Partner, Aon

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.