An HR Consultancy's Own Worksheet For Carta Or Forge

List every equity or profit-interest holder, distinguishing founding partners from senior consultants who received grants as a retention tool. Firms in this space often over-index on informal understandings about equity rather than clean documentation, precisely because so much of their own advisory work involves telling clients to do better. Fixing that gap before a liquidity conversation starts, rather than during one, avoids the awkward discovery that two partners remember a grant's terms differently.

HR consultancies frequently work with competing employers in the same industry vertical, and an outside institutional buyer's diligence process could expose which specific clients the firm serves and at what fee level. Score this the same way a marketing agency would score competitive conflict risk, since the underlying concern, client-sensitive information reaching people close to competitors, is nearly identical. Ask each practice lead which of their client relationships would be most damaged by a leak, rather than estimating conflict risk from the partner level alone.

Consulting firms in this space often run lean balance sheets funded largely by partner distributions rather than retained capital, so be honest about what the firm can actually fund without disrupting partner compensation. This number is usually smaller than partners expect until someone actually runs it. Have finance present this number to the full partner group rather than to whichever partner is pushing hardest for a liquidity event, so the funding constraint is a shared fact, not a negotiating point.

Because this firm's whole business is designing equity and compensation policy for other companies, whatever structure it chooses for its own liquidity event will inevitably get compared, by staff and possibly by clients, to the advice it gives everyone else. A firm that recommends transparent, well-documented equity practices to clients but runs its own buyout informally is setting up an awkward contradiction worth avoiding. Treat this row as a genuine reputational risk factor, not a soft consideration, when weighing how much process rigor the transaction deserves.

Low client-conflict risk and adequate internal funding points to a straightforward Carta program. High client-conflict risk or a real funding gap pushes toward either scaling back the transaction or, if outside capital is genuinely needed, working with Forge under a tightly scoped diligence agreement that redacts specific client names. Write the scoring result down and revisit it if either factor changes materially before the transaction actually closes.

Whatever the worksheet says, document the process the same way you would tell a client to: written eligibility criteria, an independent valuation, and a clear rationale the partners can explain if a staff member or a curious client ever asks how the firm handled its own equity. Bring your AI CFO into the numbers early so the conversation with staff starts from a documented model rather than an improvised number.

Document the program the way you would advise a client to:

• Write down eligibility criteria that name every equity or profit-interest holder and explain how each one qualifies.
• Get an independent valuation rather than a number negotiated informally among the partners.
• Prepare a clear rationale the partners can explain to a staff member or a curious client.
• Keep a record of how client-conflict exposure and internal funding capacity were scored in the worksheet.

Say a thirty-person compensation consultancy has three founding partners and five senior consultants holding profit-interest units from a retention program launched five years ago. The worksheet comes back showing moderate client-conflict risk, since the firm advises employers across several industries without deep specialization in any one, and adequate internal funding from firm reserves. The partners run a Carta-administered program, document it with the same rigor they would recommend to a client, and use the finished case as an internal reference the next time a senior consultant asks about liquidity.

Some HR consultancies are tempted to turn their own liquidity program into marketing material demonstrating their expertise, but do this only with real care: anonymize any figures the partners would not want a client comparing against their own numbers, and get every partner's explicit sign-off before publishing anything about the firm's own equity, since internal financial details carry different sensitivity than a typical client success story.

A broader marketplace comparison is worth a look.