Sadly, "can" and "do" are WORLDS apart.
A question for fellow analysts as well as ex-analysts on forum:
How many deals are you typically staffed on at any given point in time? (include bus dev efforts)
How many other analysts work with you on each individual deal?
All in all, how many people do you have to report to each day?
Just trying to figure out how many people put tasks on your plate without realizing that your plate is overflowing...
Staffing problems suck. I wish I could explain, but thats just the way it works around here.
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It really depends on the
It really depends on the stage of the deal you are at. At certain stages, one deal can take 20 hours of your day or no time at all. At my MM, if things are spaced out nicely you can handle three at once as a second year and two as a first year. For us, there is one person at each level and that's it, meaning I report to the four people above me per deal. Also, people don't hesitate to call direct if they want something, so it isn't unlikely to get a call from the MD requesting that you pull something together.
Yeah this is too general a question to answer
If we take a generic sellside M&A auction deal where you go out to a large number of parties, there's a lot of work upfront with preparing all the marketing materials and presentation etc., but it slows down a bit when the senior banker is actually calling on buyers and the associate (sometimes analyst depending on deal) is just sending materials over and setting up meetings.
You get busier when you go into exclusivity (assuming someone actually signs an LOI) and have to deal with one buyer directly... sometimes can be lots of customized analyses, presentations etc.
And then when a deal is about to be announced and you have to do a FO (Fairness Opinion) you get insanely busy scrubbing numbers and doing 500 turns of a presentation for days/weeks.
Keep in mind, this is just for a generic M&A auction deal - IPOs and M&A deals where the buyer and seller have already started down a path and you're brought in at the last minute will be different in terms of workload and what you have to do.
TYPICALLY, I am working on 3 or 4 active deals at once, where I define "active" as "Requires at least 10-20 hours of work per week."
However, sometimes the hourly mix is very off - this past week, for example, I spent about 50-60 hours on one deal that is moving toward the final stages, and only around 10 hours on 2 other deals, with the remainder of my time being taken up with marketing, handling random favors for people, etc.
In general, there is never more than 1 Analyst on a deal here, especially with the "reduced headcount" lately and loads of people being fired.
Back when times were good if some huge (> $20B) type deal came up, sometimes 2 Analysts would be staffed on a project with the expectation that it would require a massive amount of effort to close.
How many people I have to report to daily... also difficult to answer, but mostly 3-4 Associate/VPs, sometimes more senior people will ask for favors though.
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