Why Novograf celebrated Employee Ownership Day on June 29

Brand Realization company Novograf celebrated Employee Ownership Day on June 29th 2018 with a party for the employee owners, the unveiling of a Novograf timeline and an open day for other local businesses.

In this, Novograf's second year as an employee owned company, we held a successful AGM and celebrated EODay in the same eventful week - and that's worth celebrating!

Employee Ownership has been, and still is, a journey for everyone at Novograf. We went through a strange transition period as we came to understand the mechanics of employee ownership - what it means for us and our customers.

After thirty years of growth, Novograf Ltd became employee owned on 1st January 2017. On that day, stakeholders Alistair Miller and John Clark assigned their shares to the Novograf Employee Trust which holds and manages the shares on behalf of all employees of Novograf.

The change to employee ownership status first became an 'interesting idea' early in 2016 when then Managing Director John Clark and then Chairman Alistair Miller began to think of retirement and the question of succession - this led them to take the remarkable step of converting the business into an employee ownership trust.

Employee Ownership really makes a difference for our employees and cutomers - we all own the business, which means each and every one of us is directly responsible for ensuring we do all we can to help our customers successfully achieve their designs, budgets and targets for their roll-outs.

So how does Novograf's employee ownership work?

Employee ownership specialists, Baxendale, and Co-operative Development Scotland (an arm of Scottish Enterprise) guided Novograf through the process as the ownership of Novograf Ltd was carefully passed from its private stakeholders into the newly formed Employee Ownership Trust. Alistair Miller and John Clark sold their shares to the Novograf Employee Ownership Trust, and will be paid for those shares over an agreed term from company profits. In this way, employees will gain ownership of the business without having to invest directly, however employees do have the option to purchase some shares from the Trust.

The Trust's role is to manage the shares and oversee the governance of the business. The Management continues to run the company, but now it will be on behalf of the employees via the Trust rather than for private stakeholders.

Research has shown that employee owned companies are likely to out-perform conventionally structured firms on just about every business metric: productivity, profitability, customer satisfaction and employee engagement, to name a few. Novograf is looking to a bright future.