People on the "other side": Is it ever that urgent?
As a prospect, one of the things I've often heard about IB is that people are often given work to do at the last minute because it's "urgent": for instance, being asked on Friday morning to create a new deck that needs to be done by Sunday evening, because the client requested and it needs to be done.
My question is, for those of you who have exited to corporate development (or any other relevant role): are things actually that urgent? Do you ever really need that deck by Monday? Or have bankers just forced themselves to think that way, because that's how banking is and we all need to accept it as such?
My firm? Its almost never "urgent" like better turn something completely new around at 2am on a Saturday. That being said, It can certainly be urgent in terms of "holy crap you guys F***ed your model up and sent me slides with all the wrong info and I need to get this to the board by the end of the hour." That has happened several times and that is when I tend to think that maybe we are just better off doing this ourselves.
Truly urgent - probably not but I'd still rather have it done over the weekend and review on Monday.
One of the perks of working with an IB is that they'll do the work that I don't want to do. If bank 1 will do what I need over the weekend so that I don't have to and bank 2 won't, I'm going to push to not hire bank 2 again.
^ this is sadly the truth. 99% of the time it’s not truly urgent, but there is no cost for the corp dev guys to force you to work over the weekend to make their lives marginally easier on Monday.
In IB (or any client service job that doesn’t bill by the hour), the marginal cost of you doing extra work is zero. And you are treated accordingly. This is why IB is becoming less attractive - diminishing pay with continuous poor treatment.
Ignore title currently in PE. We just sent out an email Friday night asking for materials to be ideally done by Monday AM. It was kinda urgent but like not really. We are currently planning to select one bank out of five so its up to them how they want to approach it.
The thing is whenever the sponsor writes « ideally » or « it would be great » then you know the bank will make it happen because of how competitive the industry is
Having been on both sides and now with quite a bit of responsibility for managing advisors I think a few things go on here:
1. Sometimes people don’t understand how long something will take because they’ve never done it before, so when the former management consultant turned Partner at a fund who has never built a model themselves asks to see an updated version of the model by CoB they don’t really get that this will turn into a 4am job
2. Sometimes banks shoot themselves in the foot a bit and add a tonne of unnecessary work. If I ask to see some comps I’m probably going to just take them from the excel backup and dump them in the appendix of our memo in the default MS Office format. What I don’t need is forty pages explaining how you selected them, the end market exposure of each company, the proportion of revenue that is recurring, a case study on one of the businesses etc
3. Urgent means different things. I might say something is “urgent” because I want to discuss it with the MD and his calendar is pretty full, or he’s leaving at midday to go to his daughter’s concert so I want to show him in the morning. It doesn’t mean the deal will die if I don’t get it immediately
4. People on the client side want to demonstrate their own value internally by showing that they are producing a large volume of work, even if it is low quality. This is what is happening when you are asked to produce work in “client format”
5. At the end of the day we really don’t care about your work life balance, that’s a problem for the bank to sort out not for me. If I can have five analysts getting their weekend crushed but it means I have a slightly more chill Monday morning then I’m of course going to do that, and your insecure sycophant MD will happily oblige
All valid points and #5 just comes down to having good MDs that will push back. Although that is rare as like we've seen in this thread its competitive and there is an MD that won't push back that then gets the mandate
It is almost always an MD setting an artificial deadline / trying to be a hero. Based on my Corp Dev experience at a couple large companies, it's far more likely to push the lawyers on timing.
For IB/Financial Advisors in general, in terms of urgency it would really depend on what type of work that you are asking.
If it's a dynamic equity/debt issuance in a shaky market, then its probably a "real" urgent request that's coming from management that's panicking. Usually it's low-value add or simply a "in the moment" thing that management didn't really wanted to think through first.
Most of the real urgent stuff in my experience are restructuring type of work. You are under incredible pressure to accommodate all the creditors/lenders requests while also maintaining some kind of orderly conduct so it would go relatively smooth on meetings/court dates.
Buyside M&A are usually pretty chill, whilst sellside it really depend on the client management/board. Been through 2 deals with ridiculous client's board but chill buyers and the opposite (chill board but pushy buyer). Personally i prefer the former, since a great board/CEO would know the company's worth and has the balls to actually confront the buyer if they are asking too much/stupid stuff.
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