Do you learn more in middle market?
Disregard my position. Question is in the title.
I don't care about prestige at all, not the person I am, I keep hearing that at most BBs they are offshoring work to India for everything, the model, the materials, literally just becoming good at delegating. One of my friends works at a middle market shop and was talking about how he feels like everything he does is more hands on because he makes the model, he builds all the materials, he has ownership over each mandate, he basically thinks he's learning more. Is working in middle market really a better educational experience? Would it position me to actually work more effectively for exits when everyone else is switching to AI and not learning how to speak to the things they output?
Bump have heard everyone in the MM glaze it (ofc they are going to) but have never heard from the perspective of someone who has sat in both seats
Am at a MM. it’s true, but the knife cuts both ways. You get more experience “in the weeds” cutting data, building the model, designing the slides.
However, this means YOU actually have to cut the data 500 different ways and oh also by the way, the data cube our $ client sent us is totally wrong, so we have to clean all their data too and rebuild the cube / the model and design the slides… it often adds up to a lot of busy work that a lot of the bigger banks offshore. Not a bad thing per se but it is the reality.
Ignore title. Have experienced both, and the only thing we would offshore to India is presentation design. We would do all the thinking behind it, then send it off for them to create overnight, and send us multiple presentations showing the information in different ways. Have never sent a model out offshore - no one trusts them that much.
That being said, you will be more of a "cog in a wheel" at a bigger bank because there are generally more people on a team. Smaller team sizes will let you take more responsibility and learn more.
I work at a MM firm. I didn't come from a BB, but I have a number of colleagues who did and have shared their perspective over the years.
For sell-side M&A specifically, I do think there's an argument to be made that you learn more in the middle market about certain key aspects of the job. Deal teams are generally smaller, volume of live deal work can be higher, direct exposure to MDs and clients can begin earlier, and rarely do I see delegation of responsibilities to product groups. I've worked with people more senior than me who had just lateraled from BBs, and they knew virtually nothing about certain aspects and deliverables of an M&A process because that's what the M&A team did at their prior firm.
Having said all of that, working at a BB can give you more diverse exposure to non-M&A work; MM firms don't do nearly as much as BBs in the equity and debt markets, for example. Also, we're speaking in generalities and a lot of what I described may vary significantly from one firm or coverage area to the next.
I worked in mid market M&A and then moved to a BB M&A group. I found I was more comfortable with the sell side process than my peers when I moved over (really only did sell side in mid market). At the MM, as an analyst I had the pen on the whole CIM on some files, building a model from scratch with unsophisticated management teams, being plugged in on building buyer lists and doing outreach and negotiating NDAs, working on the NWC target (there was no FDD), etc.
When I moved to BB, I thought wow the coverage team can take the whole CIM, sponsors and coverage do buyer outreach, NDAs are just forwarded to lawyers, there’s FDD - this is easy. When issues would come up though, I found I was more comfortable getting into the trenches and problem solving than my peers. What was harder though was the modeling which was now my main job at BB - the models at MM were a joke so there was some learning curve to get up to speed. But again building forecasts with management who had never built forecasts was a helpful skill set for dissecting forecasts received from clients.
All that said, there’s learnings in both sides but I’ve definitely been exposed to more complex and more interesting problems at the BB. Once you get to associate you can be as involved as you want in all parts of the deal.
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