Year 2 of being an analyst in a mid-market doing M&A, and I've been trying to figure out why this job is such hell sometimes even though there are a few points that could make it potentially a job you adapt to and have some semblance of balance:
- A lot of the technical work isn't actually that hard - you can definitely get good at it over time to the point where it doesn't become a pain point
- A lot of it is marketing materials and ability to convey ideas rather than thinking really hard about solving an actual problem
- You learn how certain MDs operate and how to make them happy and avoid their wrath (reuse slides they like, use certain formats, use certain buzzwords, talk to clients a certain way, etc)
Basically - give it a couple years and you'll be someone who is competent enough to do the job that it theoretically shouldn't suck, right?
Then I realized, how much time is spent answering emails, tracking buyers, scheduling calls, updating diligence lists, consolidating notes from duplicative emails? These are all mundane and easy admin tasks, but it puts a ton of pressure on someone who is trying to do a model and CIM at the same time. You can never get good at scheduling stuff manually, it is always a laborious task that is a pain in the ass.
Take buyer tracking. No one at my firm uses the CRM that corporate provides us, so everyone uses excel-based trackers and nobody knows who the fuck we are trying to reach out to except the MDs. No one has a centralized list of buyer contacts, so we just have to prod the MDs and hope they give us people's names (then we have to furiously try to find contact info from existing deals we've had prior). Imagine how easy life would be if MDs actually used the CRM and logged their contacts rather than writing it down on a piece of paper as a comment on a buyer's list.
Diligence trackers. Has no one developed a method of managing multiple trackers in a manner that is able to receive requests and real time updates?
If this job was purely what people think it is (doing models, making decks, eventually making calls and doing presentations), it would actually be pretty tolerable. But so many of these banks operate like start-ups with no infrastructure because the junior people turnover so there's no point to improve processes and the senior people become too senior to care about how inefficient a process is.
Bump, curious of other's perspectives.
It's a factor, I don't think it's a huge one but and would probably save juniors an hour or two in the average day.. but then they will have more capacity and seniors will want to do more meetings/pitches/deals. In 2021 my firm lauded all the many juniors they hired - yeah they took on some work, until more work appeared. Same goes for any process improvements.
IB has no time/effort calculation like other jobs. "This might be interesting but will likely not drive revenue + it would take my people a week to do" becomes "show this scenario plus 3 more". The MDs treating the juniors like oompa loompas whose time does not matter is the real issue. I appreciate the idea for a better CRM/cleaner admin side, but the issues in this industry are just way larger than that
Spot on, in short, no tools would fix IB hours. Even if you had human like AI that could draft pitchbooks and do models, that thing would be turning comments 24/7. For most MDs there is never enough marketing content, and this will not change until group heads & banks start to look at (banker revenue $)/ (resource cost) which will also never happen.
Just a lowly intern starting off but this cracks me up and hurts so bad at the same time. Only at a boutique now but said MD literally just threw bs work on a Friday evening and wanted it by Monday morning as he's going on vacation soon. (Wasn't even a client deliverable or anything really "urgent")
This was exactly my experience in IB. I don’t expect it to change at all. We would idiotically reach out to four person corp dev teams on like ten deals at once because MDs didn’t talk to each other. We spent hours ‘packaging outreach’ only for it to sit in MDs outboxes because they didn’t actually know the people they said they did.
a couple special cases aside, the IB business model is to throw a heaping pile of flaming dog shit at the wall, and see what sticks. You could cut down on probably 80% of the work from juniors and still get the same results if you’re a heavy hitting MD.
That’s how a place like CVP is able to earn sm revenue without pitching — whale hunting model and effective seniors that cut out bs work because they understand that clients get the same generic pitch deck from every BB, so they don’t need to show clients that. Partner there told me “we don’t send anything unless we think it’s a novel idea.” Accordingly, clients probably get excited and are inclined to peruse materials from CVP, whereas this isn’t the case for the generic pitches they get from a handful of other places (my bank included lol). Because of that, they win business while having a crazy lean team.
I think something that you eluded to was once you figure out an MDs style etc, learn the ropes its not hard.
Seems like the issue is once someone gets to this point they move on either promoted or to buyside/mba/corporate.
Part of the issue is the merry go round of brain drain for the mundane tasks that make everything work.
Granted I understand that people want to move on, etc. so its not an easy fix but basically by the time people are good they are basically gone.
Most companies and industries (IB, Corp Dev, PE, RE, etc.) don't optimize processes to make it streamlined. This is why worked hours become longer as things are not organized in a great way or communicated efficiently. But it's a cost center and the benefits are purely theoretical since you'd have to convince them that with the spare time you could close 1-2 more deals per year than normal. Otherwise, they are going to say, "this is how the bank has done it since the early 2000's and we are still growing and thriving!" and since they are no longer the ones that have to do the menial tasks, they don't care. Not every manager wants to make life easier for their employees when it comes to saving them time, so asking them to cut into the profits to spend money and time on training and implementing processes isn't high on their to-do lists.
I don't think this would necessarily increase the amount of deals that close - I think it would reduce turnover (which unfortunately is an unquantifiable metric for roles like this). Turnover is expensive, and 20% being churned must hurt the bottom line significantly. I know most people have their sights on jumping to PE or whatever, but that first step of "hey, this is kinda bullshit - imma humor that recruiter and see what's out there" probably happens a lot of the time because of the hours caused by inefficiencies and shitty management
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