How to negotiate your offer and package

Here is the strange thing about finance people and pay negotiation. You spend your career being precise with everyone else’s numbers, holding the line in supplier talks, modelling every scenario, and then you go oddly passive about your own offer. You hear a number, feel a flush of relief that the search is over, and say yes before you’ve thought it through.

A senior finance offer is one of the most negotiable moments of your working life, and the gap between a good outcome and a great one is usually a single, well-handled conversation. Here is how to handle it.

1. Never accept on the call

When the offer comes, the worst thing you can do is accept it on the spot, however delighted you are. You don’t need to play hard to get. You just need room to think.

Say some version of: “Thank you, I’m really pleased. Let me look at the detail properly and come back to you tomorrow.” That is it. It’s gracious, it’s professional, and it buys you the single most valuable thing in a negotiation, which is time to respond with a clear head rather than react in the moment. Nobody senior has ever lost an offer by asking for a day to consider it.

2. Negotiate the whole package, not just base

Most people fixate on base salary and leave everything else on the table. At FC, FD and CFO level the base is often the least flexible number, and the real value sits in the components around it. Look at all of them before you decide what to ask for:

Base salary. The anchor, but rarely the whole story.
Bonus. Not just the headline percentage, but how it’s measured, who decides, and whether year one is guaranteed or pro-rated from your start date.
Long-term incentive, equity or options. Especially in a PE or VC-backed business, this is where the real money is won or lost. More on it below.
Pension. An extra few percent of employer contribution is pure value and often easier to move than base.
Car allowance, private medical, life cover. Small individually, real in aggregate.
Notice period and any garden-leave terms. Protection that matters more than people think until they need it.
Sign-on or buy-out. If you’re forfeiting an unvested bonus or LTIP by leaving, ask the new employer to buy you out of it. This is normal and frequently agreed.

Knowing which levers exist lets you trade. If they genuinely can’t move base, a better bonus structure, a buy-out, or two extra pension points can be worth more anyway.

3. Anchor on evidence, not feelings

“I was hoping for a bit more” is easy to decline. “Based on current market data for this role, at this level, in this sector, the median sits here and I’d expect to be in this range” is very hard to argue with. The first is a feeling. The second is a fact the hiring manager has to engage with.

So before you counter, get your number. Know exactly where the offer sits against the real market for your exact role, and what a fair range looks like. That turns the conversation from a personal request into a calm, evidenced discussion between two finance professionals, which is the ground you want to be standing on.

4. Understand the equity before you sign

This is the part most candidates accept without really reading, and it’s often where the largest sums are. If there’s equity, options or an LTIP on the table, get it in writing and make sure you genuinely understand it before you commit:

How much, and how is it valued? A percentage means little without a sense of the company’s value and its trajectory.
Strike price and vesting. When does it vest, over how long, and is there a cliff?
Good-leaver and bad-leaver terms. What happens to your unvested equity if you leave, or are asked to? These clauses decide whether the upside is real.
Dilution. What happens to your stake if the company raises again before an exit?
What happens on a sale. The whole point in a PE-backed business. Understand the exit mechanics, not just the grant.

If you take one thing from this section: never accept an equity package you can’t explain back to someone else. Ask the questions now, in writing. It is far cheaper than finding out later.

5. Make one clean counter, not a haggle

Once you know your number and your levers, decide your handful of asks, prioritise them, and put them forward together, once. “I’m keen to accept. There are three things I’d like to land first: the base at X, the bonus measured on Y, and a buy-out of the incentive I’m forfeiting. If we can get there, I’m in.”

That is how senior people negotiate. One considered, evidenced counter that shows you’ve thought about the whole picture. What you want to avoid is the drip-feed, going back three times for a little more each time. It frustrates the other side, erodes goodwill before you’ve even started, and makes you look junior. Decide what good looks like, ask for it cleanly, and be ready to accept if they meet you.

The honest summary

Buy yourself a day. Look at the whole package, not just base. Anchor every ask on real market data, not how you feel. Understand your equity before you sign anything. Then make one clean, prioritised counter and mean it.

Do that and you negotiate the way the best finance leaders do, calmly, from evidence, and from a position of respect. It is the same discipline you bring to everyone else’s numbers. You just have to remember to use it on your own.

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