Rather than selling to an out-of-state buyer or shuttering the business, O’Donal decided to keep things close to home. He reached out to the Cooperative Development Institute (CDI) to explore how he could sell the business directly to its most invested stakeholders: the employees. Nearly half of the O’Donals staff had been with the business for ten or more years, and this year twenty-two employees signed on to form a cooperative and purchase the nursery together. Working alongside O’Donal and CDI, they successfully completed the transition to a worker-owned cooperative this spring.
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