Difficulty of getting MD role?
To all members of this community, I was wondering how difficult is it for someone to make it from A1 (Analyst 1) to MD?
Outside of the long working hours and time sacrifice, which has been touched upon a lot on WSO, what other factors make it difficult?
• Office politics? • Cyclical/recessionary factors? (e.g. layoffs) • Deal flow?
MDs on WSO, people who have MDs as friends, analysts, associates, and everyone with experience in the industry, what is your take?
Wishing you all the best.
Making it to MD is pretty straight forwards… especially if you were an analyst, banks are dying for A2As, from there just don’t be hated and you’ll get the promo to Director, after that you’re competing with a bunch of internationals/MBAs to win business so should be easy given you’ll have friends on buyside and can speak english. Hard part is consistently winning business, so you go spend those early MD years at a BB and use that prestige for the rest of your life. Enjoy
There's a point in people's career where there's literally nothing you can do except wait. As an analyst and associate you can do a good enough job to push deals along and not be the reason something gets held up, and you'll get promoted after a certain amount of years. To make the Director/VP level you need to be able to show the ability that you're a people person and can bring in deals to the company and grow revenue rather than just support the people that actually can grow revenues (or at least maintain them). The unfortunate truth is, at that point you are just waiting for MD's to retire or leave to be promoted up. There's a ceiling for everyone that you hit because there's no need for thousands of MD's at every shop. You might hit VP by 30 and SVP by 35, but you could stay at that level for the next 10-15 years while you wait for a seat to open up at the level above you. This is why people might lateral to a MD position at another firm, because a seat opened up at another company and everyone is trying to jump at it.
There is so much turnover at the lower levels of IB that they could hire a new analyst everyday and still wouldn't be oversaturated in a good economic environment for deals. Unfortunately, MD's don't work nearly the hours of analysts and are paid exponentially more so there is little incentive for them to give up a cushy lifestyle unless they have to.