Meet Productive
Productive is a tool that brings every aspect of your agency together under one unified solution. Sales, time management, project management, invoicing, budgeting … all of your business data is consolidated into a single platform. Created by Tomislav Car and other industry veterans behind a 350-person design and development agency, the team at Productive has a deep understanding of agency needs.
Productive
🏢 Industry - Business Operations
💻 Location - Croatia, Serbia
👬 Team size - 82
💰 Funding stage - Bootstrapped
📅 Founded in - 2014
As Productive grew into the company that it is today, they knew they had an opportunity to accelerate their growth. They decided very quickly that this buy-in had to come in the form of employee equity.
Ramping Up
Productive started building their equity policies using some of the best practices out there in the startup world today - implementing concepts like a 1-year cliff (the period a new employee would need to work prior to their equity starting to vest) and a 4-year vesting period (the period in which they earn the right to exercise their equity, and after which, that equity can be exercised). They also worked with some of the top tools in the industry, such as Carta, to help manage their grants, track who owned what in the company, and help them communicate directly with equity holders.
Unfortunately, they quickly realized that wasn’t enough. Productive also lacked extensive legal knowledge regarding grants, which could have posed many possible roadblocks to the program.
As Productive’s business continued to grow, they could clearly see the benefits of granting equity to their employees. This is one of the top benefits any company can provide its team, and Productive knew theirs would really appreciate having true ownership over their work.
But how to manage it? What were the different laws and requirements Productive needed to consider?
Legal Challenges
Working with benefits for your talented team isn’t cut and dry. There are always local considerations to take into account.When it comes to equity, this could be especially fraught, because finding lawyers that could help them issue grants in a way that wouldn’t be a tax nightmare for their employees came with a lot of logistical challenges, How do you communicate? How can employees understand the equity they’re getting? How long does it take to issue the documentation? How much is this going to cost?
Not having the right legal support means the process of issuing grants would be more complicated. Finding lawyers, dealing with taxes, issuing documentation - it all takes time and money. It’s an overwhelming prospect for any company, no matter how established their equity policy is. So when you take an organization that is still perfecting how they issue grants, to whom, and under what circumstances, it becomes exponentially more complex.
🗣️ Tomislav Car, Founder @ Productive
“We're still in the process of refining our grant policy, but Easop was a huge help with providing us all the necessary legal documentation, contract templates, and other documents. They really smoothed that entire process out.”
Finding a Solution
Luckily, this is about the time Productive met Easop. And they quickly realized that, while using a cap table management system like Carta was vital to the success of their employee stock ownership plan, so too was the ability to grant equity to their employees quickly and easily.
With Easop, they didn’t need to worry about filing the right paperwork, or mistakes in drafting that paperwork, or chasing attorneys across the world to get it done. Things just worked the first time. It allowed them to issue and manage international equity grants quickly.
To learn more about how Easop can solve your international equity headaches, just jump on a call with us. Get Started
What The Productive Company Loves About Easop
As with all companies issuing stock options to their teams, Productive needs each equity grant to be approved by the board. That means making sure that every document was read and signed, and then verifying nothing was missed before the grant can be completed.
But with Easop, that problem was removed entirely. With the entire approval process handled on the app, it was easy for Productive to ensure each board member covered each grant without missing a beat.
One of the hardest parts of any equity program is effectively communicating to employees what equity they have, what progress they’ve made in vesting that equity, how they can expect to be taxed, etc.
But Easop provides employees with their own space that helps them clearly understand what their specific situation looks like. All employees can see how they’re taxed depending on their residency. No more confusion. All the answers they need are in one place.
Productive needed a solution that could help them understand the intricacies of the entire grant issuing process. So when Easop was able to provide them with all the necessary legal documentation, contract templates, and more in a few simple clicks - the team at Productive could tell they were on the right track.
But what really sealed the deal was the support team. “The support team was excellent, and everyone we dealt with was very welcoming.” They knew that they could come to Easop with any problem, and Easop’s legal support team would work tirelessly to find the best possible solution to their situation.
Finally, Productive knew that, while Carta didn’t help with international legal documentation for grants, it was vital as a way of tracking the equity picture of every single stakeholder. So whatever solution they went with to help their global employees, it had to integrate with Carta.
Easop’s effortless integration with Carta and other systems made it possible for Productive to keep tracking stock option grants in their cap table management software of choice, while issuing the right equity in the right way to their international team through Easop.
Discover the future of stock option management with Easop. Your journey to seamless, compliant, and hassle-free stock option management begins here 📈
