The right compensation design can be the difference between attracting and retaining an executive team that remains focused on creating long-term ownership value and an organization with high turnover, an inability to “close the deal” on important new hires, and executive behaviors that are not aligned with business goals.

We design and implement equity and cash-incentive compensation programs to most effectively support our clients’ business objectives. This includes a range of approaches from helping start-ups implement their first stock-option or “phantom” equity plans to ensuring that a Fortune 500 company’s cash bonus plan balances the need for executive initiative with stakeholder concerns about financial risk.

Our design process typically includes a thorough review of stakeholder objectives and concerns (e.g., business goals, issues with retaining and motivating key talent) and a financial and competitive analysis.

Understanding the competitive landscape is critical to the design of a compensation program that will effectively attract, retain and motivate employees. Information as to how peer organizations compensate their employees also provides the Boards of public companies with a level of comfort about their own executive pay practices.

To ensure that your pay practices are consistent with targeted market practices, we work with you to first identify appropriate peer organizations and then conduct and analyze benchmarking surveys around both executive and director compensation. Our surveys are often developed to reflect perquisites and benefits as well as more traditional cash and equity compensation.

Retirement plans, when purposefully designed, can be extremely helpful tools for attracting and retaining employees. We can put together defined-benefit Supplemental Executive Retirement Plans (“SERPs”), for example, that are both tax-effective and conducive to long-term retention. Often such plans can also prove useful in attracting executives from companies that offer traditional defined-benefit plans.

In addition, we can assist our clients in implementing and financing non-qualified deferred compensation plans to provide their executives tax-effective savings vehicles without the pay caps and IRC non-discrimination restrictions of traditional 401(k) plans.

Employee Agreements can play a significant role in attracting and retaining executive talent and ensuring their sustained focus on long-term corporate objectives. Whether the need is for new hires or current executives, we work with Boards and owners to identify the key corporate objectives and build Agreements around significant matters such as compensation, benefits, length, severance and change-of-control.

Public Board responsibilities related to executive pay have acquired an increasingly high profile. By assisting Boards in understanding the competitive environment and developing executive compensation programs that appropriately balance risk-taking and rewards, we provide our clients with confidence they have met the standards for due diligence with respect to compensation issues.

We also help Boards develop the Compensation Discussion and Analysis report required by the SEC to be included in the company’s annual proxy statement.