What I Do

Most organizations don't, until they look. Market pricing compares your pay to current salary survey data for equivalent roles in your industry and geography. If you're seeing candidates turn down offers, losing employees to competitors, or getting pressure from staff about pay, those are all signals worth investigating. I can help you get a clear picture.

Market pricing is the research, a salary structure is what you build from it. Market pricing tells you what roles are worth in the current market. A salary structure takes that data and organizes it into pay grades and ranges that your organization can use day-to-day to make hiring decisions, give raises, and maintain consistency over time. Most organizations need both.

A compensation philosophy is a short, written statement that defines how your organization approaches pay. It answers questions like: Do we pay above market, at market, or below? How do we handle raises? What do we value in how we compensate people? It sounds simple, but without one, every pay decision gets made in a vacuum. With one, leaders can make faster, more consistent decisions and explain them to employees with confidence.

It depends on scope, but here are rough benchmarks. A market pricing project for a defined set of roles typically takes two to four weeks. Building a salary structure from scratch usually runs four to eight weeks. A full compensation strategy engagement, covering philosophy, market pricing, and structure, is typically eight to twelve weeks. I'll always give you a clear timeline before we start.

Yes. Whether you're a 20-person startup trying to get pay right before you scale, or a 2,000-person organization that's outgrown its existing structure, the work is similar, just different in scope. I tailor the approach to what your organization needs, not a one-size-fits-all package. You don't need an HR department, either — if comp currently lives with a founder or an office manager, that's exactly the situation this work is built for.

I work with established compensation survey sources that HR and compensation professionals use industry-wide. The specific sources depend on your industry and the roles we're benchmarking. Survey costs are billed as a pass-through at cost — estimated up front in your quote, never marked up — and your organization walks away with its own data access when we're done. You're not renting my data, you're building yours. I'll always be transparent about where the data comes from and what its limitations are, because good compensation decisions depend on understanding the data, not just the numbers.

I'm a Certified Compensation Professional (CCP), a globally recognized credential awarded by WorldatWork. Beyond the certification, I've spent years doing this work across healthcare, municipal government, and a range of other industries. The CCP means the methods I use are grounded in the standards the profession is built on, not just my own opinions about pay.

Pricing scales with organization size, and it's published: market pricing runs $5,000–$10,000, salary structure design $9,000–$18,000, job architecture $17,500–$35,000, and comp philosophy development $3,500–$7,000. Pricing a single position is a flat $1,000. A full compensation strategy engagement — the philosophy, market pricing, and structure bundle — runs $15,000–$30,000, less than the three pieces separately. Organizations over 2,000 employees are scoped custom — and whatever the size, your written quote lands within 48 hours of a 15-minute call.

Whatever the scope, you walk away with working documents your team owns: priced role data in a workbook you can maintain, written salary ranges with the grade logic behind them, or a compensation philosophy your leaders can explain in plain language. Never a slide deck that gathers dust.

You can — if someone on your team can match your roles to the right benchmarks, level them correctly, age the data, and defend the result when an employee or a board member pushes back. That's the actual work, and it's where DIY efforts usually go wrong: not bad data, good data matched to the wrong job. When we work together you get the method, not just the numbers — documented matches, the logic behind every range, and your own data access when we're done. If you want to run it yourself next year, you'll be equipped to.

Doing nothing is also a choice — it just gets made for you. Pay decisions keep happening either way: every offer, every raise, every counter. Without a structure they get made one at a time, in a vacuum, and explained after the fact. Transparency laws are making "we'll deal with it later" shorter-lived every year. The cheapest time to fix a pay structure is before someone asks to see it.