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Suppose I'll shamelessly bump this up, not sure how to get more eyeballs (or maybe no one cares, which is fair).
Bump
Can vary a lot depending on ownership, mgmt ability, size of company, etc. In the LMM where I play, I have seen (out of 10% option pool; assuming mgmt aren't shareholders), CEO's at 1-4%, CFO's at 1-2%, then goes down from there. Some people can even get .10% for folks that are important but generally lower level.
Thanks for the reply, helpful. So to gross those up to a kind of "% of mgmt pool" just multiply those by 10 I guess.
If it wasn't obvious I am trying to gauge where I am vs. market.
Texas Tea, some thoughts:
The % allocation will depend a lot on the enterprise value of the company and the philosophy of the PE firm. We had option pools that ranged in size from 10% - 18% (assuming this is for North America). Generally at the beginning of the investment, the CEO would get 4-6% with the CFO getting 1-3%. The CFO could vary widely if the individual was a seasoned CFO with a full skill set versus a controller who was recently promoted to CFO and needed lots of help on things such as the banking arrangements.
Where you go from there depends on the organization. Typically we would rely on the CEO to make a recommendation to the compensation committee for the allocations, but we would guide the CEO on how to thing about it. People who reported directly to the CEO would typically get between 0.25% - 1.0% (where 1.0% might be the head of sales who attends board meetings in a sales-oriented organization). In some rare circumstances, we would do option grants another layer down for something like regional sales managers or divisional leaders, but those amounts could be as little as 0.1%.
Note: All percentages expressed as a percentage of the total equity value of the company.
Thanks CompBanker, much appreciated.
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