Podcast · Sijoituskästi #102 · 2022-12-06 · 55:08 · In Finnish
Negotiating Your Own Pay Rise — Sami Miettinen on Sijoituskästi #102
Published as “#102 Näin neuvottelet itsellesi palkankorotuksen ft. Sami Miettinen”
Hosted by: Teemu Liila · Kevin van Dessel
A twin recording with an unusual geometry: Teemu Liila and Kevin van Dessel came to Miettinen’s studio to record their own episode, so the guest is at home and the hosts are the visitors. Both sides point listeners at the reciprocal Neuvottelija appearance.
Where the negotiation books came from
The origin story is less dignified than the sales figures. Miettinen claims something like a two-thirds share of everything written about negotiation in Finland — Neuvotteluvalta and Uusi neuvotteluvalta — and the project started at a literary dinner where he was seated next to a thoroughly drunk author. Afterwards he asked his then girlfriend, now wife and a master of Finnish literature, how hard it could be. Her answer, delivered with full academic authority, was that not everyone can do it and he probably could not.
He brought in Juhana Torkki, who had done the same thing for public speaking with Puhevalta, and the books ended up carrying interviews with Ahtisaari, Wahlroos, Siilasmaa and Holmström alongside the theory.
The degrees, and whether they were worth it
Three of them: KTM from the Helsinki School of Economics, an American MBA, and the CFA he took alongside an equity research colleague at Credit Suisse. His honest account of the MBA is about signalling rather than content — the Americans have no idea what a Finnish Master of Science is worth and file it roughly at bachelor level, whereas American MBA reads as this is a good guy, and it got him straight into an associate seat at 25 rather than through the analyst grind. He finished the KTM before leaving specifically so that he would not have to come back.
His view on studying for an investing career is narrower than the hosts expect: it was the CFA, not the business school, where he first learned investment theory properly. Before that his method had been what he calls the ape strategy — the first student loan into a 1990s bull market that was simply unsustainable, with correspondingly unearned returns.
Investment banking, described without much polish
Credit Suisse First Boston was the hardest place he worked, and the era was genuinely toxic: around 200 flying days a year, a running joke that the long weekend meant not having to come in on Sunday, and an analogue-watch gag he still shows interns — turn the dial upside down and three in the afternoon becomes nine in the morning, so there is another eight-hour shift ahead. Taxis home were free after nine, which meant everyone left at ten, until a memo arrived complaining that people were ordering the cab for nine and leaving at nine forty-five to bank the waiting charge. His point is about systems rather than nostalgia: cultures nobody ever thinks through produce insane practices and structures.
He tried a double all-nighter once on a fairness opinion and describes the state afterwards as psychosis. Technically the week ran well over a hundred hours. He does not recommend it, and notes the bad old pattern was really a delegation failure — work handed down three days too late, producing an all-nighter that better sequencing would have avoided.
The Nordea deal is the one he offers as his largest success and his most frustrating failure in the same package. He sat on the Nordbanken negotiating team when a third of the Finnish banking sector was sold to a Swedish bad bank and all decision-making authority moved to Sweden. In billions it is the biggest transaction of his career; his principal won, which is what a broker is paid to deliver, and he is explicit that sabotaging a client’s deal over your own view of the national interest would be unprofessional. But he thinks the Finnish negotiating team — advised, he notes, by Swedes — did a poor job, and he generalises the pattern: deals where your entire advisory bench holds the counterparty’s nationality tend to end badly. He mentions Deutsche Bank advising Outokumpu on the Thyssen transaction as another instance, and suggests always putting one of your own people in the room.
The Nordea project was code-named Muumi, which lets him ride a favourite hobby horse: code names should be playful but abstract enough to conceal the target. His own set for Valmet Automotive ran Vorsprung for the German end, Silvia for the Swedish Semcon piece — Sweden’s king being married to a German queen — and Charge for the CATL share issue.
On fees: sell-side mandates usually carry a fixed base plus a percentage of everything above a defined good outcome; buy-side work is more often flat or tied to the financing. The Merita–Nordbanken deal produced something like ten million in fees for Credit Suisse. Finnish M&A fees, he adds, are usually hundreds of thousands rather than millions — do not hire an investment bank if your budget is in the tens of thousands.
The pay-rise method
The hosts explicitly refuse the generic answer, and this is what they get.
Build the dataset. Finnish tax records are fully public — Miettinen calls the openness a GDPR violation with some relish, and notes at the end that unlike Norway there is no trace of who looked you up. Go to the tax office terminal, enter each colleague’s name and home municipality, write down several years of figures, and plot them against tenure: if a colleague joined two years before you, look at what they earned two years into the job, not what they earn now. Validate it with a casual question or two about what the next step tends to pay.
Move the timetable. Work out what your normal promotion track would be — say three years — and aim at eighteen months.
Ask early, when it is cheap to say yes. In the next development discussion, ask what you would need to do if you were promoted eighteen months from now. The boss can answer generously because it is a pleasant, distant hypothetical. Write the goals down.
Come back with the receipts. Surprise them: here is what we discussed, here is what I did, can we talk about the promotion as agreed. Then name the level, referring to the spreadsheet built from the tax records — with a little added on top — and stay quiet while they squirm.
If that fails, create the alternative. Get a competing offer and say you love the place but have been approached. Then walk. The one hard constraint: do not bluff.
The hosts add the obvious caveat, and Miettinen agrees with it — you have to actually deliver the goals, and most people complain about their salary before doing anything about it. His broader frame is time management as an option flow: think about things a year ahead, which is precisely what people do not do. His example is a sharp analyst in London who asked in year three why she had not been promoted, and had never once asked for it, having assumed the system would deliver.
The uncomfortable question
The hosts ask whether men and women negotiate pay differently, and flag it as dangerous water. Miettinen’s answer is his own reading rather than a settled finding, and is presented as such: he believes competence distributions have similar means but longer tails among men, that men take more risk for evolutionary reasons — his own book’s opening example being showing off for a woman — and that women therefore more often have to override an average-level risk aversion deliberately. He stresses the distributions overlap heavily: plenty of non-aggressive men, plenty of assertive women. Asked whether this drives the unexplained pay gap, his answer is narrower and more practical — the discomfort of walking in a year early to ask what it would take, and simply not having considered that this is part of the job. He also points out the employer side is not scheming: if nobody asks for promotions, nobody thinks to hand them out.
The 3D model
Delete, delegate, do. Delete should be the large one — say no to much of the option flow, because if you cannot, you spend your life executing other people’s options. Delegate needs a machine beneath you. Do is the dynamite if you are actually good. The mix is a function of age and power, and juniors invert it, which is fine: in a good organisation, being on the receiving end of the delegation stick is pure learning.
Applied to a transaction: refuse bad deals, delegate the data room, and personally take the hinge points of the SPA.
Hiring, and the mirror-image mistake
The most quotable turn in the episode. Translink Corporate Finance gets 80–120 applications per intern round, runs case studies on real companies — value this business off the Inderes reports — and takes roughly five interns a year across two rounds. Interns go onto live client work rather than pitch decks; he names one who ran the data room on a real transaction.
His original method in London was to call finance professors, ask for their top three students, and hire the best of those. He now calls that a rubbish approach, for a specific reason: it assumes your own mirror image is the best employee, which he describes as an extremely narcissistic assumption that a great many people nevertheless act on. It broke when a Swedish candidate from his boss’s own school pulled out a week before starting and he grabbed someone from the general pile — poor grades, a cheerful taekwondo type, and an excellent employee. Translink now deliberately fishes wide, and he says he almost prefers candidates from Vaasa, Turku, Itä-Suomi and Lappeenranta over Helsinki, with industrial-engineering students doing particularly well. Broad net, open mind, then look at the case study and the presentation.
On languages: English is effectively mandatory since 80 % of the material is in it, Swedish is socially useful, and Dutch — the Translink network being Dutch-rooted — produces the running joke that closes the section.
The rest
On quiet quitting, he is unromantic: with a management presentation due the next morning somebody has to finish it, and if juniors decline the work it lands on the bosses, which is what actually happens. He says he does things daily that he could delegate, because he can do them at twice the speed, and that the team notices which way the delegation runs.
The closing house question — the hosts’ standard one, deliberately irrelevant — is about crypto. He bought a little bitcoin at six thousand euros, moved some between wallets to prove he could, calls himself a demonstrably net-positive bitcoin investor with bragging rights, and points at the fifth ever episode of the Kryptoraha-yhdistys podcast in 2018 as the recording that started his own podcasting career.
There are four sponsor reads in the episode, which Miettinen counts out loud on air.
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