Walker Sydnor, president of the firm, liked ESOPs then and still does, though he knows that an ESOP isn't the answer to every prayer. You can't run your agency like a personal bank. You have a duty to run it as if it were a publicly traded company, for the benefit of your shareholders. Third, you have to plan carefully. When you have an ESOP, it's not just one or two people owning the whole agency.
Ownership is diluted throughout the firm.
We continue to hire young talented people and we have a wide range of ages among our employees. So we have to plan carefully to see when we might have to fund a buyout. Everybody talks about this funding liability as if it were unique to ESOPs. But if you want to keep your agency locally owned, you have to fund the transfer. The benefit of an ESOP is that you can do it on a tax-advantaged basis.