A SPAC transaction is an easy, exciting, and invigorating path to your goals! Just kidding. It’s like being told to race up a hill dragging a giant piece of meat while being followed by your hungry, but loving dogs. While you are running up the hill you will need to go ahead and change nearly everything about your executive compensation and be ready to explain all of that, in writing, to a group of shareholders and Board members you have not…

The De-SPAC process usually runs from 3-5 months. During this time both parties work to convince current and potential shareholders that the union will work. Regulatory bodies like the SEC also get involved and provide their opinions on the impending marriage. The companies involved may also look to…

Stop selecting and modifying data to match your past pay decisions. Just let the market data tell its story and use your intelligence to decide what to do with that data. You do not have to follow those ahead of you, and they may not be traveling in the same direction. Don’t be afraid to take your own road.

In a sense, the SEC is asking if the Emperor is wearing any clothes. Many SPAC transactions have been completed successfully. Some have seriously less successful. This is to be expected and is not dissimilar from the traditional IPO market. Some succeed, some fail. But the SEC has seen…

New year brings new opportunities in compensation. In 2022, we will get our feet underneath us, gather our balance and leap forward into a new approach to pay that may provide a foundation for the next ten years. There is no reason to wait. The future of compensation is yours to create!

Executive compensation, especially at larger companies, continues to soar ever upward. Headlines in local newspapers and websites around the US are reporting record years, once again. While there are valid arguments for many huge CEO pay packages, there are at least as many that defy explanation. Why can’t we get our arms around this issue?

When dealing with equity, especially at private companies, expect the data to be terrible. Get more than one set of data so you can have a reasonable range for the terribleness. Then do your process in reverse. Instead of looking at the market data and determining how to fit people in, look at your people and determine what you are trying to accomplish. Then determine what levels of equity and types of features will help you reach your goal. Finally, take a look at the market data and determine if you are, based on your needs, within the right range of accuracy.

Sometimes we need to go back to our roots to be better compensation professionals. I have listed three lessons I learned while serving the public in retail establishments. I didn’t know that these would apply to a career in compensation when I started working about one-hundred years ago.

SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!!! Yep, today’s post is about cannibalism. Not “eating human flesh” cannibalism, more of the “eating young people's futures” cannibalism. There are now schools and investors willing to pay for college in exchange for a percentage of your future earnings.

Employee Stock Purchase Plans (ESPPs) get a bad rap although they should be lauded in wonderment. The proof is in the number of different areas that claim full, or no, responsibility for these underutilized instruments. ESPPs are much like the old Saturday Night Live “commercial” for Shimmer (“It’s a Dessert Topping AND a Floor Wax”). Unlike Shimmer, the mythical SNL product, ESPPs are actually delicious, effective and available on your compensation store shelves today. If your company does not have an ESPP, or has not optimized the current plan, you should consider reading on.

The CEO or head of Sales asks for something that you know CAN be done, but you are not sure YOU can do it. Sometimes we take a deep breath and drop in, trusting on our training and instinct. When we can’t do that, it’s time to ask for help.

Could it be that we are designing and communicating incentives for our highest performance all wrong? A recent study titled “Reappraisal of incentives ameliorates choking under pressure and is correlated with changes in the neural representations of incentives” appears to show that the fear of losing a reward allows people to perform at the edge better than the desire for earning more award. This study specifically looked at the impact of incentives on motor and neurological performance in high-pressure situations. While this may not apply to an average broad-based plan, it seems to have possible application in the high-stakes game of executive compensation.