M&A consultant Q&A
Hi, all can see there is very little information about the M&A consulting industry on here so happy to do a Q&A. please note all information I have relates to the European market, USA may be different
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What do you do in your typical week? What is the difference beetween M&A in banking?
Thank you in advanceeee
Typical week varies wildly from deal to deal, right now i'm on a post deal project so my week is something like:
Get up and either get on a plane to the client site / stay at the office as the client is in workshops of their own etc this week. We're trying to keep it to only 2/3 days a week at client site in this deal so it's quite relaxed as and when we go. For my workstream we have three key areas to deliver on so a typical week is divided between.
1) Producing decks to review with the business unit leads / my partner before I take to review with the leads 2) Sitting in those review meetings and sitting in on calls with my wider team (other workstreams) 3) Sitting on calls with other consultants (the IT guys, Strategy guys etc)
As this is regarding the future state of their business after the integration a lot of the day is wasted by infighting and politics as each lead tries to prove their dick is bigger than their new equivalents.
For a pre deal project you spend a lot of time with your client and depending if you're on:
Buyside - Try and make sense of the dataroom documents and assess potential synergies and diligence the sell sides documents
Sellside - Write the sellside document and for a carve out of a company advise on how best to separate the company from the parent whilst taking them through the process / write a document that is meant to objectively show a buyer the operational state of the company being sold (e.g standalone costs, stranded costs etc).
in terms of how it's different from banking - banks look at financials and high level operations. We give them a lot of inputs to put into their model and then they do the financial magic from there. The work in banking actually was fairly interesting but from my experience I didn't like the culture and in my current job I love the culture and enjoy the operations more so than I did the financial, I also think i'm better suited to operations than finance.
Sounds very interesting. Thanks for doing this. I just have three questions: 1. Is the exit opportunity - more like head of portfolio operations at KKR/ Blackstone? 2. If you were not thinking of exiting, do you feel that your long term goal would be to get on the partner track? 3. And it is true that some consulting firms (I know law firms do), to convince senior people to move to emerging/ not so exciting market, they are willing to accelerate the partner track?
No problem!
1) Yes that is an exit opportunity for our those higher up in our team at the junior - mid ranks the exit opportunities are IB at a decent but not elite boutique or senior for the age level corporate positions.
2) I really love my job but from early stage observations I don't believe I want to be a partner. A lot of our partners are extremely impressive e.g. partner in 10 - 12 years from undergrad consulting or extremely senior in f500 level companies to partner. The others are a mix of consulting - industry - consulting and worked their way up or some mix but the one thing they all have in common is they adore their jobs (atleast from what I can see) and i'm not sure if I will really have that passion going forward, this is my first corporate job so I have very little comparison.
3) I believe this was true in the old days and may still be now but I haven't seen or heard about it happening recently so I can't give a realistic comment on this. We do have some partners that came from call it "easier" markets that are quite young but they are thriving here as well so I doubt them making partner was a product of being in a less competitive market.
Hope this answers everything?
M&A/PE Consultant 2 years post-undergrad here. The Big 4 are obviously players in the space but, on the higher end, my company consistently runs into competing bids from BCG, Bain, etc (FYI - I work for a boutique shop in the U.S.).
Our sweet spot (read: most consistently sold work) is a cross between an operations/business process diligence and IT diligence. IMO, this cross-functional diligence will become more prevalent as technology continues to advance and the line between IT and operations disintegrates.
Typically, I go to 1-2 on-sites per week for a total of 2-3 travel days. Some weeks there is no travel at all. Upsides are less travel and less repetition (you're never going to the same place twice). Downsides are lack of visibility into what your next few days look like. We also do post-close work. This can be anything from strategy to PMO for major transformations.
I went to a target school and got above average grades, but nothing spectacular.
Base is $95k. Bonus target is 30-50% of base (pretty high for junior consultants).