We’ve read and want to use Slicing Pie! Now what?

Great – you’ve decided you want to share equity fairly! (Or to give it a try.) Now it’s time to set up your pie and start tracking what you’re all putting into your business. Here’s our list of next steps, to help you begin.

(Hold up. Before we start: has everyone actually read Slicing Pie or The Slicing Pie Handbook? Yes? Marvellous… No? Then give those who haven’t 3-4 hours, so they can catch up. You’ll save time and avoid rookie errors.)¹

1. Set up your grunt fund

First, set up your pie, a.k.a. grunt fund. Great places to start are Mike Moyer’s spreadsheet or Pie Slicer. You can use either as is, or as the basis for your own tracking system. If you use a spreadsheet, then you’ll likely need a timesheet template or app as well (there are plenty on Google).

Then decide on your time tracking units. You can track by whichever you like, e.g. minute, hour, day or week. Just make sure that your increments are useful enough to capture differences in commitment.

We use a spreadsheet based on Mike’s original Excel model. (To make ours simpler, we deleted the input types that we didn’t need. We don’t use the Pie Slicer, because it came out after we’d already set up and we had no reason to switch.) We track time using a feature that comes with our accounts system. (This tracks to the minute, but before we switched to our current provider, we clocked what we did to the nearest five minutes.)

2. Agree your Slicing Pie numbers

Next, work out how you want Slicing Pie to apply to your business and basic pie inputs:

• Inputs: Work out which inputs you have. Most startups just start with time and cash for business supplies, though occasionally some have one or two more.

• Multipliers: Agree your multipliers, i.e. cash x 4, non-cash x 2. We recommend strongly that you use these and stick to the model, because Slicing Pie is very carefully balanced. So although it may be tempting to change it, doing so makes it less fair.²

• Loyal employee protection: Decide if you want this. If so, how long should your loyalty period be? And what % should such leavers keep? We’ve thought about this a lot. If you do – and you may not – then we suggest that employees who leave after 3 years keep 50% of their pie. (50%, because this is equally painful and favours no one. And three years, because if people stay less than that, it arguably doesn’t look loyal – though in some sectors, this may be shorter or longer.)³

• Personal car: Decide whether to record your business mileage expenses as cash, or as a combination of cash and non-cash. Using a combination is more accurate, but also more complicated. So Mike Moyer recommends treating business mileage expenses as a 100% cash contribution, which is what we also do. It’s up to you.

3. Work out your fair market values or GHRRs

Your fair market values (a.k.a. grunt hourly resource rates or GHRRs) are basically the salaries that you are getting pie for. The key to getting them right is to set them in line with the real world. Not too high or too low.⁴

So how?

• Reflect your roles: Set fair market values that reflect the roles you are actually doing – not what you are/were earning elsewhere. So if one of you is a banker but doing tech sales for pie, then that Slicing Pie salary should be for tech sales, not for being a banker.

• Benchmark: Find out what others are earning in similar businesses (if you don’t know already). When doing your research, keep in mind that startups can differ even in the same sector, e.g. some burn through cash, whereas others are very cautious. You may also need to look laterally. Job boards and salary surveys can be good places to start.

• Blend if necessary: People at startups often wear many hats, e.g. do CEO stuff as well as take out the trash, so blend salaries if appropriate. (Although one or two people we know have multiple GHRRs, we and Mike Moyer don’t recommend it, as this complicates tracking and pie calculations and is not how things work in the non-startup world.)

• Part-payment: Once you’ve worked out your fair market values, adjust for anyone who is being part-paid. (Note this will also affect those people’s multipliers.)

• Include a salary review: If you like, you can review and change your fair market salaries from time to time (e.g. just as companies do in annual performance reviews, or if you’re splitting a combined role that has a blended salary). If you’re keen on great business ideas – as we are – then check out Buffer’s awesome open salary setting formula. We use this too.⁵

4. Estimate and agree historic inputs

If you’ve already done some unrecompensed work before starting your pie (which is pretty common), then the next thing to do is work out how much historic time, if any, you all should record. This is called “retrofitting”. Do your time estimates as soon as you can – it’s much easier when everything is fresh in your minds. As long as they’re realistic and everyone agrees that they’re fair, it doesn’t matter if they’re not precise.⁶

Then record any old expenses etc that have been paid on behalf of the business but not reimbursed.

The rules for calculating historic pie inputs are basically the same as for new ones, and in addition to what’s in the book, Mike has an online retrofit guide here. But essentially it’s all very logical – apply the Slicing Pie multipliers to:

• the time each person spent (using their fair market salary for that period), and
• what was spent by the business which a team member essentially paid for.

If you previously considered a fixed equity split, then it’s interesting to see how your pie compares. However, remember that this is a snapshot. It all gets more useful when you see how dynamic shares change over time.

5. Use your pie to manage performance

Finally, to knock things out of the park, use your pie to monitor progress, manage performance, and increase trust. Once your pie is up and running, these come naturally if you: 

• note what you were doing in detail when you record your time,⁷ and 
• share and discuss these time records regularly, e.g. at your weekly team meeting. 

We find that strong Slicing Pie teams all tend to run their pies as follows: 

• each team member records their own time and activity entries, on a shared spreadsheet or app. This provides visibility and incentivises everyone to participate;
• but they give receipts/invoices for things that they’ve paid for to the grunt leader to record, as this person usually also manages the business finances. This helps ensure that cash inputs (i.e. unreimbursed expenses) are fully captured, both in the business accounts and the pie, and not missed or duplicated;
• they have an agreed deadline by which all time and activity entries have to be made, e.g. the end of the week or month. Any late entries that miss the cut-off aren’t counted. This may seem harsh, but it’s actually a really useful management rule, as it incentivises grunts to keep the pie up-to-date, and helps identify people who may be struggling – or who may no longer want to be part of the team. So don’t skip this one – it’s very useful;⁸ and
• they talk about their time and activity logs and review their pie weekly (or even more often), which encourages individual accountability.

Together, these practices bring lots of benefits, e.g. they:

• help everyone to see what’s been achieved and who’s done what,
• ensure people spend time working on the right things, which keeps everyone focussed and avoids wasting time,
• encourage constructive discussions, as people can talk about what they’re working on, suggest ideas, and brainstorm creatively, and
• help to spot issues so the team can deal with them early, as frequent reviews make it easy to see if someone is, e.g. getting stuck, going off on a tangent, taking longer than normal, not doing their bit, etc., which can save bigger problems and trickier conversations down the line.

It can take a few weeks to get into the habit of time/activity tracking. However, once people have, then these logs also provide individuals with personal development records. And even better, they’re a valuable source for investors’ due diligence, i.e. so you can show investors who did what – which investors love to understand if the business eventually plans on raising investment.

6. Formalise your pie

That’s it, you’ve set up your pie! Once you’ve run it for a while and got to the right stage, let us know. We love to help.⁹ Our comprehensive HMRC-blessed solutions:

• Fairness: make Slicing Pie values legally-binding;
• Team-building: simplify equity negotiations with new joiners and leavers;
• IP: ensure the business owns the IP that everyone involved is developing;
• Finance: guarantee that those paying business expenses get pie;
• Control: formalise who decides what, and co-founder rights; and
• Tax: tax-efficiently set up your business, so you can save tax if/when you sell.

^{1 Seriously, reading a blogpost/excerpt or watching one of Mike’s videos isn’t enough. (We know. We tried.) This list also only covers a few points from the model. So it’s a terrible substitute for reading the book – even if you are bootstrapping. (Mind you, if you are, you will enjoy, as it’s so full of great information that it is a bargain.) We don’t mind which one you choose, though it helps if you all read the same. We really love the original Slicing Pie (v2.3 pub. 2012). It’s clear, snappy and contains all the basics. However, if you want something more detailed and up-to-date, then read The Slicing Pie Handbook (pub. 2016).
2 We’ve found that teams proposing even small changes complicate life for themselves (e.g. throwing off relative shares, causing grunt confusion/arguments, etc). And big changes – e.g. removing leaver provisions, or only sharing some equity dynamically amongst worker grunts – can be so fundamental that they torpedo Slicing Pie fairness entirely. So if you want to save yourself headaches, stick to Slicing Pie!
3 Loyal employee protection was added to the Slicing Pie model after the original book came out in 2012. It allows people who stay with the business beyond a certain period to keep some pie if they resign for no good reason before their pie splits. You can read more about it in The Slicing Pie Handbook.
4 Too high means non-time inputs like cash and assets get undervalued. Too low means if someone new joins, e.g. a consultant who charges £1k/day, the rest of you will be penalised.
5 We use this largely as is. However, we’ve tweaked Buffer’s experience multipliers, to try to mirror a bit better what happens in law firms. (We also added a few Star Wars references, but that’s another story.)
6 Although this may seem daunting, one of our first clients did this in just a few days for more than eight years(!) of inputs. They looked back at expense records, notebooks and calendars to help identify roughly when they’d spent time on the business, and then they agreed how to estimate. So have a go – it may be easier than you think.
7 Be specific. For example, write ‘2 hours – researching and calling suppliers, inputting info into database, and analysing‘. Don’t just write ‘2 hours – research‘, because that doesn’t tell anyone much, whether they’re current teammates, or investors reading these records at some point in the future.
8 We were pretty surprised when clients first told us they did this (even though we did the same ourselves, for professional reasons). However, we’ve now seen multiple instances where this rule has been helpful – including in the run-up to big transactions. Conversely, we’ve also seen teams that could have managed things better if they’d had this rule in place. So don’t dismiss it.
9 Seriously, we really do. However, if you’re a non-UK resident, check that you’ve got the right visa to set up and work in the UK – we can recommend immigration law specialists if you need help. And if you want to set up outside the UK, look for a Slicing Pie-friendly attorney in your chosen country (because our advice and solutions are highly specific to the UK).}