Performance & Compensation
Pay decisions you made quickly, now permanent
Pay set deal by deal stops working around 40 people, right as pay transparency laws make it visible. Comp bands and review cycles that fit your business.
Nobody sets out to build an inconsistent pay structure. It happens one reasonable decision at a time.
The first engineer negotiated hard in a year when cash was tight. The second joined from a bigger company and brought a number with them. The third was an internal promotion, so the raise was calculated from what they were already earning rather than from the role. Three people, similar work, three different answers, each defensible on its own day.
Around 40 people it stops being invisible. Someone compares notes. A manager can’t explain a decision. And in an increasing number of states, a job posting now has to carry a salary range — which makes the whole structure public whether it’s coherent or not.
Performance management has the same shape
Most companies below 100 people either have no review process or have a form somebody downloaded. Both produce the same result: feedback that arrives once a year, surprises people, and correlates loosely with anything that happened.
The failure is almost never the form. It’s that nobody wrote down what the role is accountable for, so the review has nothing to measure against and defaults to personality.
Which matters beyond fairness. When a termination is questioned later, the file is the case. A performance process that produces real documentation as a by-product is worth having for that reason alone, quite apart from whether it makes anyone better at their job.
What we build
Compensation structure. Role levels, bands built against market data rather than against what you happened to pay last time, and a defensible position on where each person sits. Then a process for raises and promotions so the next decision doesn’t restart the drift.
Pay equity review. Looking deliberately for gaps you can’t explain, deciding what to correct and in what order. Better found by you than by a complaint.
Pay transparency compliance. Requirements now vary substantially by state and several attach to the posting itself, which means one remote role can bring you into scope.
Performance cycles that fit. For a 30-person company that might be two lightweight check-ins a year and a clear accountability statement per role. It does not need to be a platform.
Manager capability, because a review process is only as good as the conversation, and most first-time managers have never been taught to have it.
What’s included
- Role architecture and leveling
- Compensation bands benchmarked to market
- Raise, promotion and out-of-cycle adjustment process
- Pay equity analysis and a remediation plan
- Pay transparency requirements by jurisdiction
- Performance review cycle design and the documentation it produces
- Goal-setting frameworks where they fit — OKRs suit some businesses and not others
- Manager training on delivering feedback and handling underperformance
Where we stop
We’re not an executive compensation firm, and equity design — option pools, vesting structures, 409A questions — goes to your counsel and your accountant. We’ll make sure equity is communicated in a way employees actually understand, which is a different and badly neglected problem.
Where a pay equity analysis is likely to surface something material, we’ll suggest running it with counsel involved so the work is done carefully from the start.
Common questions
When do we need formal compensation bands?
Usually somewhere between 30 and 50 employees, or sooner if you are hiring in a state with pay transparency requirements. The signal is when you cannot answer why two people doing similar work are paid differently without telling a story about when each was hired.
We have never done performance reviews. Where do we start?
Not with a form. Start with what each role is actually accountable for, because most review processes fail on the fact that nobody agreed what good looks like. The cycle and the paperwork come after that, and they can be light.
Do pay transparency laws apply to us?
It depends where your employees and your job postings are, not where you are headquartered. Several states now require pay ranges in postings, and the obligation follows the role. One remote posting can bring you into scope.
What if we find pay gaps we cannot explain?
That is the common outcome, and it is better found deliberately than in a complaint. The work is deciding what to correct, in what order, and over what timeframe — and documenting the reasoning. Where the analysis touches legal risk we will suggest doing it with counsel involved.