negotiating an offer to keep existing job

A reader writes:

When a business comes under new ownership and employees receive offers to keep their current jobs, can one negotiate? In this case a larger company has purchased a small business. I'm managing my expectations and trying not to count on even being offered my current salary.

However, when I took this job I took a substantial pay cut (almost 20%) versus my previous position. If I do receive an offer from the new owners, I'd like to request that they match my prior salary. I was told at hiring that because the company was a small one they couldn't match what I was making before. I ended up taking their offer without trying very hard to negotiate. Now that a larger company that has plenty of cash on hand will potentially be employing me, I'd really like to get back to my previous salary level.

Is explaining this and negotiating with the new ownership acceptable, or would I just be marking myself as difficult from the start?

It seems pretty unlikely to me that you're going to get a substantial raise simply because the new owners have more cash.

The way they're going to see it, you've already shown that you're willing to do the job at your current salary, so what incentive do they have to significantly increase it? The only way I can see this being likely to happen is if (a) you're an absolutely fantastic employee, rock star quality, (b) they know this, (c) they think you're going to leave without the raise, and (d) they're highly motivated to hold on to you. 

(One exception to this would be if they raise salaries across the board to bring the company in line with their overall corporate salary structure, which does occasionally happen.)

It's not typical for people who can command a significantly higher salary to take a job at a major pay cut just because the company can't afford more (except in the case of nonprofits, where people have other motivations); most people aren't that altruistic. So the new owners are likely to assume that you took the pay cut for other reasons -- that you just didn't care about the money that much, that you really wanted to do this job or work for this company, that you found the market wasn't willing to pay you what you were earning previously, or whatever. 

So you're not in a very strong negotiating position; you've already shown your hand, that you're willing to do the job at your current salary. 

Furthermore, once you're already on the job, your negotiating power comes from the implied possibility that you might look elsewhere if you don't get the money you're asking for here. It sounds like these are relatively risky circumstances to be making that implied threat; the new owners, who don't know you, probably aren't going to be as highly motivated to keep you as a manager who knows your work would be.

This doesn't meant that you absolutely shouldn't try; you know your circumstances and the nuances of this situation better than I do. But the best thing you can do is to put yourself in their shoes and figure out what a compelling argument to them would be, if there is one; the fact that they have more cash than the old owner isn't it.