Our Firm, Our Future: Putting Employee Ownership into Practice

Acentech has been an employee-owned firm since its inception over 30 years ago. Today, our employee ownership structure is based on an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). Essentially everyone who works here for at least a year is an owner of the firm. The ESOP isn’t just an ownership structure – it’s an ethos. One of my favorite aspects of our collaborative co-ownership culture is our recent tradition of annual all-hands meetings focused on our firm’s strategy.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many changes on our industry, and like most firms, Acentech went fully remote for a while, starting in 2020. In some ways, this shift had significant benefits: our cross-office collaboration improved, and the flexibility of hybrid and remote work has helped our recruitment and staff retention.

By 2023, our offices were starting to become populated again, but not everyone was ‘in office’ simultaneously. That year also marked a leadership transition for Acentech – Jeff Zapfe passed the baton of Acentech’s presidency to me. It felt like the perfect time to host an all-hands meeting and reconnect. We flew our employees from across the country to our Cambridge headquarters that June, hosted a social event, and rolled up our sleeves to discuss and advance the firm’s priorities. We’ve been doing it every year since.

In 2023, in addition to celebrating Jeff’s tenure of leadership and spending time enjoying one another’s company at social events and activities, we used our time together to work on things that were important to us. We broke into seven different groups to tackle a range of both technical and non-technical areas of innovation – topics that we crowd-sourced from among the staff, ranging from mentorship practices to sound measurement techniques.

In 2024, we focused on a refresh of our strategic plan – a five-year plan that we had initiated in 2021. In 2025, we celebrated Jim Barnes’s retirement from day-to-day consulting and workshopped two specific topics: our values and how those values inform our project selection and staffing, and AI.

And this year, 2026, we returned to strategy. This all-hands gathering was particularly special: acknowledging the successful conclusion of our 2021-2026 strategic plan, this year’s meeting was key to the development of Acentech’s next 5-year plan, which centers on excellence in all that we do, with a clear and consistent focus on innovation. Innovation has been in Acentech’s DNA since its founding and is reflected in everything from our values to our strategic initiatives like the Innovation & Resources Group (IRG) and the Lab at Acentech, where we highlight stories of our work on the frontiers of our field, and provide online, educational listening experiences.

What all these gatherings have in common is that they put Acentech’s people at the center of everything we do. As co-owners of the firm, everyone here has not only a stake in its future but a voice in shaping it. If that sounds like the kind of place you’d like to invest your professional time and talent, please check out our careers page, where you can find current openings.