you might wonder what happened to the ESOP during the company’s six-year struggle to survive. “It was like a starved cow in a drought,” said CEO Kyle Smith. “The law says that you have to at least pay the interest on your repurchase obligations. We abided by the rules, but we couldn’t afford to put enough money into the ESOP to keep it healthy. That made the ESOP a joke. Nobody cared about it. It wasn’t a good benefit. I had been there a couple of years, and I’d look at my statement and think, ‘Oh, great, I’ve got enough here to buy a cup of coffee.’”
