LML is building toward a crew-owned production company. That's not a novel idea — it's a proven one. Employee-owned companies have operated at real scale, for decades and in some cases centuries, across grocery, manufacturing, retail, and industrial goods. Here's some of that history.
When we talk about crew ownership at LML, the most common reaction is skepticism: sounds nice, but does it actually work? The answer is yes, and it has for a long time. The companies below span industries and continents, but they share the same basic bet — that people work harder, stay longer, and build better things when they own a piece of what they're building. Some are worker cooperatives. Some run on ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans). Some use ownership trusts. The structures differ, but the outcome is consistent: durable, competitive businesses that treat labor as a stakeholder, not just a cost.
A non-exhaustive look at employee-owned companies with real staying power — from a century-old bakery to one of the largest worker-cooperative federations on earth.
A federation of worker cooperatives spanning finance, manufacturing, retail, and education. Mondragon is one of the largest business groups in Spain, and its governance model — worker-members vote on major decisions and pay ratios between top and bottom are capped — has been studied worldwide as a template for cooperative ownership at industrial scale.
Founder George Jenkins began distributing stock to employees in 1959. Today Publix is the largest employee-owned company in the United States by employee count, and it's consistently ranked among the best companies to work for — proof that ownership and low prices for customers aren't mutually exclusive.
Maker of Gore-Tex and hundreds of other technical materials. Gore runs on a "lattice" structure with no traditional management hierarchy or job titles — employees, called "associates," are also owners. It's one of the most-cited examples of flat organizational design paired with broad-based ownership.
A discount grocery chain that pairs some of the lowest prices in the industry with an employee stock ownership plan that has made long-tenured cashiers and warehouse workers into six-figure retirees. WinCo is a direct rebuttal to the idea that ownership and low-margin retail can't coexist.
Founded in 1790, King Arthur is one of the oldest companies in America. In 2004, the founding family transferred full ownership to the employees through an ESOP — a two-century-old business choosing worker ownership as its succession plan, not a startup experiment.
Founder Spedan Lewis transferred his ownership stake into a trust held on behalf of every employee, who are called "Partners" and share in the company's profits. Nearly a century later, the Partnership still operates its department stores and Waitrose supermarkets under that same structure.
A chemical manufacturer whose founder handed the company to its workers in 1951, decades before "employee ownership trust" was a common legal term. Scott Bader is frequently cited as one of the earliest formal experiments in transferring full ownership and governance to employees.
When International Harvester planned to shutter a Missouri plant, its managers led an employee buyout to save it. SRC went on to pioneer "open-book management" — sharing financials and teaching every employee to read them — and grew into a group of 100+ employee-owned businesses.
— Kaplan Akıncılar, Founder, LML
Figures via the National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO); approximate, most recent published estimates.
These companies operate in grocery, chemicals, manufacturing, and retail — not live event production. But the underlying bet is the same one LML is making: technicians who have equity in the outcome do better work and stick around longer than technicians treated as interchangeable day-rate labor.
None of the companies above got the structure right on day one. Mondragon started with a single stove-manufacturing cooperative in 1956. King Arthur was 214 years old before it became employee-owned. Ownership is a direction, not a switch you flip — and that's exactly how LML is approaching it: build the collective, prove the model on real shows, and formalize equity for the crew as the company grows.