Act and all of the policies that are currently in
place. And it will create many, I
suspect, of the new ideas into statute that President Trump has
suggested, like, you know, no tax on tips.
I look forward to everyone here claiming that their wages are
(06:20):
tips in the future or no tax on Social Security or any of those
things. The the cost of that is going to
be astronomical. So today's agreement is we're
going to find $1.5 trillion in new funds, right, that we've
never touched before. So it's not like you can just
check in your couch cushions forquarters.
(06:41):
They have to be really massive seismic changes to tax policy to
arrive at those numbers. And what they really agreed to
was that there can't be any budget games, right?
That was the Senate wanted to use a, a budget trick so that
they wouldn't have to raise thatmuch in funding.
The House has budget Hawks and they said no.
And so the agreement is no, we're really going to find this
(07:03):
money. Where on earth are they going to
find $1.5 trillion unless they levy new taxes or take away old
right benefits, existing benefits.
And so for the ESOP community, which does really in the in the
S corporation sector at least, live or die on the tax
incentives that we created and frankly, needs more, right?
(07:25):
We need more of that. The challenge is going to be
that eventually they're going torun out of stuff that they can,
you know, use to raise money. And we're on a list right, of
special tax benefits. So A, you need people who care
about you. B, you have to be able to move
at the pace that policy is moving.
And right now policy is moving at an insane clip and it's not
(07:49):
moving forward. It's moving side to decide.
And so I don't know if you saw like this morning's news about
tariffs, which was different from this afternoon's news about
tariffs, which is really different from yesterday's news
about tariffs. But nobody can keep pace with
the way that economic policy choices are being made.
And therefore it's very hard to see where the ball is.
So we we have a care vacuum in Washington, mostly in the
(08:12):
administration that we aim to fill.
We have a fast moving policy environment, right?
And we have a regulatory complexthat has mixed views of employee
ownership. Some would argue that it's not
well educated, that regulatory complex.
The Treasury Department is far more sanguine about employee
(08:32):
ownership. The Department of Labor has been
a little bit persnickety about employee ownership, as one of
the regional officials from DOL explained to me a few weeks
back. Well, you know, we get calls
from unhappy people and so we golook for bad guys and nobody
ever calls us to say I have an amazing job, an amazing ESOP
(08:53):
company. So that's their point of view,
right? So we have different regulatory
perspectives, a care vacuum, a fast moving policy environment.
It's really important that we learn to speak to these
different interests. And so while I want to thank
everybody in this room for caring enough to show up and put
(09:17):
your blood, sweat and tears intothe employee ownership model and
vision and opportunity. And my, my own business is
employee owned through an ESOP. And so I, I really do sit with
you. I want to tell you one thing and
one thing only, which is to please stop talking to
ourselves, right? We have these conversations all
(09:41):
the time. I see a number of you at
meetings with regularity. And by the way, I love this
community. I mean, you all have made
Aesop's what they are today, which are strong and powerful
and inspirational. I'm first generation American.
I could never imagine, you know,my, my mother, my grandparents
(10:01):
who came here with nothing in their pockets.
I could not imagine being in a place where I could own a
business or create a a platform forum where my employees could
participate in that and be encouraged to do that through
policy. But we tell these stories to
ourselves all the time. So I just want to say like, I
got it. Y'all got it right?
(10:22):
We know what our story is, but it's tenuous.
Washington has a tremendously strong history of screwing
things up, and we're not about to stop that pattern anytime
soon, right? So I'm going to ask you from the
bottom of my heart, it's not that you shouldn't talk to each
(10:44):
other, it's just that you need to turn outside and have a
conversation with people who matter.
Write something in your local paper.
Post something online, schedule a meeting with your member of
Congress, right? Find a contact, a kid who was
your neighbor's son, who happensto have an internship in the,
(11:04):
you know, White House National Economic Council.
It doesn't matter. Have conversations with other
people. Because the more we talk to each
other and only each other, the more time we waste trying to
protect and defend what we need to keep whole.
It's Asca's vision that more of this needs to happen, not less.
And we will continue to do more to protect and also to promote
(11:25):
the creation of more employee ownership.
But First things first, Washington is in a frenzy.
We have a care vacuum. It's moving very, very quickly.
And we are, we are a very insular community.
We love to hear our own voices, right?
It's like my whole family, everybody loves to hear their
voices. And that's a group of voices
that don't agree with each other.
(11:46):
This is a group of voices that does.
So let's stop just agreeing witheach other, shall we?
Let's find ways to speak to other interests.
I want to see more companies do what the companies that have
spoken today and yesterday have been able to do successfully.
And the only way we get to do that is to be able to speak to
(12:06):
those outside of our community. I want to close by saying this.
I believe that the community is a really, really important tent
and I know that there are different members of the
employee ownership community. There are think tanks, there are
advocacy groups, there are business oriented groups, groups
that provide technical services.Let's not be so picky about
(12:30):
like, you know, why this group doesn't look exactly like us or
why that group doesn't look exactly like us.
All of these groups have some common denominator.
So let's find what we agree withand work together please.
Because this is a moment that's not going to come again like
this for a while. This is going to be the fastest
moving, most behind the scenes tax policy making process we
(12:52):
have seen, I have seen in my 40 year career in Washington.
So one more time, it's time to stop talking to ourselves.
Thank you.
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