Is this worth my time?
Hello WSO Community,
I recently started my first full time job and feel extremely shorted. I was told this position would be mostly corporate development with a lot of focus on M&A deals. However, so far all I have done is quarterly/monthly reporting and some treasury focused things. The role has been changed to "corporate finance" instead of "corporate development". All in all I see absolutely no exit opportunities from this now, as I have only done company specific tasks (have learned no transferable skills), and feel as if I need to make a drastic change to ever get into an M&A focused job now. Can somebody shed some light on this for me? Possibly tell me your opinions on this kind of job? Thank you.
How long have you been in your current role and what industry? I mean this in the most polite way possible, but if you're fresh out of school (i.e. with literally no deal experience) and landed in Corp Fin/Corp Dev, you still need to walk before you run. I would say not to get easily discouraged.
If you're new to the industry, working in some way on management reporting is a prerequisite IMO as the best way to get a handle on the fundamentals of the business, relevant performance metrics, drivers of profitability, and industry landscape. Knowing the nuts and bolts of your company inside and out is the best thing you can do right now to put yourself in a position to really add value down the line. At least at my firm, no one will trust an analyst to pull together detailed analysis and defend model assumptions without at least some basis of institutional knowledge of the company's historical performance and understanding of the company's current competitive strategy. I'd suggest you continue to excel at all the work assigned to you and always try to have additional capacity as soon as some of the more interesting/transaction-based opportunities come along. Most Corp Fin/Corp Dev teams are fairly lean and can use all the help they can get when a deal goes live, so I'm sure you'll be in the mix in no time. Best of luck!
I have only been in the role for a couple of quarters, and it is industrial. I love the company and the culture, and I work for a great boss, it is just extremely hard to see a light at the end of the tunnel. I feel as if what I am doing is very little "Finance" and more accounting. Thank you for shedding some light on this though. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.
+SB for this. Corp Dev groups may spend time teaching new hires the ins-and-outs of the company through reporting and seemingly repetitive exercises but it's so they learn how to interpret the financials and execute deals. It's also possible that the M&A pipeline is slow for your company/sector. Generally speaking, the market is hot, valuations are frothy, and Corp Dev can only add value through other finance-related activities if there's no active deals. The alternative is the group does nothing and it's an expensive function to keep around if they're not producing some kind of value in the absence of deals.
Take your time, learn the company, learn the business, and learn the group. This Corp Dev/Fin path is measured in years, not quarters.
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