Short, focused articles on the real-world challenges of managing MIPs — written from hands-on experience with PE-backed businesses across Europe and the UK.
A plain-English guide to MIPs in private equity — how they work, how value is created for participants, and what every management team member should understand before signing.
The terminology is mostly interchangeable — but the design choices behind a MIP are not. A practical look at how to think about pool size and structure when nobody quite knows where the benchmark sits.
A MIP pool sized at closing rarely stays the right size. Good leavers retain shares, additional equity rounds dilute management, new senior hires need allocations. How to design a programme that survives the holding period.
Most MIP documentation is written to close the deal, not to run the plan. The three layers of the document set, the definitions that decide everything later, and where setup quietly fails.
The most common onboarding failures — missing signatures, incorrect entry valuations, incomplete data — and the process that prevents them.
After working across dozens of PE-backed programmes, the same errors come up time and again. None of them are complicated. All of them are avoidable.
Everyone has a piece of the responsibility — but nobody has the whole picture. The ownership gap that causes most MIP administration problems.
The leaver provisions in most MIP agreements are clear in theory. In practice, the edge cases — illness, restructuring, partial exits — are rarely covered well.
Most programmes start in Excel. We look at where spreadsheets are genuinely fine, and where the risk of staying in them starts to outweigh the cost of moving.
In a buy-and-build strategy, every acquisition raises the same question: do the incoming management team members participate in the existing MIP — and on what terms?
Multiple acquisitions, a growing management team, changing structures — the discipline required to keep a MIP accurate over a long and active holding period.
The moment a sale process starts is the worst time to discover that your MIP documentation is incomplete. The five most common exit-readiness failures.
How proceeds flow from enterprise value to individual participant — and the assumptions, thresholds, and structures that determine each person's net outcome.
In a European portfolio, exit means coordinating tax treatment across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously. The problems that arise, and how to prepare for them.
A secondary buyout raises unique questions for the management team: does the MIP continue, reset, or convert? What happens to vesting, valuations, and existing commitments?
The tax treatment of MIP proceeds varies significantly across jurisdictions and structures. The key questions every CFO should be asking — and when to involve a specialist.
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