What is Steward-Ownership?
Steward-ownership brings together startups, medium-sized businesses, and corporations. It combines modern with traditional entrepreneurship, sustainability with profitable business. This proven model has been successfully implemented for decades by leading companies like Bosch and Zeiss and is now gaining increasing relevance as an alternative to other forms of long-term business ownership. For start-ups, it provides the opportunity to legally safeguard their purpose-driven orientation, while medium-sized businesses and hidden champions can use it to design succession, where successors can become steward-owners independent of family affiliation or acquisition power.
Steward-ownership focuses on the core of the company itself – namely its ownership, its DNA. The goal is to (re)prioritize the purpose of the company – to the maximization of short-term profits; and to safeguard its independence in the long-run.
In short:
With steward-ownership, assets and control remain within the company in the long term.
This is based on two key principles:
Self-governance
Steward-owned companies keep control within the business. Voting shares can only be held by the stewards; this way the company can not become a speculative asset. Voting shares cannot be inherited or sold for profits, but are passed on in trust and alignment of shared values and relevant skills.
Purpose-orientation
or put differently: profits serve purpose. For steward-owned companies, assets and profits are not an end in themselves, but a means to an end. They are reinvested, used to pay investors, shared with stakeholders or donated to charity.
Learn more about steward-ownership here.
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