The hardest part of compensation was never the math.

I'm Maria Buscsei.

For more than twenty years I've designed and run Total Rewards in-house at global companies — compensation, incentives, benefits, and reward strategy across EMEA and LATAM, with deep specialization in sales incentive design.

That means I've sat on your side of the table: building salary structures that survive growth, defending plan costs to Finance, and making reward decisions hold up when the business changes.

Somewhere along the way I noticed something. The technical side of compensation — the benchmarks, the models, the formulas — was rarely what decided whether a plan worked. What decided it was how people read the plan: what they compared it to, whether it felt fair, whether anyone could explain the reasoning behind it. That observation has shaped how I design pay ever since.

Large companies have entire teams for this. Small and mid-size companies mostly don't, and they end up making the same high-stakes pay decisions with a fraction of the support. The Rewards Practice brings that experience to companies too small for a full Total Rewards function — and too ambitious to get rewards wrong.

You can find my full career history onLinkedIn.