BLP:373 They Sold the Company to Their Employees. Now they're Millionaires.

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Emery Sapp & Sons is 100% employee owned, 3,000 employee owners strong, with 98 millionaires and about 600 trucks on the road every day. Jared Flinn sat down with co-CEO Robert Gillis in Columbia, Missouri to talk about what happens when a founder sells his company to the people who built it. Billy Sapp started in 1972 because the civil contractors wouldn't show up on time, so he did the work himself. In 1999 he and his partners sold the whole thing to their employees through an ESOP. Twenty six years later, 15 new millionaires were made in a single year, and most of them work in the field. Robert breaks down how the ESOP actually works, why about a quarter of every employee's salary goes into it, and why more owners don't take that path. He also gets into the $2.8 billion I-70 reconstruction between Kansas City and St. Louis, the $608 million stretch ESS won coming out of St. Louis, the broken gas tax that funds our roads, and the freight side of heavy civil, including the 600 company trucks plus the third party haulers, quarry trucks, and brokers it takes to keep aggregate moving. If you haul rock, asphalt, or aggregate, this is a look at the other end of the load.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Meet Robert Gillis, co-CEO of Emery Sapp & Sons

01:55 Billy Sapp, 1972, and the problem that started the company

03:30 What an ESOP actually is, in plain terms

06:43 Why more owners don't sell to their employees

10:30 98 millionaires, and 59% of them work in the field

12:04 If it's in the dirt, on the dirt, or over the dirt

14:00 The $2.8 billion I-70 rebuild and the $608 million job

19:30 The gas tax problem nobody talks about

22:25 What trucking really means to a heavy civil contractor