Compensation Design

We support publicly-traded and privately-held organizations in the development of customized annual incentive plans that align with your business strategy. Our incentive plans reinforce in-year performance drivers,outcomes and supporting behaviours. Our incentive plan analytics can test payouts under various performance scenarios to ensure the right risk/reward framework, impact on a per participant basis and total plan costs.

We help publicly-traded and privately-held organizations develop tailored mid- and long-term incentive plans that support their business strategy. We understand how to build cash- or equity-based long-term incentives – including stock options, restricted share units, performance share units, performance cash plans, deferred compensation – and can provide guidance on the relevant tax, legal and accounting considerations. Our incentive plan analytics can test payouts under various performance scenarios to ensure the right risk/reward framework, impact on a per participant basis and total plan costs.

We create customized sales compensation and incentive plans that support your business and sales strategies. Our deep understanding of business operations allows us to clearly identify and articulate your sales process and clarify sales roles to ensure that the compensation plans support the right behaviours and activities that deliver results. Our sales compensation plan analytics can test payouts under various performance scenarios to ensure the right risk/reward framework, impact on a per participant basis and total plan costs.

We support the development of custom incentive plans for employee groups including traders, originators and business developers. These plans have a direct alignment between value creation and the incentive awarded. This requires a deep understanding of the business strategy to ensure that the incentive awards support sustainable value creation and the right underlying behaviours for key participants and their teams.

Leveraging our consulting experience working with Canada’s leading asset managers and our Southlea Asset Management Compensation Survey, we know how to create incentive plans (including carried interest plans) that support the right pay-for-performance relationship. We work to understand your investment strategy and key performance objectives – both relative and absolute and by asset class – over the short- and long-term. Our database of incentive designs and performance targets allow us to quickly align your plans to market while customizing to fit your unique investment strategies.

We work with our clients regularly to review and assess how best to incorporate material environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into their incentive plans. We have extensive global market research – collected in partnership with the GECN – that we leverage to help you understand how market trends are shifting to reflect the changing ESG landscape. As companies refine and develop their ESG strategies, we ensure that their compensation programs support the achievement of their desired ESG outcomes.

We set rigorous and achievable performance targets by connecting business plans and budgets with historical achievements, industry performance, and market and economic conditions. We support the development of performance targets and the range above/below targets that align with your compensation philosophy, reasonable performance expectations and acceptable probabilities of achievement.

We provide regular on-going and special one-time valuations of your equity-based long-term incentive plans based on Black-Scholes, binomial and Monte Carlo simulation models. We do so by leveraging our knowledge of IFRS and GAAP accounting standards and long-term incentive plan designs. We also set-up regular monitoring of complex relative total shareholder return incentive measures to support accounting valuations and plan participant communications.