Creating an Employee Owned and Operated Enterprise System

Example of “Working Men” Pooling Resources to Create a Real-Estate Club:

When I was working in the oil field for a drilling company, I met a coworker named Matt Ruhl. Matt Ruhl was formerly living in Seattle Washington working for a barge company. This company moved products and goods and freight to Alaska by barge. There was no cheaper means of moving goods other than by huge volumes loaded on these barges so the company always busy and were prospering greatly. The men working there were making a lot of over-time pay working long hours seven-days a week. Matt had a dream to one day retire as a landlord king so that he could live off of rental income when he was too old to do heavy physical labor. So, he proposed a plan to his fellow employees to pool their disposable wealth (that which was over and above their living expenses) to buy real estate. What they did was to buy rental houses and fix them up using their own labor and then rent it out. This caused a revenue stream which allowed them to buy more rental houses. Over time this activity “snowballed” until they were able to buy many rental houses for cash (without bank loans bleeding them financially). Not long after, the members of this real estate club had enough rental income so that they could all afford to retire. But since this was working so well, they decided to just remain on the job and continue buying more rental properties as before. Thus, these ordinary “working men” eventually become millionaires by real estate investments. This enterprise worked well in Seattle because of the high demand for housing and the premium rental rates that people were paying for housing.  

It is based on this real-life story that I have desired to create an “employee-owned” association which would become an umbrella for investments and enterprise creation for the benefit of the members of our own club.

We want to create the numerous industries needed to manufacture the various goods and products needed by our members. We will also setup our heavy industry to manufacture the machinery and parts needed for building our underground production systems. We will build our own Tunnel Boring Machines (TBM) on location as well as replaceable parts like diamond cutter heads used by the (TBM).

See the links “Franchise System” and “Korean Manufacturing” for more details.

Also see the video link “Making Industrial Diamonds” for more details on the manufacture of industrial diamonds used in cutter heads for our drilling operations.

Why We Do Not Use a Centralized Command Model

I once heard a story of snipers in WWII who would systematically target those who were officers and leaders of the enemy army. It was said that lower rank soldiers during the war should not salute an officer because this could identify him as a sniper target. So, snipers would observe if a man had greying hair and wore prescription eye-glasses (indicating he was of mature age) and snipers would observe if other soldiers looked to him for instructions. This would be enough evidence to target such a man as being a man of leadership. The snipers knew that taking out a leader would render the remaining soldiers of lesser rank as largely “ineffective” if these lesser-rank soldiers had no more direction or orders given to them by higher rank leadership. This is one reason why the Israeli Defense Forces train their soldiers of all ranks to be able to make battlefield decisions during the heat of battle. In a real war-time scenario things can transpire quickly and they often do not have time to contact the headquarters and wait for instructions from a centralized command. It is for this reason that there is an advantage in not having an organization that is too overly dependent on one CEO making all of the decisions.

This further has application to what we want to create for our “employee-owned” enterprise system. This system cannot have an overly centralized command structure but it must be able to adapt and adjust and allow people in various departments to make the best decisions that they can based upon their current situation. This means that we want to teach our people of all ranks to be able to make decisions as the need arises.

Yet at the same time we can organize our economic system in such a way that we can all prosper and engage in group synergism as we work together within a common association.

Current Application

In order to get our system setup and operational, I will be the one to assign the first leaders of this newly created system. We will have “try-outs” organized so that young men can try-out for any position available. We will have a “merit-based” promotion system so we will promote those who do the best at the tasks given to them. Any number of young men can sign up for any available position and we will select the best man for the job based on what they can do.

Once we have these key-positions filled then these young men can assume leadership over their given departments and thus our system will develop from the beginning as a non-centralized leadership command with various departments run by leaders and their respective teams. But all of these departments will be part of a greater association of groups which all work together toward a common goal.

Future hiring and firing can be conducted by the first “pioneer leaders” that we assign. Thus I can work myself out of a job once this system is set up and fully operational leaving our assigned leaders to implement the leadership decisions that they see as the best fit for any situation.

See also the link “Business Ethics” for more details.