Products:  Frequently Asked Questions

As our company grows, how do we decide how much stock should be allocated to an employee's option pool?
There are two key issues in setting up an affordable stock plan: understanding your workforce and planning over the development of the company. In simpler terms, it means taking the time to forecast your workforce hiring — understanding who you will hire, how many and the cost. It is impossible to understand your needs without competitive data. Guesswork can result in misallocations of the stock option pool and loss of board of director confidence. You need the market data that Option Impact provides: Stock and pay for each position you will hire and competitive benchmarks for employee stock option pools at your stage of development.

Stage of company development dramatically affects the amount of stock given to a new employee versus a longer-term employee, but by how much?
Many companies make determinations about stock and pay without the benefit of solid supporting data — based mostly on guesses and informal, anecdotal information. As a company grows in value and risk decreases, it is far wiser to work with accurate facts rather than conjecture. Effective stock allocation — both for long-term and newer employees — requires comparison to competitive data, taking into consideration the company’s stage of development, industry, geography, size and more.

How can we use Option Impact to report — accurately and efficiently — relative stock and pay data to board and management?
The Option Impact system is a dual function system that integrates competitive data with workforce information through specialized reporting functions — at no extra cost. When using the reporting features of Option Impact, your employee data is tied to comparable competitive data instantaneously, and is available for export to your desktop.

How can Option Impact help when our company runs out of stock options?
Randomly allocating more stock is not a viable solution. A board of directors wants to have confidence that executives understand how much stock and cash it will take to run the company effectively. Information from Option Impact is understood and accepted in the venture community. Just look at our client list. Option Impact enables a company to manage strategic planning and to take the surprise factor out of sensitive management sessions.

Considering how quickly the labor market is changing, how do we know that Option Impact’s data is current?
Each Option Impact report contains an “aging bar” that shows the age of the data in the report by quarter. Option Impact’s data is current because our pre-IPO clients regularly use the system’s unique information management features and, as a result, update their company information automatically. We refresh our online reports bi-weekly with new data from the Option Impact system. Option Impact is always accessible to our clients via the Internet — 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

And what happens after the IPO?
Executives, founders and investors know the thrill of growing pre-IPO value — and the agony of post-IPO instability as options vest for employees. The comprehensive Option Impact solution — Online Survey Reports, pre-IPO Company Information System and Decision Support Products — work together to help you avert post-IPO problems before they happen.

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