Andy Staane started as a bartender at The Mooring in Newport, R.I., in 2002, as a teenager trying to scrape together a few extra bucks. Twenty-four years later, Staane is still in the same role at the same company. But he isn’t just an employee anymore—he’s also a part owner, just like all of his coworkers.
Newport Restaurant Group, which owns The Mooring and 17 other restaurants and hospitality venues across Rhode Island and Massachusetts, is one of the few companies in the country where the shareholders aren’t outside investors but the employees themselves. Founded in 1925 as a fuel oil business, the company sold off its other assets and began an employee stock ownership plan in 1995, according to Nation’s Restaurant News. It has since become 100% employee-owned.
What started as a summer job for Staane became a lifelong career because staying was a no-brainer. “If I’m going to do this for a living, I may as well stay with the company that pays me the ESOP, gives me the health insurance, paid time off, the stock options, 401k,” Staane told Fortune.
The restaurant group, now more than 100 years old, has about 1,100 employee-owners, a number that swells to roughly 1,800 workers during the busy summer season. The company says its turnover is low, with many employees—like Staane—planning to stay for a lifetime.
The company operates as an ESOP, or employee stock ownership plan, a type of retirement plan in which a trust holds company shares for participating employees. The beneficiaries, in this case, are the workers who staff Newport’s restaurants, from the Castle Hill Inn and 22 Bowen’s in Newport to Hemenway’s in Providence.
“Everything that we’re doing is to drive the value of our company that only we, as the employee owners, get the benefit of. Nobody else gets the benefit of that work,” Newport Restaurant Group CEO Mick Lamond, who joined the company as CFO in 2005 and was promoted to the top job in 2025, told Fortune.
A retirement plan that costs workers nothing
According to the company, employees become fully vested after six years of service and must work 800 hours a year to participate—only about 15 hours a week. If they leave, the company buys back their shares, and employees can roll the money into a retirement account or cash out. Since 1995, the company says it has paid out $33 million to its employee-owners.
For Lamond, the “overarching success story” is giving employees a retirement plan that grows at no cost to them, based on their collective success and hard work. Because their payout is tied to the company’s performance, he says, employees care more about their work and invest more of themselves in their jobs.
“When you have employees that actually have a vested interest in the success of the company, it permeates its way through right to the guest experience,” Lamond says.
And don’t just take the CEO’s word for it.
“They appreciate us, we appreciate them, and it just works,” Staane says of management.
Staane says he makes sure every guest he serves feels taken care of, and he makes a point of eating at each new restaurant the company opens.
“I’ll spend my money back into the company. It helps it grow. You know, I want to see it be successful. I want every restaurant that they open to be successful,” he says.
The great ownership transfer
ESOPs aren’t just good for employee retention and guest care; they could also help solve a succession problem that will get much worse over the next decade.
Americans are expected to pass down about $124 trillion in wealth through 2048, according to Cerulli Associates, with baby boomers and older generations accounting for roughly $79 trillion. But what’s been dubbed the Great Wealth Transfer isn’t just about cash changing hands—it’s also about businesses being passed down to millennial and Gen Z heirs.
In Bank of America’s 2026 Private Bank Study of Wealthy Americans, 23% of wealthy business owners said they inherited their companies, compared with 11% who bought them—a reversal from 2022, when 28% had purchased their businesses and just 5% had inherited them.
The handoff ahead is enormous. By 2035, about 6 million small and midsize businesses will face ownership transitions, representing up to $5 trillion in enterprise value, according to the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility.
Small and midsize businesses employ nearly half of the U.S. workforce, but most of them don’t survive a change in ownership: Of the roughly 510,000 that exited the market in 2022, 92% closed, McKinsey found. Only 5% were sold, and 3% were transferred to new owners.
An alternative to private equity
Lamond says ESOPs can help address the looming crisis, calling them a “proven model” compared with options that may leave longtime employees out to dry.
“This is a great opportunity for a founder to be able to sell their company to its employees, as opposed to maybe selling it to a strategic buyer or selling it to private equity,” the chief executive told Fortune. “The founder recognizes the employees are a big part of the success of the company.”
Private equity has been an increasingly active buyer. U.S. private equity firms invested in more than 21,000 businesses in 2025, about 85% of which had fewer than 500 employees, according to the American Investment Council, the industry’s lobbying group. Critics concerned about private equity’s growing footprint in America’s small businesses point out that buyouts often lead to higher prices and possible layoffs. (Some private equity deals have shared the upside with workers: When KKR sold data-center cooling maker CoolIT Systems to Ecolab, frontline employees walked away with checks averaging $240,000.)
Lamond believes ESOPs put employees first and provide a “great way to keep jobs in the community”—a case others have made as millions of business owners near retirement. Some founders have already taken that route, including one owner who sold his family’s century-plus-old company to its employees.
Staane has seen the benefit of employee ownership firsthand over his two decades with the company—so much so that he’s made working at Newport a family affair. His 16-year-old son recently joined as a busboy.
“Now my son is involved in it now, and even he sees it,” Staane says.