A fictional Big Four partner has explained that an annual profit share of £870,000 should be viewed in the context of the enormous pressure of knowing someone who received more.
The partner, who asked to remain anonymous in case colleagues assumed this was his actual figure, said the public rarely understood the financial realities of senior professional life.
“People hear a big number and think it’s a big number,” he explained. “They don’t ask what the man at the golf club said his number was.”
He described a challenging operating environment in which several friends had renovated kitchens, one had bought a boat and another had started referring to a house in France as ‘the smaller one’.
Against this backdrop, he said, the distinction between doing well and falling behind could be almost impossible to explain to someone on a salary.
Staff were assured that investment in people remained central to the business. This included an online resilience course for employees trying to establish whether investment in people would include them.
The partner was particularly proud of the firm’s adoption of AI, which had freed him from routine tasks such as asking a junior to ask another junior where the deck was.
He now asked the system directly. A junior checked the answer.
Asked whether an increase in partner profits might be described simply as good news, he said that would overlook the tax, uncertainty and emotional burden of opening a newspaper containing larger numbers.
He then had to leave for a difficult conversation with his financial adviser about whether he was on track.
The adviser confirmed that he was. Unfortunately, someone else was on a better track.
