Data:

• Ability to obtain relevant data for the industry in which your company is working. To gather that data, you have to build relationships with venture capital companies and the companies that work in those industries so you could do a compensation survey of relevant companies.  Without a critical mass of companies, your data could be skewed by one company’s quirky compensation plan.
• Ability to collate the data and identify relevant trends so you can figure out what your company's comparatives ought to be.
• Ability to analyze the data and identify what’s important in terms of building compensation infrastructures. For example, many companies are very interested in looking for regional trends. We’ve surveyed our companies, and our data shows there’s not significant variation among regions.

Understanding of corporate financing and growth:

• Ability to analyze financing trends, to know how much financing you've raised and how much more you will need.
• Ability to take into account how this differs by industry.
• Ability to take into account the quirkiness or unusual circumstances of your company. Perhaps you’re bringing in a superstar business development head who needs to be compensated more than your standard business development head.

Law:

• A solid understanding of the legal aspects of a compensation system, including experience with a number of small companies and helping them grow.
• Experience creating employee compensation plans and option plans.
• Experience building executive compensation infrastructures, from the CEO all the way down, covering all administrative positions.
• Ability to build a compensation plan based on the data and an understanding of the growth plan for your company and how you need to structure your plan so that you leave adequate room for growth.

Keeping on top of trends:

• You need to know how you going to stay competitive. Trends change, especially in the tech industry. Compensation is higher now than it used to be, for executives especially, and it’s important to know what it will require for you to stay competitive.

To put together this kind of project requires a team. You need an attorney who has dealt with these kinds of issues. You need a person with extensive human resources background. Preferably, you need that person to have expertise in reading the data. You need a statistical expert who can clean your data, run it and analyze it. Each of these skill sets is necessary.