How many deals did you close as a first year?

I'm coming close to wrapping up my 1st year as an analyst and I've been staffed on 5 sell-sides M&A deals totaling ~$16b. I'm curious to you know what your experience was like in terms of staffing. To be completely honest, the ramp up almost killed me, especially as deal flow increased and headcount decreased, but the silver lining is that I got to work in some pretty cool deal structures and learned quite a bit.

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What responsibilities did you have? I closed two sellsides my first year but was the sole / lead analyst on both from pitch to close which includes modeling, full CIP construction, buyer tracking, diligence, etc. because we don't have an M&A team. Staffed on lots of pitches, two buysides, and a debt financing deal as well. For five deals I'm assuming it was more compartmentalized, no? i.e. just comps or just the industry and company sections in the CIP?

 

We also don’t have an M&A team. I worked exclusively on those deals throughout the year and didn’t have a lot of admin stuff to work on. I’d definitely take it back if I could since I effectively worked almost 50 weekends throughout the year. Luckily we don’t do a lot of pitching and mandates kept rolling in. For 3/5 deals I worked with a senior analyst, an associate and a VP. I was the sole analyst in the last 2 deals, which were smaller and we had already worked with those 2 companies, so putting together the materials was relatively easier. For the first 3, I kept track of all the DD stuff + call log etc, worked on the CIM and MP but didn’t do any meaningful work on the models. Last 2, same thing + financial models with the help of the associate

 

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