John Hoffmire is Research Associate at the Centre for Mutual and Co-owned Business at University of Oxford’s Kellogg College. His main areas of expertise are employee ownership, impact investing, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial finance, crowdfunding, ownership, and wealth.
He is probably best known, presently, for helping to curate the Oxford Employee Ownership Symposium, in cooperation with The ESOP Association. The Symposium brings approximately 140 government leaders, practitioners, NGO managers, and academics to Oxford and London each August for three days of extensive learning and sharing about the development of employee ownership in various country contexts. Most years, more than 25 countries are represented. The Symposium is given credit for having helped change the laws and policies of five countries.
John’s achievements in both the academic and business worlds are extensive and – having participated in work, research and speaking tours in 98 countries – John is regarded as one of the leading experts in his field. His pioneering approach has led to achievements such as: leading the first sale of shares for a microfinance bank to an Employee Stock Ownership Plan at K-REP in Kenya; helping create and currently chairing an effective non-profit organization – the three office Center on Business and Poverty, which assists low-income people in many areas of the world through market-driven approaches and initiating and helping lead the process of setting up more than 50 businesses for and with low-income people.
Throughout his for-profit and non-profit career, John has has been referenced in numerous journals and publications including the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Washington Post.
Such work was recognised in 2012 when John was awarded the Darwin Nelson Community Impact Award by Wisconsin Business Development for his ‘tireless efforts to expand the financial literacy and tax form preparation programmes that have benefited so many.’ Upon leaving the University of Wisconsin-Madison, John’s responsibilities included building an entity whereby each year the students of Said Business School, at University of Oxford, where he taught, ran a $5,000,000 social bond fund which was tracked daily and competed against funds controlled by other business school students.
Before becoming an academic, John had a twenty-year career in equity investing, venture capital, consulting and investment banking. His work has had a particular focus on Employee Stock Ownership Plans. As founder and CEO of an investment-banking firm, he helped employees buy and manage approximately $2.2 billion worth of ESOP stock. He sold his firm to American Capital, which then went public. John left American Capital as Senior Investment Officer when the company reached $1 billion in assets. After leaving American Capital, John was Vice President at Ampersand Ventures, formerly Paine Webber’s private equity group. Earlier in his career, after he finished his Ph.D. at Stanford University, he was a consultant at Bain & Company.
John has fairly good language abilities in Spanish. And he has dabbled at learning Portuguese, German, Chinese, Arabic, and French.
RESEARCH
John’s main areas of research are in employee ownership, impact investing, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial finance, crowdfunding, ownership, and wealth. He has published research in journals such as Family Business Review, Families in Society, Journal of Employee Ownership Law and Finance, and in books published by Oxford University Press. His research has also been published by the Filene Research Institute and The ESOP Association. John has also written four books with co-authors: Work Made Easy (Westland 2024); The Business of Personal Finance (Routledge 2022); The Economics of Serving Low-Income Employees at Tax Time: Implications for Credit Unions, (Filene Research Institute 2009); and How to Market Your ESOP Company, (ESOP Association 1993).
In addition, John has published some 170 articles, chapters and interviews in journals, books, newspapers, and other publications.
John’s current research projects include work in the following areas:
Employee ownership – John is part of a team addressing the linkage between productivity and having employees own part or all of the company where they work. Special emphasis is given in this research to companies, policies and processes in the US, India, China, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, the UK, and several African nations.
Impact Investing – John is part of a team focusing on several key fronts: the structures around the setting up of funds and closing deals in the impact investing space. Countries where we have shown special interest are the US, India, China, Taiwan, the UK, and several African nations.
Crowdfunding – John is part of a research team portraying a broad landscape of crowdfunding including uses related to raising equity for companies, donations for NGOs, lending, and collecting donations in exchange for a gift. Our research is more descriptive in nature and covers many different countries.
Ownership and Wealth – John is part of a research team which has completed extensive research about the ownership of land, housing and companies in about twenty countries. We have correlated ownership of these types of assets with quality of life factors such as wealth distribution, educational achievement, and health.
For further information about John’s research go to: cobap.org. See the library tab.
TEACHING
John co-directs the Leading in an Ownership Environment Program at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. He also teaches MBA, EMBA, undergraduate and executive education students at various Chinese universities in the following fields: employee ownership, impact investing, crowdfunding, leadership, finance, entrepreneurship, and social finance. He encourages students to engage with real life business situations and relate them to their own experiences. He often draws on his own work history to give real examples of academic theory.
Dr Hoffmire is also recruiting students and researchers interested in employee ownership, impact investing, and crowdfunding on a flexible basis. Please send a short statement of interest by email. No resources, beyond occasional hot desk facilities, are available to support such visitors. Hoffmire’s email address is hoffmire@wisc.edu.
ENGAGEMENT
Until recently, John has been chair of the Personal Finance Employee Education Fund (PFEEF), an international organization that focuses on addressing issues of low and moderate income employees and communities through business-based approaches to economic development. PFEEF has now helped more than 15,000 people receive free online financial and investor literacy training. PFEEF owns and markets one of the premier validated surveys which tracks whether financial literacy interventions are effective. It is called the Personal Financial Wellness Survey.
John serves on numerous NGO and advisory boards including: Outline India, and the Center on Business and Poverty. He has also assisted with privatizations involving employee ownership in Tanzania, Hungary, the US, and Zimbabwe.
John served as chair of the board of directors of three for profit companies which he helped start: Hoffmire & Associates (an investment bank); Oxford Pharmaceuticals (a firm which has received approximately $125 million of investment); and Cadence Innova (a change management consulting firm which was employee-owned and had 140 consultants at the time at which it was recently sold to Next15, a public company). In addition, John served on the boards of Wisconsin Business Development Growth Fund – one of the larger Community Development Financial Institutions in the Midwest and Woodward Communications Inc. – a large significantly employee-owned media company with holdings in many parts of the US.
John was also a syndicated columnist who wrote regularly for the Deseret News among other periodicals.
PERSONAL
John has been married to his wife, Shelley, for more than 40 years. They have two adult children and two grandchildren. John enjoys running, swimming, golf, and skiing powder in places where he has to hike to find good snow. He and his wife live in Oxford.
