Webinar: The Lending Opportunity of a Generation

Investing in Businesses Converting to Worker Ownership

Overview

Recorded March, 2016

Listen to this webinar to learn about the $10 trillion lending market that will be created by the ownership changeover of private enterprises as baby boomer business owners retire. The opportunity for lenders and other capital providers to participate in these sales transactions is expected to grow significantly over the next 5-20 years to encompass hundreds of thousands of small and mid-market businesses.

This is also an opportunity to create worker-owned business that strengthen our local economies and communities. Business owners can sell to their employees when they retire, creating new worker cooperatives with deep local roots.

We’ll address basic questions about worker-owned cooperatives: what they are, how business “conversions” to worker coops work, and how financing worker-owned companies is different from “traditional” businesses. We’ll also review a sampling of specific coop conversion deals, including loan sources, amounts and terms.

Whether you’re a lender at a bank, a Community Development Financial Institution, an impact investor, or just broadly interested in the topic, join us to get your questions answered, and to learn how you can participate directly or indirectly to tap this market opportunity.

This webinar follows the release of a set of FAQs and case studies about worker coop conversion lending by the three co-hosts and presenting organizations.

Presenters:

• Dorian Gregory, Cooperative Fund of New England
• Camille Kerr, Democracy at Work Institute
• Alison Lingane, Project Equity

Webinar

Slides