About RBI
A cooperatively structured firm, built to serve the cooperative movement.
The Regenerative Business Institute was founded on a specific conviction: cooperatives deserve the same quality of financial expertise that capitalized corporations take for granted — but built around the distinct mechanics of cooperative ownership, not retrofitted from corporate practice.
Most financial services firms treat cooperative clients as a niche variation on a normal business. They apply the same equity frameworks, the same financial models, the same governance assumptions — and then wonder why the results don't serve the membership. Cooperatives are not unusual corporations. They're a fundamentally different model of economic organization, with different financial mechanics, different ownership obligations, and different definitions of success.
RBI was organized as a cooperative because we believe you build what you know. Our cooperative structure means our team has a stake in our success, our clients' relationships are built on mutual accountability, and our interests are genuinely aligned with the cooperatives we serve.
Kevin is an MBA with more than three decades of experience in cooperative and enterprise finance. He has built and advised cooperative enterprises across worker, housing, consumer, producer, and investment cooperative models.
Before founding RBI, Kevin managed budgets at federal program scale — including projects for the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA — giving him a perspective on financial governance that most cooperative financial advisors don't carry.
Kevin founded RBI because he saw a persistent gap between what cooperatives needed from their financial function and what the market was offering them. That gap is what RBI exists to close.
The fractional CFO and bookkeeping services are the foundation — the financial infrastructure that keeps RBI operating and serves cooperatives now. But the longer arc of RBI's work points toward something larger.
Equity strategy, fractional CFO, bookkeeping, and capitalization for cooperatives and employee-owned businesses. This is RBI's core practice — building the financial expertise inside the organizations the cooperative movement depends on.
The Coop Education Series provides cooperative boards and leadership with the financial literacy to govern effectively. Knowledge is a public good — RBI's education series is free because a financially literate cooperative movement is better for everyone.
A Regulation CF investment platform cooperatively structured and built for cooperative projects — where investors are members, not just capital sources. Currently in regulatory approval. This is the infrastructure that scales the cooperative development mission globally.
RBI was not founded as a neutral technical service provider. We have a point of view — and we think our clients deserve to know it.
We believe the cooperative model is one of the most important tools humanity has for organizing economic life in a way that distributes wealth rather than concentrating it. We believe that cooperatives can be financially rigorous, strategically ambitious, and globally scaled — and that the absence of specialist financial infrastructure has historically prevented them from being all three at once.
We believe that member ownership is not a compromise on financial performance. Done with discipline and expertise, it is a competitive advantage — for talent retention, community embeddedness, long-term orientation, and the kind of stakeholder alignment that most corporations spend billions attempting to simulate through incentive structures.
RBI's work is motivated by the conviction that the cooperative movement is not yet what it could be — and that part of the reason is a persistent shortage of the kind of specialized, rigorous financial expertise that we provide.
RBI's Cooperative Principles
Member ownership creates accountability
When the people doing the work own the organization, interests align in ways no incentive structure can replicate.
Equity belongs to the people who create it
Patronage-based equity distribution is not charity. It is the cooperative model correctly calculating and returning value to those who generated it.
Democracy requires financial literacy
A cooperative board that doesn't understand its balance sheet cannot govern democratically. Transparency and education are cooperative obligations, not optional features.
The movement scales through infrastructure
Individual cooperatives succeed through good management. The cooperative movement scales through shared infrastructure — financial tools, investment platforms, and education that makes every cooperative stronger.