Business View Magazine Feb 2023

156 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 2 .......................................................... The age-old challenge of “how do I engage with my employees” has gotten a lot harder lately. Lack of willing and prepared skilled workers combined with faster than anticipated retiring boomer generation and two new and vastly different incoming generations have every company in world scrambling to reassess their culture and business models. One brilliant option that very few companies even know about is the Employee Stock Ownership Model. Successful companies that employ this model go beyond the simple transaction of providing shares to a surprised work force. A few companies such as Alatrade Foods headquartered in Albertville, AL see the bigger picture and realize that simply giving stock ownership out to employees who don’t understand company ownership, or worse, are financially illiterate is not the best way to invite employees into the ownership experience. Their CEO John Pittard and CFO Andrea Elrod had this vision to see that education, training and engagement work was needed. They enlisted the help of GRITT Business Coaching and together with the executive team developed a well-coordinated program to teach employees what ownership means and specifically how to help the companies financials (and thus their ownership stake) improve. According to Andrea Elrod within the first 120 days; “we had efficiency Sprints developed that helped the company save $1.4 million dollars while also dramatically increasing employee engagement”. These days Alatrade has started weekly huddles which give each employee in every location an opportunity to be seen, heard, part of something bigger and valued for the work they do. Patrick Carpenter President GRITT Business Coaching Current member of the TEA/ESOP Culture Committee, Washington DC Vistage CEO Speaker For more information, contact us at www.grittbusinesscoaching.com. plants, through a lottery drawing for all of our line employees. It was a lot of fun. There was a lot of excitement and a lot of energy around that.We plan to do it again.We just wanted to do something fun for our employees.” Deboning and processing several million pounds of chicken per week, or several hundred million pounds annually, AlaTrade Foods supplies poultry products to large restaurant companies throughout the United States, offering a variety of first-step processing options based on customer specs.“Mostly we are a service provider for poultry integrators who are in the food service business, we’re providing products for their customers,” Elrod describes. With a recent investment in automation, AlaTrade Foods has been able to keep up with the industry- wide challenges of labor shortages.“2022 was really our biggest capital year on record.We did a few large projects and those are working out pretty well for us,” she says.“With labor tightening, we needed all the people that we had plus more.” One of these projects included an automation upgrade at the Boaz plant, which primarily focuses on dark meat deboning. This new technology created an opportunity to redeploy employees in two different locations. According to CEO John Pittard, “one of our valued partners, Marel, has helped us to update and improve these machines.” While ALA TRADE FOODS