ESOP Plan Excel Template and Step by Step Guide to Retain and Attract Top Staff
You need an ESOP plan, or employee stock ownership plan. There just has never been one available. So I built it. It’s taken me a year to ship it as it was really hard to make something simple!
Let me break this down for you. How do your staff get rich? Owning a stake in your startup, right? How do staff participate in the upside of your startup… they own options through a structure called an ESOP (Employee Share Option Plan).
Only what the hell does an ESOP plan look like and how do you structure up something really special? Well, thinking is really overrated, in my humble opinion. I’ve made an easy to follow Excel model that is super, duper powerful and does all the heavy lifting for you.
Yes… you do need to know things like what you pay staff, the date you are going to grant them shares (duh). You need to add in when you fundraise (to get diluted shares). You need to follow step by step instructions… but if you can handle all that, you have something pretty darn tootin nifty!
There is not another employee share ownership model on the internet (Lie, there is something unuseful), so if you want an ESOP template this is the ONLY one.
The step by step ESOP plan guide
To make it easy to use this model, I mapped out how to use the ESOP example step by step in this SlideShare presentation. You’ll have your kick ass ESOP plan up and running in no time!
My approach to ESOP
If you want the Ttl;dr and understand the importance of an ESOP plan and how my model approaches it, here are some slides from the guide above.
The ESOP Plan Excel Model
So what does this bad boy look like, then?
Get the ESOP course
If you don’t understand all this jazz about shares, I made the only course on the internet to take you from the very basics up to legal nerdom. You can get it here. I highly, highly recommend doing this. Yes, there is 3 hours of video content, but you will be a total boss by the end of it. Or you can just live in ignorance, which is a scary place to be.
Conclusion
There we go. I really hope this will help you to create a professional incentive structure to delight your staff! Any questions, please sound off in the comments, and I would be delighted to help!
