Accelerated Vesting

  

First see Vesting. Then shop at Sears. Or rather, Brooks Brothers. Then quickly put on that third piece from the three-piece suit and...

Okay, okay. Accelerated vesting just refers to the idea that highly favorable executive compensation often grants top execs forward vesting provisions in their stock options if they are either fired for reasons not entirely their fault, or if the company is bought and those execs might otherwise be fired and screwed out of the remaining n months of stock option vesting.

Example: An exec might have been granted 100,000 options with a 4-year vest. She worked at the company for two years, at which point it is sold. The exec would then have 24 months to vest into the remaining 50,000 options...but the new company doesn't need her and would normally just fire her. However, because she has accelerated vesting in her contract, she vests forward one year upon firing so that she can at least recover 25,000 of the 50,000 she'd otherwise leave on the table.

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Finance: What is stock based compensatio...7 Views

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Finance a la shmoop What is stock based compensation While

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investors want management with skin in the game when your

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ceo has ninety eight percent of her net worth tied

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up in the stock of the company that she's running

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well presumably she runs it better or at least in

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theory anyway So over time management has been paid in

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equity ownership grants as well as in cash that is

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company management gets paid in stock options and in stock

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or rather shares of the company simply granted to them

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in lieu of cash Why do companies not just pay

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cash while they want management toe Have that whole ownership

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thing going for them to act like owners You know

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not just like union employees They want management with direct

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stakes in how well or pa poorly the business per

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forms in the long run and think about the dynamics

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of a ceo getting paid even a relatively huge million

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dollars a year in salary and nothing else that's it

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well that ceo takes a company from four hundred million

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dollars in sales and thirty million in profits to five

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years later two billion dollars in sales and for three

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Hundred million in profits that is the ceo made the

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company at least ten times more valuable certainly ten times

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more profitable and in five years that's really good But

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that ceo just got their single million dollars a year

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each year along the way Well that ceo would not

01:29

have financially participated personally in making shareholders so much wealthier

01:35

and that's not fair right If management of the company

01:38

makes huge returns for investors doesn't it seem right that

01:41

management should have huge returns for themselves and not just

01:45

a basic salary and male Maybe a little bit of

01:47

a bonus there too well some companies loan money at

01:51

low interest rates to ceos and other top execs so

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that their ableto buy shares in the company leveraged well

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Other companies just grant shares to management and still others

02:02

just grant stock options is kind of a spiff above

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their cash compensation So yeah it's all about having skin

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in the game which if you play football without sufficient 00:02:11.45 --> [endTime] padding is a definite possibility

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