12 Hours Till Deadline: The All Nighter, Part 1
Mod Note (Andy): #TBT Throwback Thursday - this was originally posted on 8/23/12. You can read part 2 here.
Since I’ve been writing for WSO, my most popular posts have been about banking experiences. The All Nighter is perhaps one of the most quintessential experiences of investment banking. While I agree with bankerella in that you can assuage some of the pain of working through an all-nighter with attitude adjustments generally involving ‘sucking it up,’ for most of us, there’s something about that very raw blend of stress and fatigue that just won’t go quietly. And so every year, generations of junior investment bankers – some of the most elaborate whiners on the planet – pass on their legendary tales of brutal nights spent at the office. Relive the horror of yesteryear (or yesterday).
7:45 pm
Not a bad Wednesday night. You got in a little late, you had a productive day finishing up a heavy turn on a massive Strategic Alternatives deck for a client. You sent the last draft to your VP a moment ago, and he responded immediately that he’d look at the turn tomorrow. We’re in great shape, the meeting isn’t till next Monday and we’ve got the rest of this week to turn through the document with the MD on the pitch. You’re further comforted by the fact that he’s already seen one draft. You decide to stick around for another hour or so to catch up on some personal stuff and snag a free cab ride to dinner on the LES.
8:48 pm
You’re cheerfully doing a little tidying up before you leave to head out to dinner with the girl you’ve just started seeing, when you hear a familiar beep.
Your skin crawls a bit, but you immediately shake it off – probably a stupid firmwide market update, or one of your idiot college friends who mistakenly looped in your work email on a long chain.
8:49 pm
Nope.
It’s not a firmwide blast.
It’s not a fantasy football league invitation.
It’s a message from your VP.
And the subject line says Fire Drill.
...
.....
.......
10:01 pm
The last hour has been a blur – a frantic flurry of emails zipping around. Tuesday’s pitch was moved up to tomorrow morning, since the CEO and CFO of the company you’re pitching will be in New York for another meeting and it’s more convenient to meet them then, in your offices. Plus, this way, your MD can go on vacation a few days earlier. Makes sense for everyone, right?
Well, not really. But still, it wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t a few new developments…
From: Jon Vepee
To: Aaron Burr
Time: Tue 8/21/2012 8:48 PM
Subject: Fire Drill
Aaron, pls see below. Fire drill. Bluestar mgmt coming in tmrw morning, need to update deck asap. I will send comments on last draft soon, but pls start working on below Embdee requests. Need to add sections to book. Call me w questions. Thx
----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Joe Embdee
To: Jon Veepee
Time: Tue 8/21/2012 7:45 PM
Subject: Fw: Fw: Bluestar materials
Pitch moved to tomorrow. Need to incl IPO scenario – co is optimistic about public option. Pls also add loan/pik bonds financing scenario to LBO analysis. Co also sent me new model attached. Pls update projections, add following analyses and send me latest deck. Thx
----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Frank Bluestar, CEO
To: Joe Embdee
Time: Tue 8/21/2012 4:45 PM
Subject: Fw: Bluestar materials
Joe, good catching up over the phone today. Glad you can accommodate our schedule and do the meeting in NY tomorrow. Attached are our latest projections. We’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts. While we’re not that jazzed at the thought of being a public company, you’re right in that it probably makes sense to at least look at the analysis.
10:45 pm
After spending five minutes wavering between extreme self-pity and pure, unadulterated hatred for your MD and VP, who were kind enough to give you a minus-4 hour heads-up regarding the impending fire drill, you opened the attachment containing the company’s new model. It’s likely that every number in the deck will now have to change.
The attachment was in pdf. That was the first bad sign. For some god-awful reason, the good folks at Bluestar decided that sending the bankers the Excel model was just too easy. Adding insult to injury, the attachment was a secured pdf, which meant you could not copy-paste any of the numbers. So you spent about an hour typing everything in, then the next hour tying all the numbers up to avoid rounding errors and fixing typos. This is what you went to college for.
Time to start building in new model functionality into your model.
11:30 pm
Your VP sends his markup on the draft you sent earlier in the evening. He’s a thorough guy, and he usually checks most of the numbers, so you’re happy to read that most of his changes thus far are formatting-related.
The only problem is, you’ve just loaded new projections into the model – and all of the numbers are about to change. You kick yourself for forgetting to remind the VP to hold off on looking at any numbers-related pages (basically, the whole deck).
You email him back, letting him know you’ve started on building in a proper IPO analysis and reminding him that due to the new projection set, most of the forward numbers will be changing.
12:20 am
Excel crashes while you’re saving, and you lose 20 minutes of work. You scream horrible obscenities. The cleaning lady scurries to the other side of the floor.
12:25 am
From: Jon Vepee
To: Aaron Burr
Time: Wed 8/22/2012 12:25 AM
Subject: Timing
How’s it coming - ETA? Embdee emailing me
You consider responding something along the lines of “how the fuck do you think it’s coming” – but decide against it and opt for the no-respond. Now that it’s past midnight, suddenly everyone above the analyst level is laser-focused on timing and efficiency. Funny how that works.
1:05 am
After cranking through the additional analysis, you send the latest draft to your VP. You feel so-so about it. Obviously, you didn’t have time to check any of the numbers, and nobody gave you any real guidance regarding assumptions for the new scenarios, so you just went with what you thought was reasonable. You always bitch about being relegated to processing and never being asked to provide your own input, and now that you’ve been forced to come up with your own assumptions on the fly, you realize it’s not as fun as you’d imagined.
Starving, you dial up some Seamless and wait for your VP to respond. You’re 4 Red Bulls deep and this night’s just getting started.
To be continued...
Aaron Burr is a retired investment banking analyst and currently works as an associate at a private equity fund. He has pulled way too many all nighters – share your horror stories in the comments section or send them to [email protected]
Top WSO contributor. +1
enlightening and interesting. thanks
also , the 12:20-25 should be AMs. got me a little confused there
Scintillating!
LOL, great insight!
The only thing that would make this even more edgy would be the addition of a bad case of Montezuma's Revenge after eating Seamless.
Holy sh*t. I don't know I didn't live life hard enough, but this is pretty edgy stuff.
Funny, coming from a guy named, "fearless".
Would just like to let you know that there are some programs that will allow you to pull data from PDF into excel. Formatting isn't in issue as you can align rows and columns before the conversion is done. The name of the program I use is called "PDF to Excel." Completely free and very effective. Could have had you home at 5am instead of 6am, good luck and hang tight.
givin that banks are like droppin their bloombergs and gettin shiny new factsets and other such mickey mouse moves, really dont see too many places shelling out the big bucks for specialized soft-ware...
plus i would be willing to bet most if not all of my bananas that none of these progs are 100% accurate so you're just generating more work for yourself
the name of the game is...BRUTE FORCE
As mentioned above the software is free. I am an SA at small boutique and have used it effectively without any error (dealing with some extremeky spotty documents). I am all about brute force, but I also like to work smart, not hard whenever possible.
That was great! Looking forward to Part2!
at 3am you quit, bust your computer screen with a golf club, then go drinking right?
Shall we make it a Choose Your Own Adventure two-parter?
i literally started convulsing half-way through this...memoriesssss
I believe it is simply called PDF to Excel... Not very clever.
I love the part about finally getting the chance to make your own assumptions -- first time I was left to do this it was some scary stuff. 3 MD's were waiting on me to do a model, were all traveling and my associate was too busy to even look at it. I should add it was compounded by the fact that all the company's financials were real crappy and in an Asian currency too.
You just do the best you can, make the model as easy to change around as possible and wait for revisions haha.
I knew reading this was bad luck - literally just got a fire drill e-mail 5 minutes ago....
hahahahahaha
if you want to succeed in this life, you need to understand that duty comes before rights and that responsibility precedes opportunity
Or as they say where I work..."No good deed goes unpunished."
Hah, there are fire drills in VC land? Don't believe it.
Not usually. However we do an annual portfolio review and exit analysis for our LP's each year. This is coming up soon for my team. However at 6pm last night one of the larger LP's in our fund asked to have it two weeks early. If pulling public comps, precedent transactions, updated cap tables, financial models and creating finalized exit analysis scenarios for the next 4 years for 14 private portfolio companies by this morning isn't a fire drill I don't know what is. I finished up at 5:30 this morning.
The real kicker is I know the guys there won't even look at it until Monday...
First signature quote that I liked! Not ridiculously arrogant like most of them.
Nice one man! Can't wait until PT. 2
Great post but who the fuck waits until 1am to order seamless!?!? At that point I've ordered once and am trying to bum someone else's account to order a second round!
we need this done for tomorrow. now don't spend all night on it or anything, work life balance is important. relax, enjoy the evening, go out, etc. just make sure this useless paperwork is on my desk first thing in the morning, so i can thumb flip through it a few weeks later when i get around to it.
best part...
also excel crash and profanity. did you then smack keyboard hard enough to bust the little legs off it (maybe some keys) and then swap it out with shitty associate and/or shitty intern/first year analyst that peaced from office at 8?
these posts are awesome and so dead on.
I am shocked at how poorly written those emails are
You should not be. Fairly standard for intracompany emails (for better or for worse).
Burr,
What happened to the Associate(s)? Your post makes me think that they're useless.
I was wondering the same thing what do they really do?
Ding ding ding.
?
This kind of stuff happens at some non-investment banking firms, though maybe not so hardcore. It really makes you think about whether or not you're made for this kind of life (I did) :))
Its it wrong for me to be erect? Great stuff so far. This is vaguely reminiscent of my IB student experience, except that my ass, as well as large sums of money aren't completely on the line. You just found yourself a new follower.
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