-: My name is Dan Kapinos.
I'm a partner at Aon which is a professional services firm
that helps companies in all sorts of ways.
My particular team focuses on
how companies pay their employees.
Specifically, with stock.
So that tends to be at the executive level.
I'm sure a lot of people wonder how you can have a business
that focuses on how to pay people,
but paying people, particular executives,
is heavily scrutinized so there's a lot of rules.
Accounting rules, there's a lot of regulatory things
that come from congress and other parts of the government.
No company wants to be a headline
and companies grow over time
so even small companies start paying attention
to these things very early on
to make sure they don't develop bad habits as they grow.
And it festers into something
that can become very problematic.
So as much I can say,
it's big, large cap Fortune 100 companies,
it's all the way through small public companies
with 10 people and private companies
that are thinking about going public.
My team comes in at various different points in time.
Sometimes that's at the very beginning,
where they're talking about designing a structure
or redesigning a structure
to make sure it hits all the key points.
It aligns with the executives' interests.
It aligns with shareholder interests.
It's still compliant with the law
and the rules that exist.
But other times, we'll get brought in after the fact.
After a design's been put out there
and then they need support in making sure
that they then administer this plan appropriately.
Or even reactive.
They made a decision that didn't go well
and now they're looking to change course, so...
If it's designed well, it's pretty robust
that it doesn't require constant redesigning
and constant revisiting every single year,
but that's one of the side effects
of executive compensation
because it's so heavily scrutinized,
perspectives can very quickly change
which means one year,
we put in place something
that we thought would work really well
and set them up for the next 10 years aligning
with their strategy and then the rules changed
the following year and we have
to completely revisit the whole thing.
The process doesn't really end.
It's kind of a constant cycle just to make sure
you're managing all the perspectives you need to.