The 22% Pay Rise You Couldn't Refuse

The Timing Was Perfect

The second Tuesday of October. Three weeks before the £4.2 million final account submission.

The QS sat down, looked across the desk and said the words that contractors dread not because of the number, but because of the timing.

*"I need a 22% pay rise. I have another offer."*

The MD did the maths in roughly thirty seconds. Replacing him mid-final account would mean rebuilding the entire commercial position from records that were technically compliant but strategically thin, because the claim narrative, the decision logic and the client relationship context existed largely in one person's head. Delay to submission. Lost entitlement from gaps that no incoming QS could reconstruct in time. Conservative estimate: £180,000.

The pay rise cost £14,000 a year.

He signed off before lunch.

On the face of it, that was the right decision. The arithmetic was correct. The short-term calculation stacked up clearly. What the MD didn't fully register, in the relief of having resolved it, was the structural failure the payment confirmed - and the message he had just broadcast to everyone else in the building.

This Was Normal Market Behaviour. That's Precisely Why It's Dangerous.

Let's be clear about something before going further. The QS was not behaving improperly. He was not acting in bad faith. There is nothing legally or contractually wrong with an employee identifying their market rate, receiving an offer, and using it to prompt a pay conversation. That is entirely normal commercial behaviour, and in a market where QS salaries moved significantly after 2021, a lot of those conversations were simply overdue corrections that businesses had avoided having proactively.

The "hostage" framing is a metaphor for the structural condition, not a characterisation of the QS's conduct. The structural condition is this: one person had been allowed to accumulate sole custody of a £4.2 million commercial position, and the moment a normal market event - an external offer - coincided with a critical deadline, the business had no viable alternative to compliance.

That is not the QS's fault. He simply recognised the condition accurately and acted rationally within it. The business created the condition. That is where the problem sits, and where the solution has to start.

The Loss Was Not £14,000 a Year. It Was Already Happening.

There is a dimension to single-point commercial dependency that most businesses understate and the feedback I received on an earlier version of this piece correctly pushed me to make it explicit.

When commercial knowledge - variation entitlement, claim narrative, compensation event history, decision logic - sits in one person's head rather than in documented, evidentially sound records, the business is not just operationally fragile. It is contractually exposed.

Under NEC4, compensation events must be notified within eight weeks of the contractor becoming aware of them. Miss that window without a valid reason and the right to additional time and cost is potentially lost, regardless of whether the underlying entitlement was genuine. That notification history, and the reasoning behind how individual events were identified, valued and progressed, needs to exist in the file. If it exists only in the lead QS's recollection, the contractual position is weaker than the headline entitlement suggests.

Under JCT, loss and expense claims require proper substantiation - contemporaneous records, causal links, quantified impact. A claim that is technically valid but poorly supported by documentation will settle at less than its full value, or fail entirely in adjudication, because an adjudicator deciding in 28 days on the basis of the documentary record cannot reconstruct what was reasonable from witness statements alone.

The point is not merely that a departing QS makes handover difficult. It is that undocumented commercial knowledge may represent entitlement that is legally irrecoverable, regardless of whether the QS stays or goes. The single point of failure is not just a resilience risk. It is a contract compliance risk that exists while the person is still at their desk.

That reframe matters, because it changes the commercial case for the protocols that follow from "sensible precaution" to "basic contractual hygiene."

What the Rest of the Commercial Team Heard

The MD thought he was solving a retention problem. He was actually communicating a commercial policy.

The message received by every other commercial professional in the business was specific and immediately legible: the route to a market-rate pay correction is leverage rather than performance. Identify your moment of maximum indispensability and make your demand.

This is how one leveraged pay event becomes an institutional pattern - not through conspiracy, but through the entirely rational responses of commercially intelligent people to the incentive system they observe operating around them. Junior QSs are watching. They are noting the timing, the mechanism and the outcome. They are making assessments about their own positions.

Whether the original QS repeats the behaviour is genuinely uncertain. Many people leverage a pay gap once, correct it and then stabilise. Whether any given individual escalates again depends on personality and circumstance, and overstating that risk risks reading as alarmist. The more significant and more reliable risk is the signal effect - the second-order response from people who observed the outcome and updated their own strategies accordingly.

Paying the ransom once is a tactical decision. Paying it once in front of an audience is a strategic policy.

The Commercial Redundancy Protocol

The goal is not to make individual QSs less valuable. It is to ensure the business retains the commercial knowledge they accumulate, so that no single departure - voluntary, leveraged or otherwise - creates an irrecoverable position.

Two-Person Visibility

The principle is right but needs to be realistic about how most contracting businesses operate. Requiring two fully resourced commercial professionals on every project above £3 million is not viable for SMEs running lean teams. What is viable, and what actually addresses the risk, is two-person visibility - a meaningful second set of eyes on the commercial position at regular intervals.

In practice this means: monthly commercial reviews with a senior who genuinely reads the file rather than accepting a verbal update; shared file structures and naming conventions that make the claim position navigable by someone who has not been in every meeting; and periodic deep dives, perhaps quarterly, where the deputy or senior works through the key positions in enough detail to take over at short notice if required.

The test is not whether a second person exists. It is whether a second person could, right now, present the commercial position coherently to the client or to an adjudicator. If the honest answer is no, the risk is live.

The Decision Logic Log

The commercial file records what was decided. The decision logic log records why.

In adjudication, the absence of contemporaneous reasoning weakens credibility even where entitlement is technically present. An adjudicator who can see that a variation was accepted at £45,000 against a submission of £62,000 needs to understand why - was it a genuine assessment of value, a risk trade-off, a relationship concession with implications for other positions? Without that context, the settled figure looks arbitrary, and the wider claim narrative loses coherence.

The log does not need to be elaborate. A brief note on each significant commercial decision, recorded at the time it is made, creates the evidential backbone that transforms a claim from a series of numbers into a credible narrative. Link it explicitly to the contemporaneous record: the instruction, the programme impact, the risk allocation under the contract. Framed correctly, it is not internal administration - it is the supporting documentation that makes entitlement recoverable when tested.

Enforcing this discipline requires explaining what happens when it doesn't exist and the lead QS is three weeks from a major submission. Most commercial teams find that explanation persuasive.

The Structured Handover Drill

The original version of this piece suggested sending the lead QS on leave for a week during a live critical period. The feedback was right to flag the risk: unsupported deputies during genuinely critical moments can produce missed notices, poor client responses and commercial missteps that outweigh the value of the exercise.

The more controlled version achieves the same outcome without the exposure. Choose a period of lower commercial intensity - not mid-claim, not pre-submission, but a relatively quieter stretch of the project lifecycle. Structure a formal handover for that week, with the lead available in the background for genuine emergencies but not for day-to-day decisions. Review the outcome afterwards: what did the deputy not know that they should have known? What was in someone's head that was not in the file?

The gaps identified in that exercise are the gaps that would materialise in a real departure. Identifying them now, while there is time to address them, is the entire point.

The Market Rate Problem

The leverage would not have existed if the pay had been at market rate in the first place.

A QS whose market rate is materially above their current package has a legitimate grievance that predates the external offer. The second Tuesday of October was a hostile choice of moment - but if the pay position was genuinely below market, the business had created the conditions for a leveraged demand by not addressing the gap proactively. The external offer was the trigger, not the cause.

Regular, genuine benchmarking of commercial team remuneration against market - not just against internal pay scales or last year's settlement - prevents the accumulation of the gap that makes leveraged demands rational. A QS who is consistently paid at market rate, reviewed honestly each year, does not spend mental energy calculating optimal leverage timing. They spend it on the project.

The cost of proactive market-rate remuneration management is consistently lower than the cost of reactive capitulation under pressure. That is not a generous statement. It is an arithmetic one.

Aligning Incentives

The pay-rise conversation is a symptom. The structural conditions that create it have two distinct dimensions.

The first is knowledge dependency: the concentration of commercial understanding in individual people rather than in documented, evidentially sound systems. The protocol above addresses this.

The second is incentive alignment: the degree to which senior commercial professionals have a financial stake in the business's long-term performance rather than simply a salary that a competitor can match with a well-timed offer.

Deferred bonus structures and profit-share arrangements create a financial relationship that cannot be instantly replicated by an external approach. A QS with meaningful unvested deferred bonus makes a different calculation on the second Tuesday of October than one whose entire compensation is immediately portable. These structures require genuine profitability and genuine belief in the business's future - conditions that themselves depend on the quality of the commercial operation - but where those conditions exist, they are the most durable retention mechanism available.

They are also, incidentally, a genuine signal about how the business views its commercial team. Not as a cost to be managed, but as a function whose quality determines outcomes.

The QS Was Being Commercial. You Should Be Too.

The frustration is understandable. Being leveraged at a critical moment by your own staff is not a comfortable experience.

But the framing matters. The QS applied commercial intelligence to his own career position with exactly the clarity you presumably hired him to apply to your projects. He understood value, leverage and timing. He identified a gap that the business had created and had failed to address, and he priced it at a moment when the cost of refusal was visible and immediate.

A client who tried the equivalent manoeuvre on your final account would be met with a structured commercial response: documented entitlement, notice procedures, contingency plans. The same discipline applies internally. Know where your leverage points are before they are used against you. Build visibility into your commercial knowledge systems. Pay market rate before people tell you what it is. Create financial structures that make departure genuinely costly rather than simply inconvenient.

The QS was not your adversary. He was a mirror, showing you the gaps in your commercial architecture before someone more expensive did.

The time to close those gaps is now - when the pressure is off and the choices are still yours to make.

Matt Lockett

Director, Norcross Commercial Management Limited

matt.lockett@norcross.uk | 07545 533968

Norcross Commercial Management Limited provides expert commercial consultancy to main contractors and subcontractors across the UK. Project basis, fixed-term or flexible retainer - whatever your business needs, when you need it.