Chris Buttenham

Chris is one of the founders of Reins and loves talking to small business owners across America. For over 15 years, he has owned various small businesses himself, and provides great insight into helping fellow owners with their retention and succession plans via phantom stock plans.
Selling Your Company: What Happens to the Phantom Stock?
May 5, 2025
After years of building your company, you’ve made the decision to sell, and you’ve even found a favorable offer. Now, you need to inform your team. If you’ve offered phantom stock to your key employees, they’ll want to know what happens to that equity. Though the numbers will be unique from one business to the next, here are the basics of what everyone needs to know.
Chris Buttenham
What are the motivators for using alternative equity incentives?
April 8, 2025
In new survey results based on feedback from 158 managers considering a profit-sharing program for their employees, a common motivation for the decision is apparent with 48% of respondents indicating the goal of retaining their long-term employees.
Chris Buttenham
Sharing Ownership Improves Employee Retention Rates: How Do I Calculate Mine?
April 15, 2025
Learn how offering equity programs in the form of phantom stock or profit sharing has given many businesses an advantage over their competition in both attracting new talent and improving their employee retention rate.
Chris Buttenham
Who Should Benefit from Profit Sharing? Understanding the Rules and Exceptions
April 4, 2025
Explore your profit sharing options in both traditional funded, qualified profit sharing and unfunded, non-qualified profit sharing. Who should you include and why?
Chris Buttenham
If you share profits, do you cut back on equity? Apparently not.
March 10, 2025
Chris Buttenham
Ramp Up Recruiting: Offer a phantom stock or equity plan
March 18, 2025
Learn how phantom stock and equity plans help you match financial incentives offered by corporations.
Chris Buttenham
Simplifying Tax Time with Phantom Stock and the Modern Agreement for Rewards and Equity (MARE)
March 4, 2025
Learn how offering phantom stock instead of traditional stock helps workers avoid the immediate tax burden.
Chris Buttenham
Jumpstart a Team-Based Culture with Retention Rewards and Performance Bonuses
February 18, 2024
Building a team-based culture creates a space where everyone feels appreciated and works together to achieve goals.
Chris Buttenham
Investing Wisely in Bonuses and Benefits Leads to Overall Savings
February 4, 2025
Employers who invest in bonuses and benefits for their teams can see overall savings, reduced turnover and improve productivity.
Chris Buttenham
How businesses plan to divide [phantom] equity and how that changes with size
January 22, 2025
It turns out the less the pool is being divided, the less equity is being allocated to it. And that doesn’t appear to change with company size.
Chris Buttenham
Are employee [phantom] stock programs a lot more generous at S Corp and C Corp organizations?
January 15, 2025
The data says in some cases yes, but mostly no. In a survey on our website, we don’t see a decisive split on how much of their equity organizations set aside for these programs by business type, though there are some differences.
Chris Buttenham
Does size matter when it comes to sharing [phantom] equity?
January 9, 2025
According to the data, yes. When setting aside a pool for equity, the more people employed by a company correspond negatively to the amount of equity set aside.
Chris Buttenham