M&A Intern

I reached out to the local MD via email regarding the possibility of doing an internship at Lincoln. This is more standard practice in Brazil. He agreed to sit down for a chat with me which was mostly market trend discussions, motivation, what makes Lincoln different, and story which lasted about 30-40 minutes. Afterwards I had a similar discussion with an Associate which also involved a little bit of language testing in Portuguese. I was then invited into the official hiring process which began approximate 2 weeks later. The process, which is pretty standard in Brazil, consisted of a GMAT style test; market knowledge meaning current deals, interest rates, head of the central bank, and inflation expectations; and a language test which was basically a translation from Portuguese to English. The entire test lasted about an hour. After this I was invited to second round about a week later.

Second round interviews consisted of two thirty minute interviews with a 2nd and 3rd year analysts. It started off with story and motivation and then switched over to technical questions which were all pretty basic. These consisted of walk me through the financial statements naming some accounts in each and showing how they are all linked together. Next we moved on to valuation questions which started with name the 3 standard valuation techniques. For the DCF I was asked to walk through how it works overall which was a very high level description. The most detailed I information I gave was how to actually calculate the unlevered free cash flow. Then we discussed how WACC is calculated, how you estimate Beta, how you estimate cost of debt, and how this could all be done with private companies which is usually the case for the firm. Next we discussed how you pick comparable companies, industry, geography, financials, as well as how you would pick precedent transactions. We then discussed the different types of multiples we could use which were the standard multiples EV/Rev, EV/EBITDA, EV/EBIT, as well as P/E and why you would and wouldn't use each. Finally we discussed how to handle a situation where the client disagreed with the valuation and what you would do. The interview for each ended with some lighthearted discussion about soccer, if I was enjoying Brazil, how I was finding the university I was attending (coincidentally both analysts also attended the same university).

Overall the process was pretty standard, especially for the Brazilian market. The people at Lincoln are great, always willing to offer a helping hand. The management have a sort of unofficial open door policy and you interact with them frequently. Client interaction is also very high, although I personally didn't interact with them the analysts all did and I sat in on a number of calls.