How To ... Create an employee stock-ownership plan

Creating an employee stock-ownership plan isn't easy. And it isn't cheap.

Just ask Ted Bill, the president of Pelican Wire Co. in Naples, who sold his family company to a trust that controls the employee stock ownership plan in 2008. “We spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $600,000 to $700,000,” Bill says.

Bill says it's important to decide what such a plan is designed to accomplish. “Before you get a whole bunch of people involved, get your long-term advisers together and really talk about what you want to do,” he says.