Farmington Business Owner Featured in The New Yorker

Kate Emery, founder of Farmington-based technology firm The Walker Group, was featured in a January 10 article in The New Yorker that ponders the question: "Can Companies Force Themselves To Do Good?" The story details her journey toward finding a unique exit strategy that preserves the values she instilled in her company. Emery, a leading voice for socially minded business in Connecticut, also founded the Hartford-based nonprofit reSET, which advances the social enterprise sector in the state through innovative programming and business support services.

For Emery, rethinking the nature of business has been a decades-long passion. "I was moved," she says, "by a book I read, The Divine Right of Capital, which exposed the fallacy of all the rules I’d learned in business school, and it led me to want something different for The Walker Group." She landed ultimately on a structure that shares one-third of distributed profits with employees and one-third with non-profits in the local community. "Before reading that book I didn’t realize there could be another way," she reflects. "After reading the book, I knew I needed to do something different and just needed to figure out how."

It's a philosophy that continues to drive Emery, even as she transitions to a second career as a full-time studio artist. The oil paintings she creates in her Farmington studio, which is open to the public by appointment, are sold to raise funds for reSET and many other local organizations, such as the Farmington Land Trust, Hands On Hartford and the Hill-Stead Museum.

Emery hopes the New Yorker piece, written by Nick Romeo, will encourage other business owners to explore a similar path. The story maps out her process, working with Purpose Foundation to create a unique trust structure that preserves The Walker Group's focus on people… not just profits. For clients of this technology solutions and digital marketing firm, the transition will be invisible. The new structure simply ensures this high-tech company's human touch will endure far into the future.