Mid-market IB is frustrating, is the grass greener at large shops?
Most of the challenges faced in my job just stem from the client being incompetent. This includes them not sending information over, incomplete information, poor accounting / reporting (even when audited by a big 4), etc. Don't even get me started on when they send over their P&L Excel file with the worst formatting that's either all hardcode or is linked to 8 other files that you don't have.
Maybe it's a grass is greener thing, but I imagine that BBs or large banks that deal mainly with public co's don't have to deal with the rigamarole of mid-market clients. Am I tweaking for thinking that?
Edit: every slide deck you come across also sucks
Interested in knowing as well as I had the same experience. Literally every single request we had took an exorbitant amount of time or the files were just a complete mess.
If you can’t tell I’m on some processes where that’s happening. It’s like they don’t want to sell their business or something.
Really refreshing to hear it isn’t just me.
I've also found the smaller the business and it's founder owned, the more important they they are while also fighting you on every single fee. Not worth it.
Yes holy shit
It’s so much nicer when your client base is rated, much more pleasant.
The absolute home run is working only with IG clients, but the downside is that’s boring and unless you’re head of group the bonuses aren’t life changing.
But you can work in lev fin at a BB and get stuck on crappy middle market, unrated, sponsor owned companies and it’s the same nonsense.
Agree for the most part but it's not like public co work is bread n butter for BBs either. They too have to deal with shit Co's from time to time and larger cos are not always fun or easier to work for. But it is better overall ngl
Makes sense. Maybe one day I’ll be at a BB who knows
Worked for some of the top companies in telco, chemicals and auto… some of them could not even fully explain properly their budget numbers and asked to tie the numbers across multiple sources and teams. My favourite was telco that had M&A team consisting of 45 people and occasionally I was the only bank rep vs 20 people from the client side… TLDR - it is not better to be at BB; even top American banks have their share of either too big to understand clients or occasionally need to deal with some random projects
100% - have a client rn, does 16 in EBITDA and we’ve been waiting for their reviewed financials for 3 months. Just getting data is a complete hassle from 70-80% of the deals that I’ve worked on. But this can be good as I rarely work more than 60 hours a week
Yeah I can’t complain about the WLB
I’m in a unique position where my platform does small deals and also very large deals. Have personally done sell side M&A as small as low-hundreds TEV (aka, $1xx MM) and all the way up to double digit billions (lead M&A advisor, not some JBR nonsense).
The tradeoff as a junior banker, as far as I can tell, is that MM clients have worse quality data but you actually have a major role in execution, which can be rewarding.
On the large deal, company’s data was clean which make CIP drafting easy, but I didn’t get to join calls (they had an army of corp dev folks, lawyers, etc.) and literally emailed the CFO only a handful of times in ~7 months. They definitely don’t remember me now whereas all of my other clients, even up to ~$2B TEV, I could call the CEO’s cell and they’d pick up and chat with me for a bit.
Perhaps surprisingly, while much easier, the large deal felt like worse quality experience because there were so many more guardrails on the junior banker experience and I didn’t really feel like a key teammate at any point in the deal.
Long story short, it’s kinda a “grass is greener” story. I think if you want to coast for a few years, large deals probably the way to go. On the other end, if you want to feel like you’re actually learning a lot, smaller deals have felt much more rewarding for me (within reason). I’d say the sweet spot is >$500M plus, where data is solid, client is reasonably sophisticated, and you still get hands-on experience.
Interested in other opinions as well!
If you think BBs don’t have nonsense wait til you have to get a client’s 7 tax haven entities through KYC
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