This Illinois company was just sold for $3 billion, but hundreds of employees are getting a cut. Some will get $800,000.

When non-public fairness agency KKR introduced the $3 billion sale Monday of C.H.I. Overhead Doorways to metal firm Nucor, it created a windfall for a whole lot of hourly staff on the plant in tiny Arthur, Illinois, who will obtain between $20,000 and $800,000 every when the transaction closes.

The deal represents an enormous return on funding for KKR, which purchased the storage door producer for $600 million in 2015. For workers, who had been vested with fairness within the firm at no cost, the sale is probably life-changing.

“I had no concept that was going to be this huge of a deal,” stated Rhonda Jamison, 60, workplace supervisor at C.H.I. Overhead Doorways.

Jamison, a 17-year veteran of the storage door firm, realized concerning the sale and her six-figure payout at an all-employee assembly final week. The payouts range based mostly on seniority and wage, with some long-tenured truck drivers — the highest-paid hourly staff — hauling house upward of $800,000 from the sale.

Greater than 630 hourly staff and truck drivers will obtain a median of $180,000 by way of the sale, the corporate stated.

Positioned in Arthur, a village of about 2,100 residents south of Champaign, the 41-year-old firm makes storage doorways for business and residential use. When KKR bough the corporate in 2015, it allowed all 800 staff — together with salaried workers — to take part within the inventory possession plan as a free profit.

Staff who earned greater than $100,000 per 12 months had been additionally allowed to take a position their very own cash into the inventory plan.

This system has been rolled out by New York-based KKR at 25 corporations in its portfolio since 2011. The storage door producer, which generated KKR’s highest return on funding in additional than 30 years, proved the worth of the fairness plan for each possession and workers.

“We do it as a result of clearly it’s good for the employees,” stated Pete Stavros, 47, co-head of personal fairness at KKR and chairman of C.H.I. Overhead Doorways. “And it seems, it’s additionally sensible enterprise. It results in a extra engaged, secure, financially resilient, much less prone to give up workforce, which yields higher outcomes for corporations and buyers.”

Stavros, an Arlington Heights native whose dad was a union highway grader with a Chicago development firm, developed the mannequin for vesting hourly workers with fairness possession for gratis. Along with an possession stake, workers had been allotted $1 million per 12 months for enhancing the manufacturing facility, investing in every part from air-con to new break rooms and a cafeteria.

Productiveness flourished, Stavros stated, with income rising by 120% and the earnings margin rising from 21% to 35% throughout KKR’s possession of C.H.I.

Final month, Stavros helped launch a nonprofit, Possession Works, to assist proliferate the worker possession mannequin at extra corporations.

Based in 1981, C.H.I. Overhead Doorways is the biggest employer in Arthur, which is about three hours south of Chicago. The producer, which has had 4 non-public fairness homeowners throughout the brand new millennium, plans to proceed its operations on the similar location beneath the brand new proprietor, Nucor, a North Carolina-based metal producer.

The sale, which is predicted to shut in June, pending regulatory approval, will generate greater than $360 million in payouts for 800 workers. Hourly workers will obtain about $114 million of the proceeds, whereas salaried workers will get about $250 million, the corporate stated.

When Stavros introduced the deal in entrance of about 400 workers final Wednesday, with potential payouts projected on a big display screen, Jamison and her co-workers had been overwhelmed by the information.

“The entire crowd went loopy,” Jamison stated. “Grown males had been crying. I nearly fainted.”

Jamison, who lives in close by Atwood, will obtain “a number of hundred thousand {dollars}” from the sale. She plans to repay her house mortgage and several other loans, and use a number of the proceeds from the sale to assist a grandson with particular wants.

She doesn’t plan to give up work anytime quickly, nonetheless.

“There’s no cause for me to depart,” Jamison stated. “I wish to keep so long as they’ll have me.”

rchannick@chicagotribune.com