Newport Restaurant Group is 100% owned by its workers - and has paid them $33 million since 1995: ‘Nobody else gets the benefit’

Andy Staane started as a bartender at The Mooring in Newport, R.I., in 2002, as a teenager trying to scrape together a few extra bucks. Twenty-four years later, Staane is still in the same role at the same company. But he isn’t just an employee anymore—he’s also a part owner, just like all of his coworkers.

Newport Restaurant Group, which owns The Mooring and 17 other restaurants and hospitality venues across Rhode Island and Massachusetts, is one of the few companies in the country where the shareholders aren’t outside investors but the employees themselves. Founded in 1925 as a fuel oil business, the company sold off its other assets and began an employee stock ownership plan in 1995, according to Nation’s Restaurant News . It has since become 100% employee-owned .

What started as a summer job for Staane became a lifelong career because staying was a no-brainer. “If I’m going to do this for a living, I may as well stay with the company that pays me the ESOP, gives me the health insurance, paid time off, the stock options, 401k,” Staane told Fortune .

The restaurant group, now more than 100 years old, has about 1,100 employee-owners, a number that swells to roughly 1,800 workers during the busy summer season. The company says its turnover is low, with many employees—like Staane—planning to stay for a lifetime.

The company operates as an ESOP, or employee stock ownership plan, a type of retirement plan in which a trust holds company shares for participating employees. The beneficiaries, in this case, are the workers who staff Newport’s restaurants, from the Castle Hill Inn and 22 Bowen’s in Newport to Hemenway’s in Providence.

“Everything that we’re doing is to drive the value of our company that only we, as the employee owners, get the benefit of. Nobody else gets the benefit of that work,” Newport Restaurant Group CEO Mick Lamond, who joined the company as CFO in 2005 and was promoted to the top job in 2025, told Fortune .

According to the company, employees become fully vested after six years of service and must work 800 hours a year to participate—only about 15 hours a week. If they leave, the company buys back their shares, and employees can roll the money into a retirement account or cash out. Since 1995, the company says it has paid out $33 million to its employee-owners.

For Lamond, the “overarching success story” is giving employees a retirement plan that grows at no cost to them, based on their collective success and hard work. Because their payout is tied to the company’s performance, he says, employees care more about their work and invest more of themselves in their jobs.