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Sharing Ownership Services
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Contents
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 Owning a share of the business is the ultimate stake for motivating management and employees. Brash
Solutions has pioneered several styles of Employee Share Ownership Plans (ESOPs) and remains at the forefront of research and development in this highly technical field.
Most important of all, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises, we make it
simple.
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- Designing Your ESOP
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Principle:
The ESOP structure must work specifically for your company, both technically and commercially.
The success of an ESOP – no matter how good it looks when it is introduced - is dependent on its ability to
sustain an increase in employee performance. For an ESOP to have a medium-to-long-term positive effect on your employees, it needs to be:
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custom-designed to your specific needs, |
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modelled on best practice, and |
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flexible enough to take account of future changes. |
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This involves designing a Plan to meet the client’s specific needs and corporate culture, and this may involve us providing advice on any of the following:
- selecting an appropriate type of ESOP – establishing the Plan’s broad-brush structure,
- fine-tuning the Plan’s design,
- getting the best tax treatment for the company and employee-participants
whilst staying well within the boundaries of taxation law,
- accounting, finance and payroll issues,
- employee communications,
- shareholder relations,
- ESOP administration design and procedures,
- ESOP management services,
- corporate governance, Corporations Act and ASX Listing Rule requirements,
- seeking ASIC exemptions from Corporations Act requirements,
- seeking waivers from ASX requirements,
- dealing with the Australian Taxation Office, and seeking tax rulings, and
- reviewing your company’s Constitution to ensure it is compatible with the Plan’s design and Plan Rules as well as other legal requirements, and that no unforeseen impediments exist to implementing the Plan.
Pulling together all the above, we often generate an implementation timetable early on in the process to ensure all parties are informed of their responsibilities, and so that deadlines are reached in time.
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- Documenting Your ESOP
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Principle: Document the Plan correctly and simply.
ESOP documentation needs to satisfy two criteria: it must be legally sound and clearly expressed. |
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Once the design of the Plan is established, we can provide you with all the documentation you need to implement the Plan, including offer documents and Plan Rules, and Board and shareholder approval documents. |
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| See our
ESOP Documentation Products |
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- Communicating Your ESOP
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Principle: Keep the ESOP simple and participants well informed.
You may establish the most technically advanced Plan but if you can’t easily communicate its benefits and risks, it could be all for nothing. |
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For an ESOP to be successful, employees must be able to understand the Plan in which they are invited to participate. Our priority is to
keep it simple. Brash Solutions can build employees’ knowledge of the Plan using a range of communication tools such as:
- plan information booklets,
- one-page summary fliers,
- Q&A booklets,
- detailed tax booklets, and
- on-site presentations to employees or Board members.
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See our ESOP Communications Products
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- Administering Your ESOP
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Principle: Make the ESOP easy to administer.
An administratively easy Plan keeps the costs down, the details transparent, and can enable you to maintain employees’ interest in company performance by facilitating easy ongoing communications. |
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Brash Solutions can provide you with a procedures manual and spreadsheets designed to assist your staff in managing the Plan internally or in out-sourcing the Plan’s administration to external service providers. Our
 procedures would cover such things as payroll deductions and share acquisitions. We aim for a solution that is cost and time-effective, while ensuring compliance with all legal and tax requirements.
Brash Solutions can prepare individually-designed spreadsheets to assist in managing or administering your ESOP, including for instance:
- databases that track issues, sales and loans granted under an ESOP
(particularly appropriate for SME’s preferring in-house administration), and
- automated company and issued capital registers that ensure compliance with Australian and overseas stock market listing rules and company law requirements.
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See our ESOP Administration Products
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- Simulating Your ESOP
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Principle: Know in advance the relative outcomes for participants versus other shareholders.
The easiest way to illustrate who gets what is through demonstration. |
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Brash Solutions can prepare individually-designed simulators and spreadsheets to demonstrate outcomes in advance, including for instance:
- ESOP simulators that generate reliable business valuation figures, and comparative outcomes for participants vis-a-vis existing shareholders – whether projecting outcomes for the future or tracking actual outcomes, and
- tax simulators that compare the effects of two or more different methods of taxation on a particular option or share offer.
Each Brash Solutions simulator allows clients to input variables into a scenario and see the effects that making changes to a particular aspect of the ESOP or business can have on the business as a whole, and vice versa.
See our ESOP Simulation Products
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Contact Us
if you wish to discuss any of the above, or for more information on Sharing
Ownership, go to:
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