Why did the value only become available once you found the door?

Published: 28.08.2026 | Author: Ray Nicholls | Category: Insight — Boards & Investors

I should declare the obvious before anything else.

I run a search firm. When a finance leader accepts a counter-offer, my client loses the person they wanted and I lose the placement. Nobody in my industry writes about counter-offers from a neutral position, and the ones who claim to are the ones worth trusting least.

So read what follows with that in mind. I am not going to tell you never to accept one. Sometimes accepting is right, and I have seen it work.

What I would rather do is describe what a counter-offer actually is, because most of the advice circulating on the subject rests on a statistic that nobody can source.

You will have seen it. Some version of "most people who accept a counter-offer leave within six months anyway." It gets repeated with great confidence and no citation, and I have never found the study underneath it. I would not make a decision about my career on the strength of it, and I would be wary of anyone who quotes it at you as though it settles the matter.

What it actually is

A counter-offer is a decision made in roughly forty-eight hours, under time pressure, by someone solving an immediate operational problem.

That problem is real. Cover for a function that cannot go dark. A gap in the middle of a year-end, or a funding process, or an integration. A conversation with the board or the investor that your employer would rather not have this quarter, particularly if the finance seat has turned over recently.

Those pressures produce a fast, generous response. What they do not produce is a considered re-evaluation of what you are worth to the business over the next three years.

Both things can arrive in the same envelope, which is what makes it confusing. The number is genuine. The thinking behind it was compressed into two days.

It usually answers the wrong question

In the conversations I have with finance leaders who are moving, money is rarely the first reason given, and almost never the only one.

The reasons that come up are more often about scope. About sitting outside the decisions that shape the numbers they are then asked to defend. About a relationship with a chief executive or an investor that quietly stopped working eighteen months ago and never recovered. About being the person who reports on the strategy rather than one of the people who sets it.

None of those can be fixed in forty-eight hours. Money can. So money is what gets offered, because it is the only lever available at that speed.

If the reason you handed in your notice was not primarily financial, a financial answer has not addressed it. It has deferred it, usually by about a year, and often with the original frustration still fully intact underneath.

What changes afterwards

This is the part that gets least attention and matters most.

Before you resigned, your employer had one view of you. Afterwards, they hold a piece of information they did not have before: you were prepared to leave, and you got as far as accepting something else.

That does not get unlearned. It is not usually punitive, and most decent employers would deny it changes anything. But it sits quietly in the room during succession conversations, during restructures, during the discussions about who is being developed for what. You have moved from a fixed point to a variable one.

You also have less leverage than you did the week before, not more. The thing that created the leverage was the credible possibility of leaving, and you have now spent it.

When accepting genuinely is right

There are real cases, and it would be dishonest to skip them.

Sometimes the resignation is what finally surfaces a conversation that should have happened a year earlier, and the response goes well beyond money — a change in reporting line, a seat at a table you were not at, a defined route to something specific. When the offer changes the structure of the role rather than the size of the salary, that is a different proposition entirely.

Sometimes the timing is simply wrong at the other end, and staying another year with better terms is the sensible commercial decision.

And sometimes the new role, examined properly under the pressure of an actual decision, turns out to be less good than it looked. A counter-offer occasionally does you the favour of making you look at it hard.

The test I would apply is straightforward. Ask what specifically will be different on a Tuesday in four months' time, and whether anyone has committed to it in a way that survives the person who offered it moving on. If the answer is only a number, the answer is only a number.

The question underneath it

There is a version of this that belongs to the employer rather than the candidate, and it is the one I find more interesting.

If a business can find another twenty per cent for someone in two days, that money existed on Monday. It was simply not allocated until the risk of losing them became concrete.

That is not usually meanness. It is how most organisations behave under normal conditions — value gets recognised when it is threatened, not when it is delivered. But the rest of the finance team notices. What they learn is that the reliable route to being properly valued is to get another offer, and some of them will act on that lesson within the year.

Which is the thing worth sitting with, whichever side of the desk you are on.

The money was always there. Something had to happen before it became available.

Pitch Hill Partners specialises in placing CFOs, Finance Directors, Financial Controllers and FP&A leaders into growth, PE-backed, turnaround and transformation situations across the UK. If you are a senior finance leader thin king about your next move, or a board looking for exceptional finance leadership, we would be glad to talk.