About This Service

Our expertise has been honed through years of assisting clients with executive and board of director compensation reviews, cash and equity-based incentive compensation design, competitive market studies, and annual industry surveys like the Bedford Executive Compensation Survey for Mining.

Our goal is to provide our clients with sound, practical, and objective advice and guidance that ensures competitive pay practices while meeting the scrutiny of shareholders and other stakeholders.

Our success is grounded in understanding your business, your industry, and your strategy. We invest the time and the research necessary to get a clear picture of how your company intends to succeed. We then align your compensation philosophy and pay practices to ensure that you have a robust compensation program designed to support achievement of the company’s short and long term aspirations.

Executive Compensation

We advise the Executive Committee and Board of Directors for public and private companies on all aspects of executive and Board renumeration:

  • Salary structure and salary planning
  • Annual cash incentives
  • Long term incentives:
    • Stock options
    • Restricted Share Units (RSUs) / Performance Share Units (PSUs)
    • Deferred Share Units (DSUs)
    • Phantom share plans
    • Long term cash plans
  • Termination and Change in Control provisions
  • Employee savings and share purchase plans

Compensation Governance

We advise our clients on all aspects of compensation governance including:

  • The role of the Compensation Committee of the Board of Directors
  • The role of Directors in Executive compensation and Directors’ pay
  • Annual Management Information Circular and Compensation Discussion & Analysis (CD&A) preparation
  • The potential relevance of institutional investor and proxy advisor guidelines (i.e. ISS; Glass, Lewis & Co.)

Compensation Policy

We assist our clients with all matters relating to compensation philosophy and policy including:

  • Minimum share ownership requirements for Management and Directors
  • Peer Group definition and selection
  • Compensation strategy
  • Performance dimensions for variable and incentive pay
  • Pay element weighting (pay mix)

Benchmarking

In undertaking our work with clients, Bedford relies on publicly available information and proprietary data to benchmark executive and director compensation and ensure consistency with your compensation philosophy. We use this data to undertake:

  • Executive and Directors’ compensation packages benchmarking
  • Labour market studies to support broader-based compensation planning
  • Market-leading industry surveys such as the Bedford Executive Compensation Survey for Mining

 

Compensation Report: Cannabis

THE BEDFORD REPORT: BOARD & EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION IN THE CANNABIS INDUSTRY 2019

The 2019 Bedford Report on Board and Executive Compensation in the Cannabis Industry. This is Bedford’s inaugural industry-wide survey of compensation awards and practices and provides insights into management compensation in this exciting and rapidly evolving industry. To better appreciate compensation practices in the Cannabis industry, we’ve offered comparisons to established industry practices in The Dietary Supplements and The Food and Beverage industry.