Greatest MD you’ve ever seen
Any good stories on the greatest MD or “Rainmaker” that you have encountered? What made them great? Let’s swap some stories.
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Career Resources
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Michael Klein
Justine Tobin
sigh
So funny 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Bump
I've met some pretty sharp bankers at the senior level - it's more rare however.
Mix of 'best' and 'worst'.
Best:
Worst:
I learned a tremendous amount, but also, 'suffered' under her - there were negatives I'm afraid to list here because I'm worried they'd be identifiable. In addition to knowing everyone, everyone knows her. I've described her anonymously before (with a bit more detail than what's here) to people who have quickly identified her and confirmed her reputation of being insanely 'good' but impossible. She also seems to know everything about everything, always. She'll probably read this post (or have it forwarded to her) and know it's me who's writing it, which in turn is part of what makes her so great - and terrifying - is that she's almost omnipresent.
Sounds like if Harvey Specter was a woman and went into banking
That's why her hair is so big, OP. It's full of secrets.
It's sad that so few people know this reference. If they knew where it came from, they would understand why this MD acted the way she did.
100% this is Regina George in banking
I see you're in ECM so we probably ran in different circles (was in M&A myself) but I had an MD who was exactly as you described. She told me candidly one day that the reason she was so rough with the other MDs and with her junior folks was that she came up through a super bro culture and was one of the only women who made it through to MD. She felt that if she didn't keep such a stiff appearance that everyone wouldn't really take her seriously, which I felt was a shame. As a guy I'm not going to say I relate because I'm sure she went through the wringer of shit to a degree I never did but I got where she was coming from. Btw working for her was an absolute nightmare at times but after I left that bank and got to know her on a different level, I got to respect her perspective a lot.
There is a decent chance we know the same MD - most of her career was in the sponsor world / not ECM (how she knew everyone at all of the funds). I also heard some detailed stories about the bro culture she came up in and how she was one of the first women to make MD where she did.
I think I know exactly who you are referring to.
Name drop
Isobel van Daesdonk? Says she's a senior MD at Guggenheim and worked in sponsors and ECM at deutsche.
I believe said MD is a strong taker — from the book Give and Take. Sometimes those people act like “fakers” — takers pretending to be givers.
A good book to read.
David Dolezal
Why? Isn’t Gugg’s power team relatively weak?
Jim Millstein
Confirmed. Dolezal is an absolute savage. We're a renewables fund and we almost exclusively hire him.
I think the answer above covered a lot of the important business development stuff. Simply put: to be a rainmaker you have to be plugged in to a valuable network and seen as an expert in your area. The rolodex (+ability to execute on it) is pretty much the value.
My group was started by rainmakers from other firms. To speak more on some internal factors:
1. These guys understand what "tone at the top" means. Sounds simple, but many MDs don't understand that the way they treat their VPs filters down to everyone in the organization. They truly walk the walk and follow the golden rule. Obviously we still work banking hours but there's a huge difference between spending 16 hours a day miserable and 16 hours a day just working (with normal people).
2. They are not insecure or anxious. These guys don't feel the need to work just for the sake of working. They maintain a high win rate in their pitches, and are aware that spending man hours on something that isn't won is a waste of time for all involved (obviously there is return to business dev and IP development, but you get what I mean)
3. They have a very refined operating model. Again, it sounds dumb, but a lot of senior bankers don't seem to understand how to get from A to B in an efficient way. The less time juniors spend battling terrible processes, the more time they can spend doing their VPs jobs and making everyone happier. This just rolls up the chain, with the VPs then able to do important work for the MDs
4. They have fun / are young. It's probably age discrimination, but working for younger people is better in my opinion. Also means more years of peak earnings for them, which means more work, bonuses, and opps for advancement for the juniors.
This isn't an exhaustive list but a few things I've noticed
Interested to hear your thoughts on working with a tenured MD vs a freshly minted MD, as you make a point on age. Anecdotally, have heard that newly minted MDs can tend to create a ton of unnecessary pages, pitch for everything, etc., whereas the same may not be true for an established MD.
Good point and generally agreed. In the case I described above, the MDs are relatively young but not newly minted. Think early to mid 40s vs. mid to late 50s.
All else equal, I think it is fair to say that more experience is useful for MDs not creating unnecessary work, but highly personality dependent. Practice doesn’t make perfect it makes habit
probably Dr. House
*cough* Tobin
Best MD I worked with leveraged a single deal into 4 separate transactions.
Started with total EV on the JV at $200-400M, but the transactions later totaled ~3B in EV. We also won all that business in a 3 week period. That MD is killer and knows how to finesse opportunity after opportunity.
Lol at being the analyst on that deal and getting it over the finish line
”Hey here’s another 3 to work on”
Yah, it sucked. Their board still made us pitch each transaction knowing they’d select us
Worked for a young MD that drove a competitive process with one buyer for an outlier outcome. Hyper demanding, but also created an exceptional product in terms of marketing materials and could shoot the shit with buyers in a way I never saw before or after. It made literally 0 sense. Somehow the dude just pitched the company as though it was exactly what the 1 interested buyer needed and was something the market was going to grab and that the buyer couldn’t afford to lose/ not buy despite the company having 0 interest aside from the single party.
It’s not that anyone could sell a great company, but to sell a shit company for a massive outlier outcome is just next level salesmanship in my opinion.
came her thinking someone must've written Jonathan Kaye
Hands down, jonathan kaye!
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