How many deals did you close?
Hey there,
Just wondering, how many deals did you guys close in your first 1-2 years in Investment banking ? What’s a good number from your perspective ?
Also is there a LOT of variability across banks / groups in terms of deals per analyst?
2 completed. Would've had 2 more if it wasn't for COVID.....(buyer pulled out of one because equity partner dropped out; second business was a courier type of business and got absolutely destroyed by COVID)
At a smaller boutique though, so I'd say my experience was a bit more unique. Tbh, I think you're fine as long as you have 1 or even an in-process one you can talk to.
Thanks sounds like you had a good experience. Was that all M&A?
Yep - all M&A
8
1 sell-side M&A, too many public offerings to count.
Being on the inside (finally!), it is easy to tell that the first 2 years most bankers won’t actually close that many (pure M&A) deals.
Quite frankly, just as we are settling down the time for departure comes upon us. Lol, if anything, if I was a senior employer looking to hire IBankers, would be quite vary of bankers with 1-2 experience straight out of college in terms of their implied experience vs actual experience.
Are you thinking about it in terms of PE recruiting? Let’s be clear.
PE firms won’t hire you because they feel you have developed acute analytical skills, learnt how to invest, closed enough deals to know how to structure deals alone. You will get hired because you know the process (qualitative), know how to read financial statements (basic level), and can compute the cashflow statement given other two (more or less your 3 statement model). When you think about tbh, a long term IB intern with a little bit of smarts (a la Europe) can go straight to PE without FT experience in IB due to the above. We already know more and more PE firms are hiring directly out of UG/college.
Yeah wouldn’t be so extreme. PE recruits you because of your modelling skills, communication skills, project management, general ability to process large amounts of data and possibly industry knowledge (VC, RE/HC/infra funds). You develop all of these in banking and tbh it’s quite different to be on a deal from start to finish and writing emails to C-level executives than spreading comps during a summer internship.
Noted but I think we are not saying something too dissimilar.
The project management and comm skills are loosely part of the same “process” skillset. Large portions of data...um, not entirely sure. There is data from statements, records, payroll forms, supply chain docs, VDR disclosures etc. Don’t think there is much “data analysis”, certainly not in the sense the term is used these days. But in any case, not the same as looking at these as DD performers looking to invest. More like the MD telling what is to be uploaded etc.
Modelling skills? This is where I am afraid I do have disagree but this is arguably the one skill you can learn without setting inside an IB (courses etc) and be as close to being on par with actual bankers (analysts). Most models are fairly vanilla unless you are at a shop that likes to engage in legally convoluted transactions etc.
Wasn’t talking about summer interns - long-term internships in EU are 6 months each and most grads do multiple. Pretty sure this point can be easily corroborated by people on the forum. As you can probably guess from the tenure of the internship, after having done just 1 (let alone multiple) one comes of as an experienced An1 (at the very least). Unless you are at a bad place, you will (and are expected to be staffed on deals and join all client calls). If one is at a decent shop, they can easily have experience of closing multiple deals. Understand this point is quite different to recruiting in US.
Sector experience sure, but probably would not call it sector expertise. Again, you will just grow in confidence when you see that all those things you read in “insights” are happening in the actual market. But that’s more or less it (talking about people exiting after 1-2 years exp).
I am going to disagree with you. Based on the size of the fund you will need to know how to run numbers and can come up with ideas.
Depends what you mean by running the numbers. Basic modelling etc? Sure, in fact I would never dispute that. If my comment suggested so, I am happy to say that’s not how I mean it.
I do however think it’s not about PE firms looking to hire the fully formed, complete product in terms of investing ability. Running a multi-tab (40 tab operating model) is OK - let’s be honest, on most occasions the client hands over all/most of the data which just needs to be “moulded” appropriately.
Working in PE - 2 deal closings in first 6 month
Platform deals or are you including add-ons? 2 deals in the first 6 months is pretty good luck
Excuse the late reply. Was lucky and got staffed on 2 platform deals, one of them being a B&B-platform which led to 1 add-on since
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