Steward Ownership
Steward ownership offers entrepreneurs an additional path to conventional ownership models, a path that ensures that companies remain independent and mission-driven. It enshrines two core principles in a legally binding way:
Purpose orientation
Profits are a means to an end, never an end in themselves. They serve the company’s mission and development, or fund charitable activities – value created inside the company can’t be extracted by its owners for personal benefit.
Self-determination
The company cannot become an object of speculation. It stays self-determined and independent in the long term – the steering wheel always in the hands of people connected to it and its mission.
The concept of steward ownership represents a proven innovation. Beyond distributing power only by the mechanisms of bloodlines or money, steward-owned companies – ranging from established corporations such as Bosch, Zeiss, Carlsberg, Novo Nordisk, Patagonia or Signal, to SMEs like Organically Grown Company, BuurtzorgT, Ecosia, Stapelstein, Haferkater, Vyld and many more – follow a new model of governance and ownership by finding a coherent answer to the question: “Who are the most capable owners for the company?”
Steward Ownership Aligned Financing (SOAF)
The definition of steward-ownership-aligned financing applies the core principles of steward-ownership – self-determination and purpose-orientation – to the financing side of things, thereby forming the foundation for how investments can be designed.
In order to put this definition to life and create the investment quality that aligns with its definition, adjustments, alignments and twists are carried out in three key areas of investments: 1) governance, 2) returns and 3) liquidity; to turn conventional investment structures into steward-ownership-aligned financing.
SOAF definition: in a nutshell
In steward-ownership-aligned financing, the quality of the investment (i.e. how the investment is structured) and the relationship with the company are designed in such a way that investors become financing partners of the company while:
- preserving the company’s entrepreneurial autonomy and
- refraining from commodifying the company as a whole.
Thus, the relationship between the financing partner and the company is defined by:
- the entrepreneurial control never being overtaken (bought),
- and economic claims being limited in terms of duration, amount, or influence.