Hey monkeys,
I just started a gig in an EB. My group is very small (6 people including me) and is regarded as the best in my country.
My associates and VP work at great speed and accuracy. Lately, they have been demanding the same of me but I am not able to work as fast as they can with a nearly perfect outcome as they expect
What strategies would you guys advise meto follow?
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If you just started it's not realistic to be fast OR make no mistakes. I would check things carefully and try to focus on the error part of things, and the speed will come with time
Not a good position to be in if (a) you're actually an analyst 3 and (b) they're asking you to perform like they do.
The work isn't complicated, it's just getting reps in until you figure out the most efficient way to put it all together and check.
One trick that may help you navigate this is overcommunicating with your team. I think people tend to be a little bit less antsy on timing when you at least check up with them as you're passing milestones and keeping them apprised of progress so they know you're actually actively working through it as fast as possible. If you just go radio silent all day and only check up when done it leaves more room for "What the fuck is he doing???"
I like your take
I 100% second this, very good advice. It’s a piece of feedback I got constantly during my second year because I was slower to get deliverables out on average and I was way overstaffed. Putting this into practice was massively helpful in terms of reducing chasing and increasing positive perceptions of me/my work during my third year.
Also, if you tend to suffer from analysis paralysis/spin your wheels too much (I’m also very guilty of this) try to ingrain the habit of taking no more than 5-10 minutes noodling on something you’re struggling with before going ahead and just asking the question. Lay out the issue you’re facing very clearly and always try to float a potential solution you’re thinking through - don’t just come to people with problems and shrug your shoulders saying “I don’t know.” Always come across like you’ve been thoughtful. Hope that helps a bit.
The most important things are communication (discussed by another poster) and attention to detail. I will be more upset as someone above you if you send something to me with errors in it than if you're a bit slower to get it done. I'd rather feel like I can rely on you to get me good quality work product even if you're a little slower, because it's a lot easier to manage timing expectations with the people above me than it is to deal with errors that slip through as a result of you making a ton of errors and me not catching them all. I also understand that Analysts are not as experienced as me, and are going to take a longer amount of time to do something than me, and that as you get more experience you'll (hopefully) develop the speed.
So focus first and foremost on making sure everything you send out is error free. Check it as you're doing it, but also check it right before you send it out. A habit that I developed (that I still do as a VP) is reopening anything I attach to an email and giving it one final look through before hitting send, even if I've already looked through it multiple times. I can't tell you how many times this has saved me from sending something out that had things I needed to fix / update.
When turning comments, you should be reviewing three times. First, read through all of the comments themselves and look for any that might be hidden (some MDs I've worked with have been notorious for marking up PDFs in black so it's hard to find them all). Second, go through the comments one at a time as you implement them. Third, and most importantly, put the finished product up on one monitor and the markup on the other monitor and literally touch on your screens every single comment to make sure they're all in.
When putting a model together, go through line by line after putting it together to make sure everything makes sense. If your model has financial statements that calculate down to EBITDA internally, then compare it to the EBITDA shown on the financial statements. Compare the ending cash for each period in your model to the ending cash in the statements. If you're doing your own projections, take a look to see if there are any glaring differences in future line items vs. historicals and determine if they all make sense. And additionally I think formatting of models and making them look good actually does go a long way in helping to determine if there are any errors. It's a lot easier to look at a model that is clean and formatted and see any mistakes than one that isn't formatted well. Plus everyone will love your models.
It really just takes slowing down after you're done and giving everything a good look through. Which is tough in this job because everyone above you can work faster than you and has timing expectations based on how fast they could do it, plus of course the short timeline that literally any deliverable has given the amount of iterations and number of people that need to review and provide comments before being finalized.
In terms of speed, pick one or two Excel shortcuts per week and implement them into your work. Learning Excel is a skill and doing this will help you learn to work faster with it. When I was an Associate I would put a sticky note up on my monitor every Monday with a few shortcuts I wanted to internalize using for that week.
Great! Thanks a lot man
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