A practice accountancy professional hands in their notice. They've accepted an offer elsewhere. Your instinct, and often your Partners' instinct, is to counter. Match the salary. Improve the title. Promise the things that should have been delivered months ago.
It's understandable. It's also, in most cases, the wrong call.
Why counter-offers rarely work
The data on counter-offers in professional services is consistent and fairly sobering. The majority of professionals who accept a counter-offer and remain with their current firm leave anyway within 12 months. In many cases, within six.
The reason is straightforward: the salary was rarely the real issue. People don't typically go through the emotional and professional effort of a job search, updating a CV, attending interviews, managing the anxiety of a process, because they want a pay rise. They do it because something about their current situation isn't working. Career progression, culture, management, recognition, work quality. The counter-offer addresses the surface, not the root.
In the time it takes them to work that out, their employer has sent a clear message: we knew you were worth more, and we waited until you were walking out the door to act on it.
The cost to the practice
Counter-offers are expensive beyond the immediate salary increase. They create precedent. Other practice accountancy professionals note that a resignation is an effective negotiating tool. The individual concerned, even if they stay, tends to be less engaged. They've seen the door, they know what's outside, and they know their firm was content to underpay them until forced to act.
There's also the management bandwidth cost. A Partner who spends three weeks managing a counter-offer situation is a Partner who isn't spending that time on clients or business development.
What to do instead
The practices that handle this well tend to do two things. First, they invest in proactive retention: regular, honest conversations about career trajectory, compensation benchmarking that doesn't wait for a resignation, and genuine follow-through on development commitments.
Second, when a good person does leave, they handle it well. A gracious exit, a warm professional relationship maintained, and a rigorous process to replace properly rather than reactively. Professionals who leave on good terms often return. And they refer.
The counter-offer conversation is almost always a symptom of something that could have been addressed earlier. The practices that recognise that consistently lose fewer people worth keeping.