After 104 Years in Business, Respected Firm Completes ESOP Process
KANSAS CITY, MO — After more than one hundred years in business, Kansas City-based Musselman & Hall Contractors announce completion of the transition of the firm from a family-owned to an employee-owned enterprise.
Dexter Phillips
“We are very excited to be one hundred percent employee-owned,” said Dexter Phillips, former Executive Vice President and now Chief Executive Officer. “Musselman and Hall has more than a century of history, and we wanted to set the company up for the next one hundred years. This new structure establishes a perpetual ownership and leadership plan that will prove to be very beneficial for company stability in the years to come. It also allows for the employees to fully realize the rewards of their hard work.”
In an ESOP, company owners put their shares into a new entity that buys the company, in this case, members of the Hall, Morris and Phillips families, and passes ownership to more than forty non-union employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP).
“We have many dedicated employees who have been with us a very long time. Now instead of working for the company, they are the company,” said longtime CEO Doug Hall, now Board Chairman. “Whatever they produce goes into their own pockets and nowhere else. I think George Musselman would be happy to know that the little company he started back in the nineteenth century would ultimately be owned by the very people that worked so hard to make it what it is today.”
Under the new structure, a board of directors of up to five people will manage the company. Besides Board Chairman Hall and CEO Phillips, Mike Morris maintains his responsibilities as President.
M&H was founded in 1914 by George K. Musselman and John N. Hall after evolving from George K. Musselman Construction Co. in the early 1890s. M&H is one of the oldest and most-widely respected construction companies in the Midwest, with offices in Kansas City, St Louis, and Wichita. M&H has worked on a wide variety of projects in seventeen states in 2017 and currently employees 289 people. For more information, visit MusselmanandHall.com.
