How many people are on your deal teams?
I am currently a second year analyst looking to move into CD or CF after completing my analyst program. I am curious how large your current deal teams usually are in CD for example.
Asking as I currently work in a large group where we could have numerous juniors on 1 dealteam for a project. Worried if I move to a smaller team that I’d have to take on significantly more roles and responsibilities which could lead me to be overwhelmed or excessively stressed. Currently my role is busy but not very stressful because our team has more resources
Hm good question, didn't think of it like that before
Our teams are quite lean, but this way you can learn more and truly build a strong understanding of the sector and role. If you've built a strong foundation during your analyst job at your bank, you should be able to function relatively more autonomously moving forward to your next role after the initial learning curve
Got it, and when you say quite lean, how many people is that?
Also, is that specific to your group or common? Wondering if there are a good number of CD teams that run not-lean
I'm working for a very well-known F500 company as an FP&A analyst. My team is very small, 5 people overall. Other FP&A teams also consist of 4-6 team members (and this includes people in various roles, from analysts to VPs). That's about CF.
In my company CD teams are even smaller, usually 2-3 people, like an analyst and a VP (2), or an analyst, a manager and a VP (3). There is also one 'key team' that monitors interregional projects and it consists of 6 senior people if I'm correct.
As for the stress factor, I'd say my job is pretty stressful due to the fact how lean my team is. We often get tasks with short deadlines from other teams, and this combined with the fact the workload is usually massive, I sometimes end up working from 9am to 10pm. Those are not banking hours, but I also earn much less. FP&A is often portrayed on WSO/Reddit as a lovely job with great WLB but honestly this massively depends on a company you are working at.
Did you start in IB
Curious about this as well. Would appreciate any insights.
My roommates team has like 2 ppl bro
3. SVP, me and an associate.
We bring on buyside bankers for large deals / if we are on multiple deals and need additional capacity though.
Basically with corpdev, you eliminate 75% of the busy work in banking. Less slides, less of the massive package of every analysis and comp under the sun, most of which is not relevant to the deal you're looking at. The focus is on (i) pushing the deal along and (ii) actually getting into the business/industry specific drivers that will inform valuation and how to think about the deal. In other words, you'll use your fingers less, but your brain a whole lot more
Still in IB but I thought the norm was 1 of each level, and sometimes skipping a level (I.e if a 2nd year analyst might not need an Assoc.) or might not need a VP if the MD is super active
When I’ve interviewed for Corp Dev roles the teams are almost always 10 people, more commonly 5, so it seems that lean team experience is pretty important unless there is a very good training program.
I've had anywhere from 2-6 with the 6 person group being high volume group with 1 head, 2 VPs, 2 associates and an analyst/intern (depending on hiring cycle)
2 at my portco, the CFO and me (FP&A manager). Our business development group (also just 2 people) helps out some and each member of the management team is responsible for their functional area and delegates accordingly. Our sponsor's VP and associate are very involved, then depending on deal size advisors, consultants, etc.
In corpdev it's hovered at 2-3. Usually me and a VP / corpdev head plus an integration specialist or more experienced corpdev colleague. These were at midsized tech firms though where our deals were on the smaller side. Larger firms undergoing larger processes or more dedicated M&A strategies are going to have larger teams - I've seen teams of 10+ people at large cap tech companies so it just depends.
On the corporate finance side similarly I've worked at midsized firms where it's usually 2-3 people per team with multiple teams that are brand, product, or P&L category specific making up the larger corporate finance function.
If you've come from banking I wouldn't worry about feeling overwhelmed or excessively stressed. Yes, you'll have to wear different hats and you might have to broaden your skillset, but outside of a live deal your workload at most places isn't ever going to hit 80+ hours / week. Most weeks in corpdev I was working 30-40 hours with a spike to 50-60 when we were on a live deal. Corporate finance is even better 40 hours most week. The only time I've truly been busy has been recently where it's just me and my boss (CFO) creating a budget for the first time where we probably hit 60-70 hours for a couple of weeks.
Keep in mind too the work changes. You're not cranking out CIMs or pitchbooks that have to be formatted to 100% accuracy to the dot. From a corpdev perspective your work will lean more towards managing working teams and facilitating discussions. At least for me a lot of my work was about taking rambling thoughts and perspectives from different leaders in the group and spitting out a coherent and clear presentation for the decision makers to look at.
Corporate finance has been pretty similar for me too. I've found that detailed modeling becomes a lot more important (e.g., instead of growing revenue at 5% every year vs. building a bottoms up detailed revenue build based on customers), but also it's a similar deal - take a bunch of thoughts and perspectives from sales, cost center owners, non-finance people, etc., then translate that into numbers and shove it into a model or tracker or whatever.
I'm still only 8ish years into my career so this is just based on my own experience.
2-4 is pretty common. I did have one corp dev team that I was on where we had a team of 10+, but we also looked at a dozen deals every month. The key difference between IB and CD, and where you probably will find yourself saving time, is that in CD, many of the BS assignments, like spreading meaningless comps, almost never happen. Most of what you do on a lean corp dev team is of value. In my experience, that eliminates at minimum 25% of the work from IB. The remaining 75% is also dramatically trimmed down because of the amount of approvals you need. You only have one CEO who can sign off on transactions, so if you are at a serial acquirer, you're going to do significantly less DD before presenting a deal for approval. That cuts out a ton of work. If you're at a company that acquirers 1-2 targets a year, you might do more DD, but you're also only looking at 1-2 deals per year.
I am in corp dev at a fortune 500 utility. Our team, up until basically this month, had a VP, directors, managers, and analysts. Our deal teams are generally one deal lead (a manager/director) and one analyst with our VP mainly coming in on a “we need a real decision maker” basis.
With that being said, for some deals (ie - when we hack off 20% of the company) there will be way more than just a two-man team while others are so small that an analyst will do substantially all the deal work. But most deals are 1 manager/director and 1 analyst
3, at a small cap public company (not highly acquisitive)
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