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.
