Dreading the beginning of sellsides
Hey guys, second year analyst here (off-cycle so my 2nd year starting a month and a half ago). I know this site is full of people with many, many sellside experiences under their belt & at the expense of sounding like a whiny b*tch I need some motivation from yall.
I closed my first sellside like 3 weeks ago. It was a long, stretched out process ~8.5 months. When I was staffed on it, we were kicking off and I was excited and just wanted to take in as much of the experience as I could so I put up with any and everything. I cranked the late nights, I worked on every mundane ask, I replied to every thread picking up anything the more senior deal team members wouldn't. I was fresh-faced and clearly a couple months into it, I realized how painful it was. It got better after the halfway point, mainly because we had marketing mats, financials and a lot of the heavy lifting done.
Now that I've been staffed on another sellside as the jr most member of the deal team, I really am freaking out. The first time I did it, I didn't know what to expect. This time, I am already overcome by anguish over how the next few months will turn out. The relief you get once you close a deal is amazing, but the absolute torment you have to go through in the first few months, maybe its just my group who runs shit processes, but is really not balanced in any way.
My question is, how do you guys mentally prep yourself for when a sellside kicks off. How do you accept the fact that you will have to repeat all the shitty diligence collection, CIP making, model cranking nonsense? Please help monkeys.
Wants to be an investment banker, dreads banking the investments...
Seriously though, this is your job. There are really only 2 paths through, you either quit or you do the work. The good news is now that you've been through one process you have experience. Try to lean on that and use it to know which items are actually important, which deadlines will stick, etc.
The worst part of anything in life is the unknown. Now that you know what to expect, understand how long it could take, and are ready for certain deliverables you should have a smoother ride.
only think about what you have to do today. NEVER think far forward in banking, its too overwhelming. I know this feeling well OP. its easy to go down this mental exercise when you get staffed up on a "big mandate". just breath and only think about the near term work.
just focus on today and tonights tasks (with your goal being getting it done as quickly as possible so you can take a break and go to bed at a decent time).
let the seniors worry about all the future planning and workstream timelines. thats not your job yet.
plus, the second sell side will be easier. you hopefully can do the tasks a little faster.
lastly, don't be afraid to quiet quit a bit. guys were killing themselves this last year and got corp dev like bonuses. you just need to finish these two years. if you have a strong chance of another terrible bonus this year due to market conditions outside your control...theres no reason to get too worked up about a staffing. you dont need to do this forever.
>you don’t need to do this forever
implying leaving banking? I heard private equity the same thing, although less stressful, with respect to it revolving around transactions and the associated processes and how every deal is the same?
Lol just wait until you begin to not only dread the beginnings but also the middle and end of transactions. Sounds like you had it pretty smooth post marketing material creation, but with enough deals, you’ll come to dread all parts of the process.
Middle when a deal suddenly loses momentum during marketing because a company begins to miss budget or your MD significantly underestimated the significance of a geographic concentration. Then you suddenly have two IOI dates where you get 0 bids on both.
Or perhaps the end, a month before signing, when a third party advisor breaches NDA and it’s egregious enough for a founder to walk away, setting on fire your sleepless months of work.
Needless to say, if you are already feeling burnout on your second deal, this career may be tough for you. I realized it 3 years into the role that every sell side is pretty much the same thing structurally and it is all just varying degrees of painfulness (maybe your buyer is the only one left and they won’t back down on impossible diligence asks; perhaps your client has the most god awful data and nothing ever ties across data system pulls, etc etc).
I think you may have to do some soul searching as I personally began dreading being staffed on any pitch, as I knew it could convert into 6-10 months of pain. Yet pitching and executing is the foundation of the job, and if you don’t like your day to day, why keep the job? Because it pays well? If it pays well, then just suck it up. The motions of a transaction are pretty brutal.
bro when a sell side loses momentum its awesome. what are you talking about.
What are you talking about? It’s great if it’s a definitive dead deal, but that’s rarely ever the case.
A process losing momentum then turns into an MD thinking that endless new page creates will get Tier C investors excited about the deal. Or perhaps what if we cut the data a different way? And then the moment a dead deal gets a sparkle of interest from a buyer everyone know is a Hail Mary, you’re forced rolling forward data on all work you’ve done months ago and forgot all the minutia needed to adjust it.
I would 100% rather be pulling late nights in 2020/2021, doing the next essential task to get a process to sign, rather than what the current market looks like for non premier assets.
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