How do you tell whether an office / group is good or not?

If I'm trying to determine whether a regional office of a less-prestigious bank would offer a good SA experience, how would I best go about doing this? Is there a way to see if the group has good deal flow? And what even constitutes good deal flow?

People on this forum talk a lot about how "x office has 0 deal flow, all you do is pitch." Please help me avoid that.

5 Comments
 
Most Helpful
  • Check their deals on websites (how often, how much, how recent, did they actually lead these deals or are just “co-managers”)
  • get league data table from bloomberg or dealogic for multiple years (if they’re industry focused filter to that industry), see where they are and wether they have grown, check their average deal size
  • talk to analysts/associates ask politely about things like: how much of time is spent between deals vs execution? How involved are you with the deal execution/client facing things? (if it is a small shop, the trade off is that analysts get great experience talking to clients), how many deals are you working on at average? What is your fav deal recently and why? (Always gives a chance to get a feel of their experience), is there an area where you guys really specialize in (i.e. if all their deals in one subsector which could be of zero interest to you)
  • I think a good indicator always is how many analysts/associates vs MDs they have. If there is a good dealflow they should have decent analyst count, vs having 4 MDs and one analyst (huge red flag)
  • Ask MDs abt strategy of the group going forward
 

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