Finding Value In "grunt work"

It's not relevant.

Just quit your job.

You will always have a certain level of grunt work as long as you are the lowest person on the totem pole. I just got through printing and binding a few CIMs for the head of corp dev at my firm....and this is after two years of doing what you're doing in IB.

Like Quaneaser said, you need to master the grunt work before you can move onto anything else. You are being given grunt work because, quite frankly, you have not proven yourself yet. All first year analysts go through this. Master the grunt work, and the next time something slightly more important comes up, you might be assigned that.

But, to slightly expand on what has already been said, there certainly is something to gain from grunt work: showing senior bankers that you can think on your own. Remember how I said that I just got through printing and binding a few CIMs for the head of corp dev at my firm? I did that without him asking me. In fact, he didn't even expect it. But, I went ahead and did that because I knew that it would make his day easier. It gave him the opportunity to worry about the big stuff, not trying to read a CIM on his computer or finding someone to print and bind it for him. As the junior person on my team, my only job is to make the life of those above me easier, as is your job to make your senior bankers' lives easier. As you progress as an analyst, things like creating a second, more improved version of a slide on your own to show a banker, giving your senior banker a heads up that the client mixed up meeting times in an email, printing two extra copies of a pitchbook without being told to do so, etc. will become second nature for you. This "grunt work" will set you apart from the other analysts who are just there collecting a paycheck and waiting for their two years to be up.

Hope you know PE isn't all that different from what you listed above...

An attitude like this is frequently what will turn more senior people off giving you higher value add work - you need to build up some goodwill getting the basic stuff right before they can rely on you to do work that is meaningful. Also banks, to a greater extent than the buyside, are hierarchical - you have to pay your dues until a more junior person shows up.

The beauty of grunt work is that it usually involves many repetitions, and being the monkeys we are, reps make us better.

Let's go with formatting for example: when I started I couldn't spot 2 different fonts on a page or misaligned headers... and then I formatted things over and over and over again and I got better. Assuming you see value in being able to create good presentations, then it's only through grunt work that I got there. Just looking at pretty decks wouldn't have taught me as much.

Generally speaking, grunt work lets you become quicker and familiarized with investment / decision processes at a lower stakes game. It just makes no sense to have a fresh analyst bite way more than he can chew - analyst gets overwhelmed and does a shit job, and sr. people are left with nothing.

Also, and this is a farther reach, being able to go through cycles of grunt work can give you more confidence in yourself e.g. knowing you can pull all nighters and do BS work on a tight timeline, etc. makes you know you're "tough"

Finally, from a organizational perspective, grunt work allows sr. people to weed out less interested people. Grunt work is a chance for jr. to show "they care even when it sucks"

1st year sucks. Then it gets better. And better. And better. Just the way things are. Even if the investment processes were totally different from buyside to sell side, nothing helps your end goal more than having good work ethic.

Think about what you're getting paid relative to what you're doing and it might change your perspective.

there's value in grunt work itself obviously, but more importantly, that's how you tell people you are good enough for next level, and that you are trustworthy.

you need to prove yourself first.

my associates always complain about the same thing. i always believe that 80% is bullshit and 20% is real work. but in order to do the real work, you need to put up with 80% of the bullshit.

to give u an example, i am one of those vps at work who really hate telling associates to do grunt works. and i also hate my directors and my mds bossing me around as well. currently, i have five live deals running. i originated the deals. i put together all the models and investment memos. i called in my own investors to invest my own deals. i do the bare minimum of work to go from point a to b. before i originate a M&A deal, i pretty much know which investors might want to be interested? what is the rational? how they like to structure their deals? at what valuation they can accept this deal. so all my work is tailored to close the deals as soon as possible. and i make money when deals close.

so if u take a step back, do i really want to spend all my times to explain to the associates why certain slides have to be done this way? why should we pick certain comp sets? why strategic vs financial investors? how do build depreciation or debt pay down schedule? to be that just seems a lot of crap work when i could be making money.

on the other hand, if an associate don't whine and bitch. do exactly what he is being told. and when u go through the motion, u can start understand why i do certain things. and when i am free, ask me why i do the way i do things, that would be a better approach.

i know how to originate, structure and execute my own deals because i have been in this circuit for awhile. i have been involved in 100+ meetings, seems all the buy side clients, met all the CEOs within my industry, listened to 1,000+ hours of craps. u sort of build up a sense of how things are. and most importantly what they like and what they dont like.

so doesn't grunt work tell u to become a better investor? no. but does that give u a chance of what is really happening? yes. so it all depends on how u keep adding value (help me spend less time making slides) so that i can make more money > then i am more willing to assign u more work > u learn more also.

so net net, what i am trying to say is stop bitching and go back doing "models and bottles".

The value of it is showing the people you work for that you can get the job done no matter how mundane the task is. Attention to detail is important in this job and showing that you have an eye for it by prepping the "grunt work" can make you stand out. Then the more interesting work should come your way. Does this work suck? Absolutely, but you can still learn a lot from it. Be a sponge and adsorb as much knowledge as you can at this point, while still getting the day-to-day tasks done.

You were hired because they needed to bring someone on that could reliably do those tasks. While good leadership is cultivating or enabling talent it's ultimately your responsibility to grow into the next rung on the ladder. No one has hired you to become an investor, or an investor in training, that's on you. You're being exposed to deals and how your firm thinks/operates. Can you not glean useful information based on what's happening around you or in those meetings? What do you think about what's being said?

Many jobs start with grunt work like you're doing now. Yeah it's boring, mind-numbing, and it sucks. But it is important.

You need to walk before you can run and you need to learn the rules before you can break them, as they say.

Folks up the organizational chart got there by doing good work on assignments that, at the time, may have sucked and seemed beneath them. Hang tough. Stay the course. It will pay off. And congrats on the gig.