Retire and take up golf perhaps. Gardening, cabinetry and woodworking had potential.

Or maybe start another company.

But until he was able to find a new owner for his Software Solutions Inc., the next life passage would have to wait.

Rettig, 58, president and co-founder of the Lebanon-based firm that sells software to small and medium-sized governments, considered selling the 22-person company to another software provider.

When he took a closer look at what was a solid prospect, Rettig realized he did not like the view.

"I think they would have laid off a lot of our staff and mined our customers," Rettig said. "They were 100 percent bottom line. That's not what I wanted to see happen because the company was really my baby."

So Rettig decided to join the rarest of rare owners, somebody who would sell his company to the employees.

"You get everybody's attention when you say we're about ready to sell out to another company," he said.

There was a problem: Software Solutions needed more revenue and more profit. Rettig offered a year's grace on his employee stock ownership plan so employees could move the numbers.

Earlier this month - the end of that first year of trial employee ownership - revenue grew by 11 percent and profit rocketed by 208 percent.

That meant employees now had the cash to buy the company. It didn't mean everybody was happy.

"I had one guy tell me: great, 'We own the company but now we have debt,' " Rettig said.

Annual revenues are $3.5 million. The sale price was not disclosed.

The learning curve for many employees can be sharp, said Corey Rosen, executive director of the National Center for Employee Ownership, a nonprofit information organization in Oakland, Calif.

About 3,000 companies in the United States have majority ownership by employees.

"These are hard concepts initially for employees to get their hands around," Rosen said. "They don't understand what a company is, how it gets created, where the stock comes from or how it gets valued. There's confusion over profit and sales.

"But that's not always the case. I remember talking to one machine operator who made about $8 an hour, and he said the biggest problem facing their company was that they had to improve their ratios. People can understand if the company has the patience to teach them."

He expects the trend to grow as baby boomer executives retire. A recent study suggested that the number of executives considering selling their companies has grown sevenfold since 2001.

E-mail at jeckberg@enquirer.com