Your success is concentrated. Your risk shouldn't be.
Executive compensation planning in West Chester, PA. Equity compensation rewarded your career and quietly became your biggest risk — years of RSUs, options, and deferred comp riding on a single ticker. The question is not whether to diversify. It is how, when, and at what tax cost.
Career, income, and net worth — all on one ticker.
Loyalty built the position. Design protects it.
It happens gradually. Annual grants vest, you hold because selling feels wrong or the timing never seems right, and one day your employer's stock is half your net worth. If the stock stumbles, your income, your equity, and your retirement take the hit together.
Chester County is full of executives in similar positions, at the region's largest employers in financial services, pharma, and healthcare. The solution is rarely "sell everything". That can trade a concentration problem for a tax problem. It is a multi-year design that unwinds risk deliberately: which shares, in which years, at which price triggers, coordinated with everything else on your balance sheet.
Every form your compensation takes.
Each equity vehicle carries its own rules, its own tax treatment, and its own deadlines. The plan has to account for all of them at once.
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Restricted Stock Units
Vesting schedules, the sell-versus-hold decision at each vest, the withholding gap that surprises executives at tax time, and how RSU income stacks on top of salary in your marginal bracket.
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Stock Options — ISO & NQSO
Exercise timing, the alternative minimum tax exposure that incentive options can trigger, expiration deadlines, and sequencing exercises across years instead of in one taxable pile.
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Deferred Compensation
Election windows, distribution schedules, and the credit risk most participants never price in — deferred comp is an unsecured promise from your employer, which argues for coordinating it with everything else rather than treating it as a bonus savings account.
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10b5-1 Trading Plans
For insiders and access persons: designing a plan that actually diversifies on schedule instead of one that never seems to line up with the market, within your company's trading policy.
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Concentrated Positions
Multi-year unwinding strategies, charitable approaches to appreciated shares, and how much single-stock exposure your actual plan can tolerate — a number, not a feeling.
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ESPP & Benefits Coordination
Purchase plan participation, benefit elections, and making sure the pieces your employer provides fit the design instead of duplicating risk you already carry.
Every equity decision is a tax decision.
Vest, exercise, sell, defer, gift — each one lands somewhere on your tax return, and the difference between a coordinated plan and an improvised one is often measured in years of unnecessary tax. We build the equity strategy and the tax strategy as one design, in coordination with your CPA.
Equity compensation, answered.
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How much company stock is too much?
There is no universal number — it depends on what the rest of your plan can absorb if the stock has a bad decade. The honest answer comes from modeling your actual goals against your actual exposure, which is exactly what the design process does. For most executives we meet, the current number is higher than they would ever choose on purpose.
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Selling feels disloyal. Is it?
Your employer pays you in equity as compensation, not as a loyalty test — and executives at every level diversify. A disciplined, scheduled approach also removes the appearance of trading on information, which protects you as much as it protects the company.
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My RSUs already have taxes withheld. Why do I owe more in April?
Supplemental withholding on vests is a flat rate that is often lower than the marginal bracket the income actually lands in. That gap is one of the most common surprises we see, and one of the easiest to plan away once someone is watching for it.
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Do you work with my company's stock plan rules?
Yes. Trading windows, blackout periods, ownership requirements, and pre-clearance policies all become constraints in the design. The plan has to work inside your company's rules, not in spite of them.
Bring your grant statements. Leave with clarity.
One meeting, no obligation. Based in West Chester, serving executives across Chester County and the Philadelphia region.
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