Company: HCKT
Filing Date: 2025-03-21
Form Type: DEF 14A
Source: 0000950170-25-043233
Chunk: 22

Company: HACKETT GROUP, INC.
Filing Date: 2025-03-21
Form: DEF 14A
Chunk 22
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 page 17 below for a more detailed discussion of the Stock Price Award Program). The Stock Price Awards are designed to incentivize long-term out-performance of the Company’s stock price, aligning the executives’ interests with those of the Company’s stockholders while taking into account the Company’s need to aggressively pivot its capabilities to support generative artificial intelligence (“Gen AI”) related consulting and implementation services and pursue the development of or acquisition of Gen AI software platforms and related capabilities to support and differentiate its offerings.

The main goals of the Company’s executive compensation program are as follows:

to motivate and focus executives on critical business issues;

to ensure that the executive team has clear goals and accountability with respect to the Company’s financial performance;

to attract and retain executive talent;

to increase shareholder value; and

to provide significant incentive opportunities tied to the attainment of specific financial performance goals.

In order to attract, retain, and commit top executives to the fulfillment of superior performance results, the Company's executive compensation program is designed to provide superior pay opportunities in exchange for superior performance.

The Company believes that its compensation programs support its business strategies and directly links pay with performance results. The Company continues to observe what it believes to be its directly comparative pay market, which is other strategic consulting and business advisory organizations and professional services firms which are mostly of significantly greater size.

In order to assure that its executive compensation programs are both competitive and appropriate, the Compensation Committee reviews executive compensation periodically to determine whether any adjustments to specific compensation components should be implemented. In connection with this process, the Compensation

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Committee primarily considers the value of base salary and incentive cash and equity compensation. These compensation components are even more meaningful since the Company does not contribute to any retirement programs in any form including defined benefit, defined contribution or supplemental retirement plans for its executives.

The Compensation Committee also periodically reviews external market data on executive compensation in order to obtain a general understanding of current compensation practices. In 2017, the Compensation Committee retained John Bloedorn, an independent compensation consultant formerly with Mercer who was involved with the development of the Company’s current executive compensation program, to gather relevant marketplace data on total compensation for similar executive positions. This data consisted of annual salary, short-term incentives, long-term incentives, and pay mix. Data was obtained from total compensation information of similarly sized publicly traded companies including a subset of the Company’s historical peer group and the most recent Institutional Shareholder Services peer group at that time. In addition to Mr. Bloedorn’s analysis, the Compensation