> Your salary comes (effectively) out of their own pocket, and recruiting you is quite possibly a significant and risky investment for the entire company. So w

> Your salary comes (effectively) out of their own pocket, and recruiting you is quite possibly a significant and risky investment for the entire company. So what? It's just like any other expenditure for the company. And it doesn't change the reality the owner is thinking about -- value of hiring you must be higher than cost of wages paid on a regular basis for it to work out. And probably high enough that they'd even bother trying to recruit anyways. In a way, it's sometimes even easier to have negotiations in the owner because it's so much easier to up-sell them on added value you can provide because you are talking to the person who'd be willing to buy even more of just that. There's no one-size-fits-all HR determined range to deal with.