For most of my AEC industry career, board meetings began with the numbers: revenue, margin, utilization, backlog and cash flow. We examined them carefully and challenged management on the variances. That work matters.
I find myself wondering were we sometimes paying too much attention to what was easiest to measure and not enough to what mattered most to the long-term health of an employee-owned firm?
We could tell whether utilization had slipped or a business unit was missing its targets. We were less equipped to tell whether the people building the next generation were still behaving like owners.
Those are very different things.
I’ve seen firms maintain respectable financial performance while their ownership culture quietly eroded. Senior people became protective of their practices and less invested in the success of the whole. Difficult conversations were avoided. Developing successors was supported in principle but neglected in practice. People did their jobs, served clients and collected dividends but fewer took responsibility for what didn’t directly benefit them.
Financial statements rarely reveal this early.
Boards should ask:
Who does the unglamorous work that strengthens the whole firm? Who invests in future leaders without an immediate personal benefit? Who challenges colleagues thoughtfully, confronts uncomfortable truths and puts the enterprise ahead of a business unit?
And who still says “our firm”rather than “the firm”?
Boards don’t need twenty more measures. They need a few meaningful signals, grounded in what directors hear and observe, and the courage to act when those signals change, even when the financial results still look good.
Employee ownership is a financial structure. Acting like an owner is a behaviour. The first can survive long after the second begins to disappear.
If ownership behaviour started deteriorating tomorrow, would your board recognize it before the financial statements did?
By then, it may already be years too late.