What Is An Employee Ownership Trust?

In order for a company to become Employee owned, 51% of the business is acquired by an employee ownership trust.

The trust then distributes these shares to the employees avoiding the need for each employee to have there own personal share holding. All employees automatically become co-owners by becoming a beneficiary of the trust.

This has many benefits for the business and its customers, including greater productivity, resilience and long term growth. Importantly for the team at Hot Clay this gives everyone a voice in the companies decisions and we are already experiencing lots of positive changes.

The employee ownership model is gathering movement. Among the well know employee owned businesses, are John Lewis, Ardman and Riverford Organics.

Why Employee Ownership?

The community feel that exists at Hot Clay made this decision a lot easier. We all know each other very well and this gives us complete trust in the team moving forward.

The positive values that are important to this company are now deeply ingrained in the culture and as a team we all share the desire to be better for people and the planet.

We want all of the staff to have a say in how the business is run, we believe this creates positive change. This shows in our charity projects and our cycle to work scheme that were put in place by the staff.

We have always pushed the boundaries of business, every year the business changes for the better and we felt employee ownership was the next step.

"We were inspired by companies like Riverford Organics as we appear to share a lot of the same values. With the team continuing to grow we decided to make the change to employee owned in the hope of building a 100-year company."

- Founders, Simon and Pippa