Integrity Marketing Establishes Employee Ownership Plan
The distributor is not calling the plan an ESOP.
A rapidly growing life, health and annuity distributor says it has set up an employee ownership plan for its employees.
Integrity Marketing Group LLC says it has provided about $50 million in funding for the plan.
(Related: Integrity Marketing Acquires Iowa-Based Distributor)
The Dallas-based company says it’s making the plan available to employees who have at least one year of tenure at the company, at no cost to the employees.
Integrity Marketing — which has announced many acquisitions in the past few years — now has about 750 employees. The company says employees of any newly acquired companies will also join the ownership program.
The $50 million funding level amounts to an average of about $67,000 per employee.
Integrity Marketing now has relationships with about 235,000 agents and brokers, and those producers reach about 4 million clients, according to company figures.
The company says that, in 2019, it expects to help insurers place business that will generate about $2 billion in new premiums.
In the past, Integrity Marketing has said the owner-managers of the firms it was acquiring would receive ownership interests in Integrity Marketing. The company has never used a term such as “stock” or “partnership” to describe the nature of the ownership interests.
About 6,600 U.S. businesses were using an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) company ownership structures in 2016, according to the National Center for Employee Ownership.
The center reports that organizations were also operating about 3,800 “ESOP-like” plans that, technically, were not ESOPs.
— Read ESOPs: A Tax-Advantaged Business Succession Plan, on ThinkAdvisor.
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