In his 12 years on the job, Justin Berk, a 44-year-old product manager at an insurance-tech company, had seen his employer get bought and sold twice. All he had received in return was a “pat on the back” at a company meeting.
“A pat on the back is nice, but it doesn’t pay the bills,” he said.
When KKR sold his company, Integrated Specialty Coverages, to Onex Partners, the company meeting was much more significant: Berk received 30 months of his salary as a cash bonus as part of a KKR initiative to share its private equity profits with workers at its portfolio companies.
Berk and other long-tenured employees, like Bonnie Stewart, the director of operations for ISC subsidiary Gaslamp Insurance Services, received 30 months of their salaries. The payouts were announced at a September 18 meeting in San Diego’s iconic Hotel Del Coronado, following a Champagne toast in celebration of the sale, in which KKR said it delivered a 2.5 return.
Stewart said that if she could “bottle up the feeling” of receiving that windfall, she “wouldn’t sell it.” The change in mindset that came with the program, starting at the foundational level of renaming “employees” as “owners,” and the hard work that led to the profitable sale, were worth even more.
“I don’t think Travis Kelce would sell the feeling of winning a Super Bowl,” Stewart said. “He earned that. His team earned that.”
In total, KKR paid nearly 400 ISC employees between 3 and 30 months of their salary after closing the sale. Payouts were based on when workers joined the company, and ranged from a minimum of $10,000 to a maximum payout of more than $413,000. The average payout for workers who joined in 2025 was $24,500.
It is part of a KKR initiative that’s helped profit-sharing gain steam across the industry. KKR has exited 15 of the 91 companies it has programs with, delivering $2 billion to more than 40,000 employees.
These employees don’t receive actual shares when KKR buys a company; instead, a portion of the company’s equity is earmarked for them. Their potential payout, just like KKR’s, is based on the return it gets on that initial investment.
We spoke to three ISC employees, who told us that the money was life-changing, allowing two to save up for a down payment in a pricey Southern California housing market.
Berk took his two daughters, 12 and 10, to Maui, Hawaii, for the first time last year, a vacation that wasn’t possible before. He’s also no longer wincing at fees for club sports.
“It’s easier now to say yes to more meaningful family choices,” Berk said.
The cash
Payouts were made when the deal closed on November 24 of last year, and were based on the employee’s current salary and tenure at the company.
Stewart, who started at the company 19 years ago, was among the employees who received the highest monthly payout. She has two younger kids and said the money is “very impactful” on her family, allowing her to think about creating wealth for her children. It’s expensive to live in Southern California, and it can be hard to save.
“It gave us that new opportunity to look at investments that we might not necessarily know of before,” Stewart said. KKR provided free financial advisors to employee owners as part of the deal. Stewart and her colleagues even asked executives how they managed their money to learn how to handle their coming windfall.
Trevor Sybert, a 49-year-old underwriter who joined the company in 2020, had scheduled a work trip to South Carolina, so he watched the meeting over Zoom in an airport alongside another executive. He was “bummed” to miss the event live, but most importantly, he was going to get 15 months’ pay.
Right now, he said, the money is sitting in a high-yield savings account, but he plans to use it as a down payment on a condo, as he and his wife divorced and sold their house.
He’s feeling real “financial freedom,” he said, and plans to be conservative with his spending. Sybert said his financial advisor also helped him set up his financial future following his divorce. The first step was growing the size of his emergency fund.
For Berk, the money means that he can do more things with his family. But most importantly, it means that his family can have a home of their own.
“Saving up for a down payment out here is almost impossible unless you’re an executive at a company,” Berk said. “Now, I have a nice cushion that will become a down payment on a house.”
The change
When KKR bought the company in 2021, Sybert instantly saw the appeal of the ownership program: “We are going to make some money if the business does well,” he said.
Sybert said he learned more about business than ever before — “This is the first time I’ve ever heard of EBITDA,” he said — attending quarterly owners’ meetings that got deep into the details on ISC’s performance.
KKR has built and iterated on an in-house playbook for these investments, which it has now helped export to other industry leaders, such as Apollo, through the nonprofit Ownership Works. Blackstone, which is not part of the initiative but has made its own employee-ownership pledge, recently took a company with an employee-ownership plan, Jersey Mike’s, public for the first time.
At the beginning, the workers, redubbed “owners” as part of KKR’s initiative, were given a crash course in valuation, the company’s business plan, and how it gets its revenue. Each quarter, company leaders would walk through the company’s projected valuation and give a performance scorecard.
Information became increasingly transparent throughout the process, said Berk, with many employees gaining direct access to business intelligence dashboards to understand the gritty details of the business.
But it’s the behavior that information fostered that really made the difference.
“When you own a piece of it, you’re not just clocking out and saying, ‘Well, I’m done for the day,'” Berk said. “You might stick around a little later, do a little extra, make that extra trip to the broker. You’re owed a little piece of the pie, so you’re going to take better care of it.”
It also meant that employees who weren’t willing to adopt the mindset left over time, Berk said, while the rest stayed. He said his team had only lost one member in three years.
The company created the Bright Ideas club, a place for workers to pitch potential big-picture changes at the company, as well as a Founders Club, which highlighted the top five employee-owners each year.
For Stewart, who had started as a receptionist before rising to her current role managing roughly 20 employees, the switch from employer to “owner” was natural. She said she noticed a change in how her team would come in with new ideas to solve problems. Her fellow owners were “thinking outside of the box,” she said.
“In retrospect, we grew a lot, and for the best,” she said.
Over the years, it also became apparent that the company was edging closer to a sale, with metrics improving at each quarterly meeting.
Stewart found out about an event invite two days before the event. All signs pointed to good news, but “I did not want to say it out loud,” Stewart said. But as she saw balloons lining the entrance way and cameras and light set-ups, she could sigh a deep breath.
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