WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Apis & Heritage Capital Partners (A&H), an investment fund that finances the conversion of companies with substantial workforces of color into 100% employee-owned businesses, today announced that it has converted Blooming Nursery, based in Cornelius, Oregon, into a 100% employee-owned enterprise, putting over 100 blue-collar workers on a path to wealth and independence.
"We're excited to welcome our third portfolio company, Blooming Nursery, into the growing A&H family of employee-owned enterprises,” said Phil Reeves, founder and managing partner of A&H. “Our employee-led buyout will not only protect Blooming’s role in its community and in the marketplace for the long term, but it will also enable the hardworking employees who have made it thrive benefit from that success.”
Blooming founder Grace Dinsdale is confident that employee ownership under A&H’s guidance is the right path for her business and its workers. “I'm devoted to my team. Everyone works hard here to produce the quality and beauty of Blooming Nursery’s plants, sold to the best independent garden centers. My employees are like family to me. I can’t imagine a better future for us, myself included. I'm thrilled by the legacy I leave behind and know it will continue to grow and prosper!"
A&H’s novel investment model identifies profitable businesses with large lower-income workforces and workers of color where the owner is ready to sell their stake. A&H then provides financing to pay the owner for his or her shares and provides technical support to convert the companies into 100% employee-owned enterprises, including post-investment training in employee ownership culture with the help of partner Democracy at Work Institute. A&H stays engaged in governance and oversight, providing advice to the management team over the ensuing five years until A&H is repaid, at which point the company is fully independent, the workers’ shares are starting to grow in meaningful value, and the enterprise is well-positioned for a strong and lasting future.
"We are thrilled to be working with Grace and her team at Blooming Nursery to write the next chapter of Blooming’s history together," said Michael Brownrigg, A&H co-founder. “The company excels at its mission, and the A&H team looks forward to supporting future growth throughout the Northwest. Cultivating the employee-ownership culture will ensure that our companies maintain and enhance their attention to high-quality services and products to help them remain leaders in their marketplaces. Employee-ownership means everyone wins when the company wins.”
Financing was provided for the transaction in part by AgWest Farm Credit. AgWest Farm Credit is an agricultural lending cooperative with more than a century of experience serving farmers, ranchers, timber harvesters, and aquatic producers throughout the West. “AgWest joined this transaction with us quickly, and their involvement demonstrates their deep knowledge of farming and farmers,” said Reeves. "We look forward to a great partnership for Blooming Nursery.”
About Apis & Heritage
Apis & Heritage Capital uses a novel "employee-led buyout" (ELBO©) structure to provide workers in essential industries with the most powerful wealth building tool in the nation: equity in a thriving business. A&H finances the acquisition of great companies from retiring owners/founders and converts them into 100% employee-owned enterprises. Because A&H is dedicated to closing the racial wealth gap, it searches for companies that have large workforces of color, and low and moderate Income workers generally, so that the benefits of ownership will be broadly realized. A&H's ELBO© structure utilizes an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) model for employee ownership, which has over 50 years of bipartisan political and regulatory support.
A&H works with some of America's most forward-thinking lending institutions to provide senior loans as part of each ELBO© transaction. A&H and its workforce training partner, the nonprofit Democracy at Work Institute (DAWI), build an ownership culture in each company that ensures all employee-owners, from management to the shop floor, are engaged in a common endeavor to create healthy, growing, profitable, and satisfying places to work over the long term. A&H's founding team members are Todd Leverette, Philip Reeves, Michael Brownrigg, Natalie Edwards, Jason Ollison and Kyle Chin-How. A&H, which is minority-owned, was incubated at DAWI with seed funding provided by the Kendeda Fund, The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and support from Citi Community Development. A&H is advised on its ELBO transactions by SES ESOP Strategies, a Stevens and Lee Company.
About Blooming Nursery
Founded on her family farm in Cornelius back in 1982, Grace Dinsdale’s vision for Blooming Nursery was as a nursery that produced plants that would help regular gardeners succeed. Famous for its burgundy-colored pots and branding, Blooming Nursery’s plants are renowned by retailers and customers throughout the northwest for their health, vigor, and variety. Blooming focuses on high quality herbaceous perennials, annuals, groundcovers, herbs, ornamental grasses, shrubs and vines, and also maintains many important “heirloom” plants that have become hard to find. The majority of Blooming Nursery’s plants are propagated on site in modern propagation greenhouses, vegetatively. Blooming Nursery’s plants are “bee safe”, meaning they never use neonicotinoid pesticides. Indeed, Blooming rarely uses chemicals for disease and pest control, opting instead for biological and environmental controls. Blooming Nursery focuses on water-efficient production methods as well, always striving for improved sustainability. Blooming Nursery currently has a year-round workforce of approximately 70 people that swells to 115 in the growing season. Over 90% of the workforce is Latino and Latina. Grace Dinsdale was advised by Falco/Sult.