What I do

Starting the project on the right foot

I’ll review any existing content you have related to compensation, performance management, career development and promotions.

I’ll run a one hour deep dive session to go through this and map out the next steps.

Together, we’ll define who needs to be involved in the project and the role each person will play. Making sure the salary benchmarking and compensation philosophy work is inclusive from the start is critical. “If it’s going to be used by the team, it needs to be built by the team.”

Choosing relevant and reliable data to compare yourself against

You’ll need reliable salary data to build trusted pay bands. If you don’t already have a data source, I’ll walk you through the options based on your roles and locations.

I’m data agnostic, so I won’t push any particular provider. You’ll set up your own contract directly and I’ll be there to support you through it.

Once we’ve selected a provider, we’ll also work together to make sure we’re building the right data set for your organisation by choosing the right filters — things like company size, funding stage, industry and location — to ensure the data we use is truly comparable.

I’ll also help you look at ways to crowdsource additional data to build a data set that actually fits your organisation.

Building a ‘common language’ for mapping roles back to the market and comparing ‘apples to apples’

In any salary benchmarking exercise you need to map your roles and employees to the right benchmarks in an objective manner. We’ll use a ‘common language’ or ‘job architecture’ consisting of tracks, levels, job families and locations.

Job family mapping

I’ll also help you choose the right job families for your organisation. That means figuring out how your roles group together in a way that makes sense for your structure, industry and size—without overcomplicating things.

Levelling

Once the architecture is in place, I’ll help you level every role objectively. Job titles alone aren’t enough, titles vary widely across companies, so we’ll use a levelling framework, not a skills framework.

Defining your ‘North Star’ for pay decisions and building your salary bands

This is where I’ll help you communicate how and why you pay the way you do, grounded in your culture, values and finances.

Together, we’ll cover topics like:

• What your guiding pay principles are
• How pay, performance, and career progression work together
• How location impacts pay
• How to structure and create competitive salary bands for all of your job families
• How transparent you want to be about pay internally and externally

Spotting pay gaps and understanding the cost to close them

Market position

I’ll analyse where your pay currently sits (by percentile) and calculate what it would cost to move to your target position.

Pay equity

I’ll also check for pay inequities across:

• Level
• Dept.
• Gender
• Ethnicity

This helps you manage potential attrition risks before they become a problem and plan for any budget needed to close gaps.

Performance based increases

If you want to link pay reviews to performance, I’ll help you build a process that ties together performance ratings, band position and clear raise guidelines.

Collaboration friendly comp reviews

I’ll set up Google Sheets tools that sync manager and master sheets, so updates flow both ways without version control headaches.

Open roles calculator

I’ll also build you a hiring cost forecast using your new salary bands, giving Finance a clear view of future hiring costs.

Making sure everyone understands how pay works

Manager training

I’ll make sure your managers feel confident having pay conversations, including answering questions like:

• “Why was Alice levelled at IC2 and I’m IC1 if we do the same work?”
• “I’ve had a job offer for £5k more, what can you do?”
• “A candidate wants more than our bands allow, what now?”

Launch plan

I’ll work with you to plan how to roll out your compensation philosophy and salary bands to the whole organisation, including prebuilt presentations and founder scripts to make communication clear and consistent.

• Unused hours roll over into the following month
• All contracts are rolling month-to-month
• If your usage exceeds 4 hours in a given month, you'll automatically move into the full day tier (£950) for that month. I’ll always track time transparently and give you a heads up if we’re approaching the limit.

We'll explore the link between performance and pay, and where needed, introduce any existing scoring methods to determine pay raises, however, this project won't involve designing or building these processes from the ground up.

Over the years, I've noticed two key aspects of variable pay:

1. The variable pay data from third-party benchmarking providers can often be patchy and hard to interpret.
2. Variable compensation tends to be bespoke to each organisation.

As a result, benchmarking your organisation against the market isn't as straightforward as it is with base salaries. We will explore how variable pay can influence your base pay strategy and delve into 'OTE'. However, the task of redesigning or constructing variable pay processes falls outside the scope of this project.

If you are looking for advice on building a Sales Team or Customer Success bonus plan from scratch or re-designing an existing one, then I can intro you to Ollie Jones over at Rampd who has supported a number of my clients with this.

Understanding how equity operates on both a local and global scale can be a complex task. If you're interested in exploring equity, I can connect you with Tamas from The Equity People, who I’ve worked with for 5+ years and are my go to people when I have clients who want to chat about equity.

If you’re looking for support to build a benefits package from scratch or want your current one overhauled, then I can connect you with my trusted benefits broker Daniel. I’ve worked with him or over 10 years and he’s helped me when I was inhouse and also a ton of my clients. He’ll help you navigate everything from health insurance and dental care to life insurance, ensuring your employees have access to a well-rounded benefits package.

Yes. I offer a 15% discount for organisations making a positive impact, including:

• Charities
• Non-profits
• Registered B Corps
• Companies tackling climate change
• Organisations working towards social good or environmental sustainability

If your work contributes to a better society or a healthier planet, I’d love to support you.

Based just outside London in the county of Kent in the UK, I work globally, partnering with clients across the UK, Europe, Dubai, New Zealand, San Francisco, and everywhere in between.

At the end of any engagement you’ll walk away with the following:

✅ Compensation calculator (Google Sheets) ✅ Compensation philosophy ✅ Levelling framework ✅ Manager training decks ✅ A ton of comms materials including emails and launch presentations ✅ Bespoke compensation calculator videos based on your unique strategy

❌ Salary benchmarks are not included Costs do not include salary benchmarking data. You'll need to budget separately for this. Benchmarking data can range from free to £8k per year, depending on your location. I'll help you select the option that best matches your needs.

• Yes, I work with companies across all industries. While I specialise in supporting SaaS businesses and emerging AI and machine learning companies, I’m not industry-specific and have experience with a wide range of sectors.

No worries! I love a good challenge. I've helped loads of organisations figure out pay for all sorts of quirky roles when their usual data sources come up short. Here's how we tackle it:

• We mix and match compensation data from similar roles to create a salary band or;
• We pull together info from multiple sources including specialist recruitment reports to get the right numbers for those really specialist jobs.

I've cracked some pretty unusual ones in my time—even sorted out pay for Zebrafish scientists!

• On average, you’ll need to set aside around 6-8 hours per week, including the weekly 1-hour check-in.
• A typical project runs over 8 weeks, so you can expect to spend about 64 hours (roughly 8 full working days) in total.

Other stakeholder time commitment

• To make sure the build is successful, it’s critical to bring other people on the journey. We’ll chat about forming a Compensation Committee, and who should sit on it, but this will always involve the founder(s) of the business.
• Consequently founders will need to dedicate around 5-10hrs of their time during the course of the whole project.

Yes. All the materials shared with you are yours to edit and keep.

• My background is in early-stage companies, and that’s where I do my best work. I focus on start-ups and small businesses because they have the flexibility to build fair and transparent pay from the ground up, without the red tape larger organisations face.
• I typically work with companies up 300 people. If you’re bigger than that, I can recommend some excellent reward consultants who specialise in supporting larger organisations.

Yes, the earlier you can design and implement a compensation system in the life of your startup, the better. Doing so can save you from dealing with significant challenges later. Ideally, I recommend starting this process around 10 to 20 employees. While it’s possible to implement at 200 employees, it tends to be more time-consuming and complex. By then, you may encounter issues like people being over-levelled, outside of the salary bands you build, and inconsistent job titles. This can all lead to confusion and dissatisfaction. Starting early helps ensure smooth growth and consistency as your company expands.

Absolutely. While I'm a strong advocate for pay transparency, I appreciate that it's a journey and not one that can be rushed. To be genuinely transparent about pay, you need not only salary bands and a compensation philosophy, which I'll assist you with, but also the following:

• Clear job descriptions.
• Clear definitions on how career progression operates and is evaluated and how it’s connected to pay.
• Performance management systems in place to assess the quality of work of individuals.

We'll work together to set you on the right path regarding the above. Remember, pay transparency isn't about disclosing everyone's salaries to the world or even internally. It's about demonstrating to employees the rationale and methodology behind their pay.

While it's natural to worry about this, keeping pay information private may not even be possible in some locations where pay transparency law mandates that you show salary bands on job adverts e.g. California and the EU post June 2026.

Even if your salaries aren’t the highest, you can still attract top talent by showcasing your unique values and culture. As part of your EVP you’ll want to highlight what makes your company stand out—whether it's an exceptional work/life balance or innovative benefit and progression programs. By emphasising your strengths, you’ll attract individuals who resonate with your company's ethos.