There is a moment that captures everything about Constellia’s transition to employee ownership. A team member said to founder Alan Gotto, “If this were my company, this is what I would do.” His response was simple. Make it their company.
That exchange says more about the future of business than any mission statement ever could. It cuts through the familiar slogans about being “people first” or having a “family culture.”
This is a business managing more than £400 million pounds of public spending and working with over 250 organisations across central government, the NHS, utilities, local government and major private sector clients. They manage more than 3,000 suppliers - it’s a substantial, sophisticated organisation.
Many businesses at this scale take the private equity route. But as Constellia CEO Rob Levene notes, that path typically means optimising for short term returns and often losing the culture that made the business successful in the first place.
Instead, they sold 75 and a half percent of the business to an employee-owned trust. The people who built the company will now benefit from its success.
Constellia’s move comes at a time when the political environment is shifting too. Labour has committed to doubling the size of the co-operative sector and supporting alternative ownership models. But policy only gains traction when businesses prove these models work in real conditions and at real scale.
Constellia is now one of those proof points. A business embedded in supply chains that reach across the UK economy. When clients see them thriving as an employee-owned organisation, some will inevitably ask whether this model could work for them too.
A Movement, Not a Moment
Movements do not grow through manifestos alone. They grow through examples that make the alternative impossible to ignore.
As Gotto and Levene demonstrate, sometimes the most transformative thing a leadership team can do is simply to make their company what it always claimed to be: a place where people matter, not as a slogan, but as owners.