Every compensation committee eventually asks the same question: is this package reasonable against our peers? There are two ways to buy the answer. One costs about $25,000 and takes six to eight weeks. The other costs $1,500 and arrives the next business day. I have sat on the buying side of both — I am a sitting small-cap public-company CFO — and the difference is not what most boards think it is.
What the $25,000 engagement actually includes
A full consultant engagement is a bundle:
- A custom peer group study — built from public proxy statements
- Percentile benchmarking of base, bonus, and equity — built from public proxy statements and 8-Ks
- Two or three committee meetings, attended in person or by video
- Negotiation support when a package is contested
- Sometimes a proprietary survey drawn from the firm’s private client data
Strip the bundle down and notice something: the core deliverable — the peer group and the percentiles — is assembled from SEC filings. Proxies, 8-Ks, 10-Ks. EDGAR is free and public. The premium buys everything wrapped around the data: the brand on the cover page, the warm body in the committee meeting, and the comfort of pointing to a name your directors recognize if a vote goes sideways.
Those things are real. They are just not benchmarking.
What the committee actually asked
Go back to the question: is this package reasonable against our peers? Answering it defensibly takes four things:
- A peer group with documented selection criteria — industry, size band, business model — not a list reverse-engineered to flatter the number.
- Percentile positioning for each element: base salary, short-term incentive, equity, total compensation.
- A pay mix and structure comparison, because a $300K base with heavy equity is a different animal than a $600K base with none.
- A citation for every figure, so anyone — a director, an auditor, a proxy advisor — can verify it against the source filing.
That is a data product. And at small-cap scale, proxy advisors do not ask who prepared your comp analysis. They check whether the peers are size-appropriate, whether the selection criteria are disclosed, and whether the positioning is explained. A benchmark that cites every figure to its SEC accession number answers that. A famous logo does not.
When the full engagement is worth it
Honest answer: sometimes. A contested comp fight with an activist on the register. A ground-up redesign of your long-term incentive plan alongside counsel. A CEO transition at a controlled company that you know will be read closely. If you need a human in the room quarter after quarter, pay for the human.
But most small-cap comp moments are not that. An annual sanity check before the proxy. A new CFO or CEO hire whose package you now have to defend. Your first proxy after an IPO. Groundwork after a weak say-on-pay result. Those are exactly the question the committee asked — reasonable against peers? — and buying a $25,000 bundle to get a $1,500 answer is how small caps end up copying large-cap proxies by default.
Side by side
| Full consultant engagement | RepCor benchmark | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | ~$25,000+ | $1,500 Core / $2,500 Production |
| Turnaround | 4–8 weeks | One business day |
| Data source | SEC filings (plus proprietary surveys) | SEC filings |
| Peer group | Custom | Screened, selection criteria documented |
| Citations | Rarely traceable to the filing | Every figure cited to its SEC accession number |
| Committee meeting attendance | Yes | No |
| What you are buying | Data + reassurance | Data |
See it before you buy it
We publish a full, unredacted sample report — a real company, real peers, real percentiles, every figure cited. Download it from the RepCor home page and hand it to your comp committee chair. If it does not answer the question they are actually asking, the $25,000 engagement will still be there.
Core is $1,500. Production is $2,500 and adds multi-year trends, director pay, equity overhang, and pay-versus-performance. Both are delivered in one business day.
Robert Steele is the CEO of RepCor and a sitting small-cap public-company CFO. He built RepCor because he needed it.