Concentrated equity, deferred compensation, RSU cadences, and the sequencing each requires.
Compensation in many forms. Architecture in one.
The senior executive’s compensation is rarely a single number on a single line. It is a base salary, a short-term incentive, a long-term incentive in restricted share units, a performance share unit award against a multi-year metric, an option grant with a defined vesting schedule, and frequently a deferred-compensation provision that releases over the years following retirement. Each instrument is taxed differently, vests on its own schedule, and is constrained by trading windows, blackout periods, and minimum-shareholding requirements that change with title and role.
The structural consequence accumulates quietly. Concentration in employer equity climbs without an explicit decision to climb. Tax timing slips out of alignment as one grant vests in a year of bonus and another in a year of loss carry-forward. Diversification is repeatedly deferred to the next open window, which arrives later than planned. The estate plan written before the executive crossed into senior leadership is the estate plan that still governs the family’s position.
Senatus serves as the architectural mandate that holds the executive’s income, equity, and family balance sheet in coherent relation across the long career arc. The corporate counsel inside the company continues to advise on the plan documents. The family’s tax counsel continues to file. Senatus convenes the table and remains accountable for the integrity of the whole — through every grant cycle, through every promotion, through the eventual transition to retirement or board service.
Four points the calendar of senior leadership tends to defer.
Each is the kind of work that competes with the operating cadence of the role, with the next quarter, with the next board meeting. Each, attended to in time, materially shapes the executive’s position at retirement and beyond.
Equity concentration, weighed against the whole balance sheet.
The cumulative position in employer equity is rarely a position the executive would have selected from a clean sheet. We model the concentration against the family’s broader balance sheet, the upcoming vesting schedule, the minimum-shareholding requirement, and the remaining tenure in role — then design a disciplined diversification cadence within the trading windows the executive is permitted.
Vesting and tax timing, sequenced across grants.
RSU vests, PSU settlements, option exercises, deferred-compensation releases — each carries a tax position of its own, and each is more efficient or less efficient depending on the year in which it lands. The decisions on which to exercise, which to hold, and which to defer are made against the executive’s multi-year tax projection rather than fiscal year by fiscal year.
The trading plan, composed inside the rules that govern it.
Where the executive is in a continuous-disclosure or insider-trading position, the disposition of vested equity proceeds inside an automatic trading plan adopted in good faith. The plan is composed in coordination with corporate counsel, set against the executive’s diversification objectives and projected liquidity needs, and documented so that disposition is mechanical rather than discretionary in a window the regulator may scrutinise.
The transition to the years that follow the role.
Deferred-compensation releases that carry into the years following retirement, post-retirement equity continuing to vest under the plan’s provisions, board appointments and the income they generate, the sequenced rebalance of the family’s position. The years immediately after senior leadership are, for most executives, more financially consequential than the year of retirement itself; they reward architecture composed in advance rather than discovered after.
The grant calendar, then the cadence of senior leadership.
The engagement begins with a documented review of the executive’s complete compensation architecture — the base, the incentives, the equity grants outstanding, the vesting calendar across the next five years, the minimum-shareholding position, the deferred compensation, and the family balance sheet around it. The review is held in confidence and shared only with advisors the executive expressly nominates.
From that foundation, the relationship operates on the cadence the role permits: a structural review at year-end against the next year’s grant calendar, working sessions ahead of vesting events and trading-plan windows, and continuing coordination across the years that approach transition out of senior leadership.
“The compensation was always disclosed and always documented. What it had not been was composed. Eight years of grants, three classes of equity, a deferred-compensation schedule running ten years past retirement, and a minimum-shareholding requirement I had not modelled. The first year of the engagement turned that into one architectural plan. Every year after has run against it.”
If concentrated equity and a multi-year grant calendar shape the family’s position, the next step is a private conversation.
Senatus accepts a limited number of new relationships each year, predominantly through private referral. A member of the Private Office will respond, in confidence, within twenty-four hours.
Request a Private ConversationTwelve adjacent audiences.
Most principals belong to more than one. The architecture is composed for the family in front of us; the descriptions below are how families most often arrive.