How are analyst layoffs even possible.

Using Baird as a case study since they let go so of so many Junior employees during COVID I wanted to see how their layoff made any sense. Given their average middle market deal size of $350mm and using a very conservative fee percentage of 1%. That gives them 3.5million still to distribute to their team. Even with base bumps to 105k. This covers almost their entire milwaukee office and that’s not even considering that they close more than dozens of these deals every year. Given the numbers how does the firm decide that they can’t afford to keep people on during an economic downturn. Would it make sense to drop bonuses to near zero as opposed to let people go entirely?