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Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees

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Re: Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees

#71

Post by C1sc0cat »

miketery wrote: post #8
nightski wrote: post #6

Sorry for the naive question, but how does this work? So let's say the employees now are part of this trust which owns 75% of the shares. What is the benefit? The trust owns the shares legally correct? Is it some sort of profit sharing scheme? I assume you don't hold on to the shares when you leave the company (as they are with the trust)? Does every new hire dilute the ownership? How does this actually impact the da…

Off top of my head: - voting rights - profit sharing (dividend) - on leaving you would sell your shares back to the trust - on hiring you would be granted shares (w/ cliff and vesting)

Not if its a coop.

Its unclear how the trust is setup

You get your shares (there is no vesting) on day one of becoming a member - you don't automatically become a member there is normally a probation period.

Re: Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees

#72

Post by jahaja »

cazum wrote: post #34
beerlord wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market failure got us to 400PPM. The externalities of carbon and methane pollution have not been properly priced in. That can be resolved with a market mechanism - a carbon tax. The free market has also brought us widespread electric cars, solar panels, gas power plants. The very things with which we will combat climate change. Socialism has brought us expanding populations globally, by offering free food to people w…

If we're just going to attribute anything that happened during capitalism as a result of the "free market" then I get to say that communism invented satellites, discovered stem cells, and cured maternally transmitted HIV. Electric cars and solar panels won't save us. You're not fooling anyone with that. Solar panels are not nearly efficient enough to replace anything major any time soon, and electric passenger cars w…

> And damn, I've heard a lot of dumb anti-socialist arguments before, but "people who are not able to provide labor to a market economy should starve to death" is a new one.

Horrible indeed. The callousness of it reminded me of this exchange, loosely recalled, in the "Conspiracy" HBO movie about the Wannsee conference:

Some nazi bureaucrat: - "Hard labour? But many haven't picked up anything heavier than a pencil in their entire life?!"

Heydrich: - "Yes, and subsequently most will perish of natural causes." casually moves on the the next point

Some nazi bureaucrat: leans back visibly shaken.

Re: Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees

#73

Post by C1sc0cat »

blazespin wrote: post #22

Employee ownership is a very old concept. All studies have shown that they are risk averse and have poor growth. I’d love for this to work, but you can’t fantasize your way to results.

Not really coops go back to 19th century Uk and Italy - oh and part of KFC is a producer coop.

Re: Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees

#74

Post by arethuza »

timthorn wrote: post #36
nightski wrote: post #6

Sorry for the naive question, but how does this work? So let's say the employees now are part of this trust which owns 75% of the shares. What is the benefit? The trust owns the shares legally correct? Is it some sort of profit sharing scheme? I assume you don't hold on to the shares when you leave the company (as they are with the trust)? Does every new hire dilute the ownership? How does this actually impact the da…

The John Lewis Partnership is perhaps the most famous employee-owned company in the UK, and they have a fair amount of information about what it means, available on their website: https://www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk/work/employee-ownersh...

I always thought it was amusing that it was Waitrose (the upscale food shops owned by Jowhn Lewis) that came to the rescue of the Prince of Wales' efforts to create his own food brand with Duchy Originals.

Mind you - considering who shops at our local Waitrose this is no real surprise.

Re: Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees

#75

Post by bloak »

marcinzm wrote: post #51
TylerE wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does everything have to be growth, growth, growth, growth? What's wrong with being stable and providing a decent livelihood?

The world is not stable, technology is not stable, your competitors are not stable and your customers' desires are not stable. If you don't try to grow then eventually you'll start to shrink.

A company shrinking is only a problem for a certain kind of shareholder. Employees may be perfectly happy to retire or move on to new jobs as the company gradually reduces its workforce while remaining true to its core business, for which there is a gradually decreasing demand.

As an example, I believe there are some car manufacturers who have stated that rather than diversify into electric cars they intend to stick with internal combustion engines for as long as there is demand, then close down. It seems like a reasonable plan to me. Some investors will be happy with the larger short-term profits that derive from not having to invest in a struggle to go electric, which they'd probably fail at anyway. Other investors can sell their shares and reinvest elsewhere.

Re: Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees

#76

Post by C1sc0cat »

Alex3917 wrote: post #20
satya71 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New Belgium is also owned by employees via ESOP. What is the practical difference between ESOP ownership and cooperative?

An ESOP is used to allow the owners to sell their stock to employees. The owners benefit by getting a tax break, and the employees benefit because they're allowed to pay for the stock out of the future earnings of the company rather than needing to pay out of pocket. Most co-ops are formed using ESOPs, but not every company that does an ESOP becomes a co-op. For example, a company could just sell 20% of its stock to…

Normally the way it works (in uk terms) the coop X owns the company Y who employs workers - who when they become members of coop Y own the ecompany.

It gets complex but membership in a coop and being an employee of the company the coop owns are two separate but interlinked things.

When I was a member of Poptel we had a 4 page document that explained how it worked :-)

Re: Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees

#77

Post by C1sc0cat »

refurb wrote: post #21

Not to be a cynic, but the owner can get a lot of benefits (including tax benefits) from selling to their employees versus an outright acquisition by an outside party. Basically, the owner sells their shares to a trust, which then pays the owner and the employees gain ownership over a period of time as the financing is paid back.

Selling :-) in the UK for small < 30mill you can use an EMI share scheme to gift the shares or grant options to the employees with no income tax liability and Entrepeneaures relief applies so 10% CGT rate.

Re: Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees

#78

Post by Lio »

relix wrote: post #53
SimonPStevens wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case I think the primary reason is to protect the company. Aardman is probably a fairly hot company right now. Probably prime for a purchase by one of the big studios. But then it would most likely just get broken up and turned into a mill for churning out look-a-like content. Or possibly even just a logo stamped on contracted out content. I believe the founders have been fairly clear in the past about not be…

Either it's hard to create the content, or it is not. If it's not hard, the studios don't need to buy Aardman. The IP they have is negligible, and no one watches a movie because it's made by Aardman (99% of the people would not know who they are anyway). If it is hard, the studios would need to keep the employees who manage to do this hard thing, and it would be in the purchaser's best interest to manage it as if it…

This sounds like exactly the attitude that Pixar bet against and won, as described in Lawrence Levy's book[1]. At the time it was thought that animation from anyone other than Disney had no goodwill attached to it.

Pixar was able to disprove that with their franchises and I think the same is true for Aardman with Wallace & Grommet and the spin off Shaun the Sheep series.

Aardman have a look to their work that people know and love.

Edited: because I'm a nitwit who put down the wrong author. Should be this book by http://lawrencelevy.com/book/

Re: Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees

#79

Post by frereubu »

osense wrote: post #60
geolgau wrote: post #58

Sorry to be offtopic, but how can you link a website that imposes literally thousands of marketing and "unclassified" cookies on you? And they only have the option to "Accept all cookies".. FUCK OFF with this bullshit! [shit!] https://imgur.com/a/RddlgcR

You can usually just open the developer console and delete the modal element, however this site also disables scrolling somewhere it seems. Couldn't figure out where quickly, so I just read the article in the element inspector. Web 2018, everyone. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you're using Firefox you can set up a user chrome file - https://www.userchrome.org/how-create-userchrome-css.html - and include this:

html, body { overflow: visible !important }

Most sites that disable scrolling like that have just put overflow: hidden on the html or body element.

To do the same thing in Chrome you can use a custom CSS extension. The thing I don't like about that is that you have to give the extension carte blanche in terms of permissions, and I don't trust that the extension won't be sold to a bad actor.

Re: Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees

#80

Post by NeedMoreTea »

relix wrote: post #53
SimonPStevens wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case I think the primary reason is to protect the company. Aardman is probably a fairly hot company right now. Probably prime for a purchase by one of the big studios. But then it would most likely just get broken up and turned into a mill for churning out look-a-like content. Or possibly even just a logo stamped on contracted out content. I believe the founders have been fairly clear in the past about not be…

Either it's hard to create the content, or it is not. If it's not hard, the studios don't need to buy Aardman. The IP they have is negligible, and no one watches a movie because it's made by Aardman (99% of the people would not know who they are anyway). If it is hard, the studios would need to keep the employees who manage to do this hard thing, and it would be in the purchaser's best interest to manage it as if it…

> no one watches a movie because it's made by Aardman

That's exactly why we took the kids to Chicken Run, having seen no trailer.

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