Shauwn and Catherine Collins, owners of Absolute Electric, wanted to offer both stock and profit incentives to retain and motivate key employees. After losing several team members and expanding from 15 to 18 staff, they both felt the need to proactively invest in a program that would help employees feel more like owners and maintain consistent, high-quality work across multiple sales and installation crews.
“We recently lost a few employees and want to be proactive in incentivizing new and existing employees to stay,” said Shauwn.
Seeking a transparent solution for granting equity and sharing profits, Shauwn partnered with Reins. Absolute Electric set aside 15% of the company for employee ownership, allocating 10% at launch to leave room for future awards. The stock is divided evenly among participating employees, while profit-sharing is milestone-based and tailored to specific roles. According to Shauwn, getting the program up and running took about a month.
From signing up to employees receiving their first award, it was 1 month. That included setting up and designing the program from scratch with the help of Reins.
By tying a sense of ownership directly to performance outcomes, Absolute Electric saw an immediate improvement in employee buy-in—particularly around their new sales-install model. Shauwn noticed that once employees felt like stakeholders, their decision-making and commitment leveled up.
We got the sense they started to act more like owners and saw how the model will help us grow and so will their equity.
