---
title: "Negotiating Your Own Pay Rise — Sami Miettinen on Sijoituskästi #102"
titleOriginal: "#102 Näin neuvottelet itsellesi palkankorotuksen ft. Sami Miettinen"
description: "Teemu Liila and Kevin van Dessel ask for the step-by-step version rather than the platitudes, and get it: use Finland's open tax records to plot your colleagues' pay against their tenure, set the promotion conversation eighteen months early, come back with the goals your boss gave you, and then stay quiet. Around it, an unusually candid tour of investment banking — Credit Suisse First Boston hours, the Nordea deal Miettinen calls his biggest win and his biggest failure at once, project code names, fee structures, and why he stopped hiring his own mirror image."
format: "podcast"
show: "Sijoituskästi"
episode: "#102"
hosts: ["Teemu Liila","Kevin van Dessel"]
date: 2022-12-06
duration: "55:08"
language: "fi"
original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31OXmTM_Fyc
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/sijoituskasti-102-negotiating-your-own-pay-rise/
---

# Negotiating Your Own Pay Rise — Sami Miettinen on Sijoituskästi #102

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.

Original recording (Sijoituskästi): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31OXmTM_Fyc

---

Cite as: Sami Miettinen, guest on Sijoituskästi #102 — Negotiating Your Own Pay Rise — Sami Miettinen on Sijoituskästi #102, 2022-12-06, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31OXmTM_Fyc. Record: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/sijoituskasti-102-negotiating-your-own-pay-rise/.