Any investment banking to corporate strategy bros out there?
I'm a 2nd year associate, I don't find this work interesting at all and corporate development / private equity don't interest me either. Corporate strategy however sounds intriguing..
Any ex-bankers make this transition? What's the hiring landscape like? What does comp progression look like? Any info helps, thanks in advance!
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Joined a strategic finance team at a pre-ipo startup after my 2 year analyst stint but will chime in in case it’s helpful.
First off, you’ll have more success looking into “strategic finance” or “finance & strategy” roles than you will looking into pure “corporate strategy” roles. The latter is usually looking for a MBB/consulting background and probably a MBA (which I assume you have as an associate) - that dictates the type of work you’ll be doing, especially if the team is mostly ex-consultants.
Strategic Finance on the other hand is like a perfect blend between financial planning(so typical valuation and operational modeling) and strategy (I.e. you create the financial models then use that to oversee projects that should improve a given team’s ability to hit their numbers and improving overall value of the business). If the sales team, product engineers, accountants, finance systems engineers and data engineers work IN the business, the strategic finance team works ON the business - aiming to tie the loose ends between all of these siloes and create efficiency. The role is heavy financial modeling, but then you also own the project of taking the real life actions to make that model output happen. Now what does that actually mean?
My team is small, 10 folks, mostly ex bankers and we have direct access to the CEO, CFO and Head of Sales. We translate overall company objectives into minute level operating actions, build the operating model that bakes in these efficiencies across cost management, headcount management, forecasting etc. then go make sure the team executes it. Then we track progress and report it up to the senior team periodically. We also internally handle all competitive market analysis (so yes full valuation exercises, market coverage, working with Gartner and such to get competitor intel) / M&A / strategic partnerships, which is naturally cross functional. Finally, we completely own all investor relations activities, including reporting to the Board and entertaining other bankers and investors, having external versions of our model ready for them, etc. An example project could be: The CFO says we have no line of sight into what our cash should be over the next 5 years, which we need to know to determine where to invest in order to maintain our growth trajectory, use raw data across all our systems to model out what our cash collections should be and see what we actually collect. If we aren’t getting all the cash we booked, own the optimization of that full process That means you have to learn finance systems and products, accounting processes and operations to be successful. I think it’s really dynamic and definitely changes as the company strategy changes but you get your hands on the most top of mind initiatives for the executive team, which is fun for ex-bankers that only interact with executive members. You are their eyes and ears on the ground.
With that being said, there is no better time to join than now - because you won’t get any extra credit in compensation or title being an associate vs. being an analyst 2. This was directly quoted to me in a process, basically the idea is that extra years in banking besides the analyst years doesn’t give you any more brownie points because more deal experience doesn’t make you better at the operational nature strategic finance job - M&A/competitive benchmarking is less than 5% of the day to day work unless the rare deal comes along. Maybe a PE associate who was deep in port-co work could make that argument, but not a senior banker - so best to join sooner rather than later. You will join as an IC (based on years of experience mostly) and you have to perform well as an IC before they just make your a manager with direct reports. From there you will be stuck at manager/senior manager until your VP leaves, who likely won’t leave until your CFO leaves. A good shop though should have meaningful annual performance bonuses or raises though (5-10% is normal) so I would focused on really trying to maximizing your entry cash salary without expectation of growing that exponentially over the next few years. Equity will likely be a meaningful part of your package but I fundamentally believe it’s all paper gains / not guaranteed / you won’t get enough to get rich at a late stage co., so just try to get the highest cash pay possible.
This sounds interesting, what are your hours like?
What I love about the job is that your hours are almost entirely dependent on how hard you want to work rather than your manager enforcing a timeline to close a project on (in most cases). The “worst” hours are during quarter end when we have to do all the board reporting - probably gets to about 80 hours MAX, never any mandatory weekend work. On average I work 60-70 hours but that’s because I want to progress my largely self directed projects to completion by a certain point. Most days I wrap up by 7pm, when most of my colleagues wrap up at 5. If I has shit to do in the evening, I’ll wrap up after my last meeting around 4. I’ll hit the gym / eat dinner and if I go back to work later at night for an hour or two, it’s to prep for the next day, always in bed by 11pm.
You’ll find there’s a range of talent across your peers on the corporate side, so if you wanted to chill you could easily do 30-40 hours a week and be just fine. You have near complete control of your schedule too, so I choose when I want to have meetings with all other departments/individuals I need to work with, unless it’s a finance team wide meeting with the the CEO and CFO.
Clutch! Really great write-up here. Hoping others in your type of role can chime in here to validate if your experience is the norm (hopefully) and not an exception.
Are you willing to share your industry and location (region: West / Tier 1 city, etc.)
yep would be interesting to see how others who’ve made the jump are doing as well. it’s a tech company and I’m in a tier 1 city on the west coast, but team is location agnostic you can work out of any of the locations in U.S., just have to be in office 3x/week
Is there a reason to even do banking if you know you want to end up in corporate strategy/finance?
I’ve noticed many companies recruit out of undergrad and if you’ve got a banking summer analyst gig lined up it doesn’t seem far fetched to just recruit for one of these instead for full time, and avoid the banking grind completely
Also generally curious how much on average equity ends up being?
My observation is that people who get the brand name of IB before hopping to roles like this get in at a higher level than they otherwise would have (i.e., a fresh grad after two years may be a senior analyst and expect to make assistant manager in another 2-3 years, an IB analyst with 2 YOE gets in directly as an assistant manager), get significantly higher comp packages, and have a better time recruiting for lateral opportunities or new roles if there ae layoffs. The value of getting that IB analyst stamp is huge.
Absolutely not. Even if the company has an analyst program I would steer clear, it’s a good way to shoot yourself in the foot and I’ll try to explain why.
1) I full stop would not have gotten the job without solid 2 years of banking experience - that was made very clear in the interview process and when you join. You cannot hit the ground running right out of college because you don’t know how to work in a corporate environment at all yet. There was effectively no training/onboarding beyond “here’s where data lives here are people who know this about x and this about x”. They expect you to join and bring insight with you, so how to build certain models, they expect you to know how to work with and get information out of department level directors, how to present and answer a CFO’s questions quantitatively, and how to get large scale projects with multiple moving pieces/partners done with very little/ambiguous guidance. That’s why groups will pay banking level comp for for example bankers to join the team - you come in kinda running on autopilot knowing what a business needs to do from a metrics standpoint to get the valuation the investors want.
2) If you join an analyst at any one of these shops, you’re not going to be well trained, you won’t get as many reps as you would in banking and you damn sure will not be the one presenting / interpreting any work with the Board, CEO or CFO. You’ll be treated like a glorified intern with subpar pay (haven’t seen an entry level Strat fin. Analyst role with >110k cash comp all in) and get subpar experience compared to your banking peers who are getting exclusive access to the C-suite/department leads on projects and effectively getting two years of work experience in one working 80hrs a week. It’s a grind but for good reason, it actually makes you professionally sharp.
3) Brand name and skill trajectory give you no real wiggle room to do anything else besides Strat. Fin, you might not even like the job but will essentially be pigeonholed into these roles or FP&A which is worse. You won’t “own” any projects as an analyst so not like you’ll be able to transfer to a higher paying gig in 1 year, I truly think CO’s who do true analyst programs (not senior analyst that requires 2 years of work exp) are just trying to get cheap labor they can promote through the ranks at a lower pay bar - don’t fall for it as banking experience means the floor is banking comp.
Trust me I’m no shill for banking, the experience fucking sucks and needs to be improved for the sake of not letting any more juniors die on the job — but I can’t deny just how heads and tails the experience at a reputable banking group will put you ahead professionally of peers who only worked on the much slower corporate side. You get whipped into shape for two years but you truly are a fucking unit when you go corporate after, you can’t recreate that need to perform at an extremely high quality under time pressure in any other field. Also let’s not underestimate how value commercial competence and awareness is, no other place to learn the ins and outs of an industry from a valuation driving perspective other than banking imo.
Equity depends on the shop and stage of business - I’ve a couple buddies in similar roles and they have cited anywhere from 25-100% of salary on top of base salary in equity with typical vesting schedule. Also seen predetermined % range of salary as cash bonus semi-annually or annually with same % match in $ equity based on performance, or even one case where you can choose to either have cash bonus (lesser amount) or all equity (much higher amount), it just depends.
Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to have a good pile of cash before venturing out to your interest
3 years of banking should leave you with atleast $3-400k of savings if you’re aren’t a total bunch .
In 3 years of any corporate strategy or finance gig you won’t have 1/3rd of that cushion
Taking a strat fin course right now with no intention of going into it (don't have a consulting / IB background). Very interesting space to be in but as you stated, I don't think most professionals could do this job well without an IB / consulting stint. I plan to grow my career in P&L Operations (hopefully) and applying Strat Fin concepts to decision-making might help.
Great posts by you on this thread. Thanks for sharing
Do you ever see ex-consultants in these type of roles?
I recently spoke with an alum that's in Strat Fin. Ex-consultant. Definitely feasible.
Superb write up! Really love the insights - this is literally the reason I frequent this forum/website.
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MBB Consulting to Corporate Strategy here. Good news is that the CorpStrat work is intellectual nirvana... tracking competitors, sizing markets, understanding your company/product positioning vs. peers, partnerships, market side of M&A (although with transaction experience you might also do the valuation / transaction work). The other nice thing is that you'll find sustainability / work life balance + you'll be able to run circles around all of your peers (assuming you aren't joining a herd of ex bankers / consultants).
Problem with corp strat is that it can be a dead end in terms of career track -- tech companies, for example, don't know what to do with strategy people and are usually led by Product. At non-tech companies, you may have GMs leading the strategy of business units. Ownership is ambiguous. At a certain point the strategy work dries up (how many times can we calculate this TAM) or you've evaluated all of the relevant adjacent businesses. Worst case scenario is that you'll end up doing boring work like running your company's OKR program or leading a quarterly strategy session with your exec team. You want to do your diligence early on how the company is growing and what paths will be available to you. I would try to align yourself to someone who is on an upward trajectory in the business and who will advocate for you to get bigger scope once you've proven yourself. In terms of paths, a few in order of how interesting IMHO:
Great post. I also think some tech companies don't see much value in Corporate Strategy especially after tech bubble burst. None of them are revenue producing and many are paid well. They're often the first place for layoffs to occur.
Yes... but often strategy becomes embedded in how the company makes decisions and in the operations of the business outside of prod/eng. I think you'd be surprised, the exec team views CorpStrat as a cost center but also as a super strong muscle that can enhance the performance of any other function. I don't think it's as dire as you say.
+1 lot of useful info here for people interested, certainly true from what I’ve seen
Bro, unlike IB, MBB can directly move to the FO side of corporate like operations, marketing, brand management (easier outside of tech unlike PM), why bother moving to corporate strategy.
Naive question but can partnerships lead to P&L ownership?
+1 to strategic finance being more alluring for an ex-IB and the general lean towards hiring consultants for corp strat roles in general.
Corp strat roles are a dime a dozen but not all teams are created equal and workload/projects can vary widely. The mission of a team may change drastically, and it helps to have executives bought into what the team is doing or else they may be scrapped. current team was spun up as the company restructured to create a high growth division so while off to a rocky start, we get more impactful projects compared to other internal strategy teams.
translating the long term growth plan into objectives and initiatives, M&A integration, performance narratives, product work, etc.
comp will vary depending on the company or team and don't expect significant pay increases without promotion. promotion pathways and opportunities are plenty where I work (Fortune 20) but smaller teams/companies will likely feel more restricted.
40/45hr weeks. its a comfy offramp for consultants.
I currently work in banking (capital markets) and would like to pivot to a corporate role in the next few years. What would be the best way to break into the field, i.e. is an MBA needed or is a straight transition possible? Currently improving modeling skills during down time.
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Bump great thread, anyone have experience on maybe the downsides or cons of this role besides pay/total comp? Do you feel like it’s been a great learning experience to set you up for whatever you want to do afterwards?
Moved into a pure Corporate Strategy team after doing a couple years in M&A (unrelated to my current sector) since I wanted to try something different - agree with the other comments that this isn’t so typical as my team are all ex-MBB but were open to my background given they valued my previous bank.
Hiring-wise for the UK, there aren’t cycles like buy-side roles, and it’s much more ad-hoc. Worth checking out Otta if you’re wanting early stage / strategic finance roles as well. Unlikely to be highest quality opportunities but have seen a few that could be attractive
Comp progression is much flatter (10-15% pay bumps off c.$150k+) vs finance unsurprisingly, but worth really understanding this. Corporate compensation is very back-dated, you make decent money throughout your career (discount to IB, on par with consulting) but if you make it to VP level+ where you’re being rewarded with options etc., then you’re living a very good life - good pay and good WLB. Staying in finance means you reap rewards consistently throughout.
It’s hard finding teams that value bankers but 100% worth sticking it out (signs are that the team has elite backgrounds - not that this matters work-wise, but more so that they won’t pay you on par with Big Four). I was lucky my team did and so I ended up matching my Analyst total comp - I’m still down vs total comp if I’d took on the Associate promo but no complaints
Adding to what others said, it’s a super interesting role for someone who cares less about financial modelling, accounting, DD and enjoys thinking through competitive advantages, competitive positioning and determining what to prioritise - appreciate it's hard to really know what you like/dislike and it took me doing this job for me to learn this myself. Certainly still using Excel for a lot of things (crunching data to prove things out) but Strategy is A LOT more qualitative - answers are more subjective and not things you can google e.g. if you’re asked to think about tech architecture / how processes should be fixed
Would caveat heavily that the importance and remit of the Corp Strat team (or CorpDev, Strategic Finance etc.) varies massively from company to company - try and sus out in interviews how impactful they are, and if they have political support from senior management. This is also relevant to the point of Corp Strat being potentially a dead-end. It can certainly be if the team isn’t valued and is viewed as simply a cost centre (and to be frank, you certainly are at the end of the day). However, if you have senior cheerleaders who really appreciate your team and work on high-visibility projects, Strategy can be a jump-pad to accelerate your career at a company and sector that you like, where you’re trusted to help work with areas you might be interested in e.g. Product
Biggest pros are that: 1) I’m working 30-40 hour weeks and actually have time for evening plans everyday (although remember you lose time cooking with no deliveries…), 2) 95% of people are absolutely pleasant to work with and not stressed themselves - work feels a lot more chilled even if I’m working on big deliverables for the board 3) you still get great senior visibility and participate in the most important discussions for a company 4) I like thinking through strategy a lot so being able to have bankers do the accounting and deliverables for you to have the time to spend on creating frameworks for decision-making is great 5) work is a lot more 80/20 vs banking, you can cut corners e.g. if analysis would be too tedious / take too long, it’s more than fine to skip
Biggest downsides for me are: 1) in the UK atleast, I feel there aren’t as many high-quality alternative options vs if you want to leave one finance co., there are an infinite number that you could apply to - unclear about this though 2) because it’s an internal company role, you typically get to meet fewer people outside of conferences, and projects w/ advisers 3) only really worthwhile going into other areas of the business at more senior levels (6+ years) - junior comp for things like marketing is not great and it makes most sense to stay in Strategy for a while if you came in early like I did
Hey mate - currently in IB in London too and looking to make the move across to CorpStrat - would you mind if I could PM you to discuss how you navigated recruiting and general interview process dynamics?
Also interested in this, could you please share here?
Probably one of the best threads about a such an under discussed exit opportunity on this site ever. I would read any thread about the corporate strategy / strategic finance side from any of the posters here, thanks for posting
I’m actually in the opposite boat — Currently a sophomore and did a corporate strategy summer internship at a tech company in Toronto (subsidiary of larger co., ~150mm in rev) and I’d like to know how I can best position myself to land IB SA 26’. It was a cool experience, got the chance to actually work on projects that have an impact and not just some intern fluff (GTM Strategy, International Market Sizing, Market Entry, bit of revenue modelling etc.). Would love to hear how I can use this as a step-stone for IB
lmao, grass is always greener...
Let me add my two pence. So I've been working at a very large corporate in London for some time (F500). I was part of Finance team, now got moved to a strategy/M&A team. I don't have consulting/IB experience to be clear. I have a few observations I want to share though:
- the grass is always greener and strategy roles in the UK are overhyped. The WSO focuses on the USA to the large extent and the pay in the US (even in my company) is 2.5 higher there at the entry level and I'm sure the difference is even bigger for more experienced roles. In my personal experience the UK pay is meh unless you find some company that will really want to pay you. Ironically I'm in tech so already want to burst the illusion bubble that tech equals big money.
- I'm sure the corporate life in general offers better WLB than IB though there are exceptions. However the pay is much smaller so in IB you can miss the better WLB, but in a corporate you will miss better money. That's at least my personal experience as I'm not fully happy with my salary.
- The salary hikes are slow. This is agan very company-dependent, but the general rule is around 10-15% of base hike for promotion (which you get every couple of years and is not guaranteed) and then annualy you get some inflation rise based again of your salary. The bonuses at my company are small and for associate level (aka 3-4 years of work experience) that would be around 6k gross. For analysts it's usually around 3k gross.
- the job itself... well, it again depends on what you like. My biggest piece of advice is to choose the company (industry) you are interested in. It is hard to be happy about something you don't care in the long run. And I'm semi-interested in the industry I'm working in, so can admit this doesn't help. The daily stuff is not very exciting, just updating some excels, analyses, and decks. Of course then there is the thinking part about the strategy but in my company the process is heavily driven in the US, so the London employees just need to stick to directions and don't much much influence over anything. This leads me to the next point...
- the word strategy sounds cool, but it MASSIVELY depends on a company what the team does and also on internal dynamics. The large US companies usually have their US offices driving the strategy while the UK is more similar to back office in this regard. Even in a strategy team you need to get approved every step by the US so this can be frustrating in the long-run. The teams in many corporates, especially in London, are small and the dynamics differ from team to team. While my team is cool, I've met several teams in my company that I definitely wouldn't like to be a part of. Hard to tell before you join as this can be misleading but just wanted to leave this here as well.
- read the job description and make sure the role is really about strategy. The most crazy strory I recently heard is about someone interviewing for a strategy role at some F500 tech company in London which turned out to be Biz Ops. Business Operations are not part of Strategy, at least not in the M&A sense, yet many companies to make roles sound better advertise everything as Strategy. I also know some another company which recently renamed their teams and currently around 20% of their teams is called Strategy haha Part of that is psychology as they want make people feel more important giving them an illusion they work on a strategy (while in a reality it's some admin team doing nothing related to the real strategy).
- Politics are everywhere. I've encountered an argument that IB/PE is about politics while corporates are not. This is not true. In corporates the politics play an important role as well, and if you don't fit in, you will struggle in the long run. Your career will struggle as well as promotions are not guaranteed so after you receive the role, you might never be offered a promotion, especially in teams which are already heavy top-down.
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