Kaiser Permanente: Employee-owned businesses foster healthier local economies
When employees share in the wealth of their company, the community benefits.
Nick Smallwood is the CEO of Courier Corporation of Hawaii, a logistics and “last mile” delivery services provider in Honolulu, and a longtime supplier for Kaiser Permanente.
In late 2021, he received an interesting call.
It was an organization called Obran Cooperative, reaching out on behalf of Kaiser Permanente about the Business Resiliency Through Employee Ownership initiative. The caller wanted to gauge Nick’s interest in transitioning his small business to employee ownership.
While there were many details to understand — such as what the benefits would be to him, to his workforce, and to the community he has been operating in for more than 30 years — the proposition piqued Smallwood’s interest almost immediately. Over the next 6 months, he learned more about employee-owned companies — in which the majority of a company’s shares are owned by the employees (rather than by a single person, family, or third party) — and decided to move forward with Obran to make that happen.
“As an entrepreneur, if there is a legacy I can leave, it’s that my employees, their families, and my community as a whole are thriving because of what we built,” said Smallwood. “Enabling my employees to become owners of our business will make us stronger.”
