MM IB Hours
Hey, was really wondering how many hours most people work in Middle Market IB. I have seen 50-60 in multiple places but I’m still unsure.
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this sounds like lmm hours.
mm depends heavily on the group/bank, some will be as sweaty as moe/jeff and some will be chill. generalizing is useless if its an actual mm with avg dealsize of like 300m+
Lol if you go in expecting 50-60 hours a week as an analyst you will have a nice surprise waiting for you
- 2nd year MM analyst
Show me a firm paying street with juniors working 50-60 hours per week and I’ll quit my job right now and join
Deada$$
What I should’ve said was 50-60 average, the range is more like 40-80 from a previous comment
Reputable MM shops (think Baird, William Blair, Houlihan, Lincoln, etc.) have hours just as bad, if not worse than BB banks or large cap focused boutiques.
While the general deal sizes are lower, the amount of time, effort, and junior man power to get those transactions done is just as much (if not more) than large cap M&A. And the type of work at times is potentially even more "labor intensive" as you are dealing with smaller companies that have worse reporting, less sophisticated management teams, and usually no historical off the shelf investor type materials to work upon (no 10K/Qs, conference presentations, sometimes not even audits). Not even to mention that much of this market segment is dominated by PE activity (either sale to sponsor or sponsor to sponsor trade) which require extremely broad processes with outreach to sometimes up to 100+ parties, further adding to the hours.
Think also worth mentioning that these firms tend to be under less media scrutiny than publicly traded / name brand BB banks so there is little to no pressure from management/ownership to actively monitor juniors hours/workload.
group dependent. 55-60 of actual work, another 10-20 waiting on responses, comments, and staffing. Jr comp (An/Aso) sees ~20-30% haircut to reflect the work hours compared to a top MM or BB
where
Depends, I worked at a MM shop and averaged around 70/wk for most of my stint. I routinely had 80 hour weeks, and some of my colleagues with shittier staffings worked 100+/wk for stretches. Sometimes you would get lucky and have deals close or die at the same time and a few 50-60 hour weeks would follow until new deals popped up. Overall not as bad as my friends who worked at better banks, but my comp was around 30% lower and I don’t have nearly the name brand on my resume.
I’ll second what some of the commenters above said, if you work at a top MM shop like Jeff, HW, Blair, etc. you should expect BB hours (more group dependent though)
In short, you’ll still hate your life but things could be worse.
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