The Power of Employee-Ownership

Midway through their careers, Bill Roark and Don Holder had both worked for a highly successful company when it was sold. For months, Roark invited Holder to breakfast and discussed starting a new company with him. Both had felt they had made commitments to valued employees in the past that they were powerless to honor after the acquisition. To prevent a similar situation from occurring in the future, Roark and Holder envisioned a business that would become an employee owned company through which its employees would have better control of their destinies. Through a phone call on his way to the University of Oklahoma for an Alabama Crimson Tide football game, Holder finally accepted Roark's offer to join the startup in early September 2002. The new company started in a modest suite at 2705 Artie St. that included a few offices and a conference room. The night before, "the company didn't even have desks," said Roark, who bought and assembled some desks from Staples and also purchased some used furniture.

Since those early days, the company's success has skyrocketed. Torch Technologies has more than 1,200 employee owners and finished 2020 with $550 million in revenue, making Torch one of the largest federal contractors in the nation. We believe that level of success is achieved by giving every employee owner a stake in the outcome.