Executive Compensation
Science, Meet Art.
Family and privately held business executive compensation is a science and an art because it requires both knowledge and decades of experience to get it right.
Steps in Compensation Planning
Family and privately held businesses are unique. Working with them requires a deep understanding of privately held businesses, as well as the nuances of family dynamics. Creating the right alignment with the right economics is an art and a science. And we are recognized as experts in both.
Benchmarking
You’re not sure what the industry compensation standards are for executives in other family and privately held businesses. That makes it difficult to know how to attract and retain the best talent.
We start the executive compensation planning process with benchmarking and review compensation data in the context of company size, location, and industry to get an apples-to-apples comparison of comparable executive compensation.
We examine:● Base Salary● Short-Term Incentives● Long-Term Incentives● Core Benefits● Executive Benefits
Benchmarking compensation for family and privately held businesses is not like formulating standards for any other public or private company. Also, only someone with deep experience in family offices can get it right. We are the premier provider for compensation benchmarking.
Evaluating
Benchmarking is only the start of your executive compensation plan. In the evaluation stage, we examine the benchmarks against the current compensation structure and the business and family goals. We identify the levers that will be most useful in driving behavior. Remuneration matters in achieving business goals, so we analyze the structure and objectives, always viewing them in the context of the family or privately held business. We use compensation to drive business goals and our experience in family and privately held businesses gives us plenty of mechanisms to effect change.
Incentive Planning
With the benchmarking and evaluation complete, the next step involves designing incentive plans to motivate the behaviors that will lead to achieving specific business goals. We work with families and privately held businesses to identify the key metrics and the most important behaviors that they want to create that really support their business strategy on an annual and long-term basis.
Short Term Vs. Long TermIncentives can be short term, such as year-end bonuses, or they can be long-term devices used to support continuing growth and profitability. We develop incentive plans to align the interests of the family and privately held businesses on both a short and long-term basis.
Long-Term Incentive PlanningLong-term incentive planning is the means by which family and privately held businesses can share some of the value creation with the right executive team. We measure the value increase of the family or privately held business in value over a specific period of years and align that with the executives’ incentives. From simulated equity plans to supplemental executive retirement plans, we can design the right structures to support your business goals.
Sales Compensation
When you need to stay competitive in your industry, it’s critical that your sales team’s behavior is aligned with your goals.
If your team isn’t performing as well as you’d hoped, your sales compensation strategy may be at fault. We can help you fine-tune your sales compensation plan to attract and retain top sales talent.
We provide benchmarking, evaluation, compensation, and incentive design to align compensation strategically with your organizational goals.
We are experienced at developing and communicating plans, so your sales team is fully activated at the end of our engagement.
Our executive compensation planning process has four phases.
Phase I:Discovery
We conduct interviews, collect data, review current roles, pay levels, and goals.
Phase II: Benchmark & Analysis
We benchmark pay and benefit levels and analyze the competitive market.
Phase III: Reporting
We present our findings and recommendations for designing the incentive plans.
Phase IV: Final Plan
We offer multifunctional programs that include the needed set of features and support services.