By Nick Romeo, Illustration: Jo Zixuan Zhou, The Washington Post, January 10, 2022
About five years ago, Kate Emery, the founder of a successful digital-consulting firm in Farmington, Connecticut, was considering retirement. With nearly fifty employees and annual revenues around ten million dollars, her company, the Walker Group, was quite attractive to potential buyers. If she sold to the highest bidder, she might easily make millions.
And yet she didn’t want to sell. Selling, she knew, would jeopardize her lifework. The Walker Group was an unusual company, thanks to a conversation she’d had one day in the early two-thousands with her then five-year-old son, Dave. They were standing in her driveway and talking about each member of the family. Her husband, a photojournalist for a gardening magazine, often took Dave along to shoots in beautiful gardens. Dad, Dave said, was an expert on gardens. Emery asked Dave what she was an expert in. “You’re an expert on love,” he said. Emery was overcome. “I made a commitment right there to do everything I could to live up to that,” she told me.
In the next few years, she reorganized the Walker Group using an unusual social-enterprise model. The company started sharing a third of its distributed profits with employees and donating a third to nonprofits in Farmington. The final third was reinvested in the company, with Emery taking a modest salary. This social orientation reflected the values with which she had been raised; her parents had started multiple nonprofits in Farmington, and always encouraged her to measure her success in terms of how much she helped others. This starkly contrasted with the business world, with its narrow fixation on profits. “It felt, to me, like having profit as the singular metric for success was at odds with the way I was brought up and with what the world needed,” Emery said.
Comments (0)