PSA - Always Call Former Employees
PSA for younger bankers / finance professionals looking to make a switch after bonuses (or frankly anyone who is naive like myself and didn't know this before): always call at least one former employee before you accept ANY offer. Period.
I recently left banking for a corporate role that ended up being completely different than the offer I signed, and I could have avoided this entirely if I'd called the former group head who left this firm after <1 year. To all monkeys who are desperate to leave banking, make sure you do your diligence on your next seat with the same level of thoroughness that they are using to evaluate you.
I used to think that calling people from the current firm was a helpful approach for doing diligence on a role, which is completely inaccurate. I've realized that calling current employees is actually almost worthless. They will give you the usual corporate BS spin on the job ("oh yeah great culture," "learned so much," etc.) - what they will not tell you about are the shitty parts of the job, which are really the only things you care about. Boss is a complete lunatic? Hours are worse than banking? Think you're going to be working on M&A but actually a glorified FP&A person? Current team members will not give you this level of candor - they just want another body to fill a seat, and if it's a REALLY shitty job, they are often incentivized to lie to you to fill the seat faster and reduce their own workloads.
I would say this advice particularly applies to corporate development, corporate strategy, and strategic finance roles, specifically at small or middle market companies, but it is also important for understanding group dynamics in banks, buyside roles, etc. where you may unwittingly end up in a nightmare group. With corporate roles, small companies / startups will lure you in with the promise of better work life balance, "exec exposure," and "high impact projects," and then 3 months in you find out you're wearing 15 hats that you didn't sign up to wear because the company has no formalized function for half of these things, which are all conveniently lumped under your job title. Don't fall for this scam, and be a thoughtful job switcher (unlike myself).
Hoping this discussion can help you guys avoid some absolute career bombs in 2024.
Rare actual good advice
Agree - not just a corp dev thing
Good insight and not specific to just corp dev
However, from what I’ve heard, corporate jobs often tend to be less structured, less standardized across different firms. It’s not like ib, where the work is generally similar just different cultures and team environments
Wow it sounds like a lot of people going to corp strategy / dev after the IB analyst stint aren’t content with the experience.
Is it better to go into PE or stay in IB instead?
OP here.
I can't confidently say that IB/PE is always a better path (I know plenty who are miserable in either), but that said, I would strongly discourage any younger person on this forum from going to a small company with a corp dev / strategy function. It will very likely not be corp dev, especially if they combine your title with strategy. Thoughts on distinctions below:
Note: If it's not a portco role, be very wary if they explicitly say you are going to "wear a lot of hats," or that you will not be purely focused on deals. For example, in my current role, our group handles IR, strategy (meaning business cases for product roadmap prioritization), and "deals" (I put deals in quotes as I have not submitted an IOI since joining a year ago). At first, I thought this could be a good opportunity to explore other parts of the corporate world outside of M&A, but what I realized is that this multi-function approach often means you will be spending 0 time on M&A. Instead, you'll be focused on the other functions, which are viewed as mission-critical by execs, while M&A is mostly on the back burner.
At these types of companies, not only will you be working on a ton of miscellaneous "keep the lights on" workstreams, but you will also no longer have a deep bench of talent to support you like you had in banking or PE. Your exec team will hopefully have decent credentials; however, the product / business leaders will likely have very weak backgrounds if it's not an elite startup, like some hyper-growth series C company.
I didn't think this talent bench concept mattered that much when I joined, as I was focused mainly on the backgrounds of my immediate team members. This was a mistake. In a corp dev or strategy function, you are leveraged for either a) transaction execution support for a business unit or b) if you're doing strategy work, you are there to help the business leaders size product investment opportunities and prioritize items on the product roadmap. Consequently, you are very dependent on the individuals in the rest of the org to be competent and helpful resources, otherwise your ability to do your job is hindered.
Suddenly, you realize that you are reliant on the community college grad / management program certificate holder for fulfilling your product diligence requests, as they are supposedly the subject matter expert who will help you get up to speed on the opportunity. Your learning experience will be limited when dealing with these folks, since you will be playing the role of the adult in the room and explaining things to them rather than the other way around. I think this dynamic is terrible for someone early career, which is when you should be learning best practices from coworkers who are smarter than you or have something to teach you.
In summary, avoid these poorly defined roles at smaller / middle market companies all costs if you are interested in the M&A part of the job.
Spot-on perspective on the middle market "corp dev / strategy" type of role. In one of these seats right now, have not submitted an IOI since I joined ~15 months ago (despite a fairly active M&A environment for our industry). Basically just handholding business unit leaders on business case development for pet projects of varying significance, and find myself working with some very un-impressive backgrounds, even on the "corp dev" team.
One of my friends did strategic finance after 2 years of IB. Her job didn’t seem to have a clear or defined set of responsibilities and the group didn’t seem that stable despite being a high growth tech firm. Sounded like she was working 50-55 hrs/week still instead of 65-70 but the position only paid ~105k all in
would say to take whatever they say with a pinch of salt too. if they left on bad terms through their own faults they arent gonna admit it and instead badmouth the company
It’s important to speak with numerous former staff if you can to see what the group was like. Everyone’s experiences are different.
A disgruntled manager who’s been stuck in the same position for 10 years may have much different sentiments than a top performing guy who left on his own for better opportunities.
This is just good diligence advice for job offers period. Always try to find someone in your role, or at least someone in a very similar role to what you were offered, who recently left and talk with them. They have the experience of doing the job and they are far more likely to be honest and more accurate about what it is like doing the work
Great advice. I recently moved from IB to a "Corp Dev" role where I've found myself (after nearly a year) having worked on little-to-no M&A, and am still working more than the advertised 9-5 on silly strategy fluff board decks and even basic capex decisions (which you'd think would be managed at the business unit level in some standardized way). Weekend and evening work not that uncommon either which is frustrating given the 50% discount in TC from IB. Overall pretty unsatisfied with the role and looking to exit soon.
Weekend work and you’re not on live deals?! Wtf! Is this tech?
How late in the evening are you working?
Yeah its pretty beat. On a good "normal day" I try to get out of the office by 6pm, but often get stuck until 7pm or 8pm, and have done a bunch of "late nights" (not banking late, but 9-10-11pm and then have to commute home and make dinner etc.) and weekends in the year I've been here. Again, almost none of this has been driven by live deals. It's pretty much all "strategic projects" ie: one of our sites needs a few million in capex and management wants to see fully built out financial models with a bunch of scenario analysis, multiple financing cases etc and then a lot of road-to-nowhere strategy decks. It's all pretty inefficient and getting old very fast. Ironically, management is able to decide whether or not to pursue inbound M&A opportunities in like an hour based on the teaser using some arbitrary scorecard, so most of the time we just pass and never even get the CIM or do any meaningful M&A analysis.
This is a mature, ~$300M EBITDA industrial business.
So what’s the exit plan?
Either back to banking where I can trade more brain damage for more money, or finding a more acquisitive platform with more competent management and an efficiently structured M&A process - that will definitely involve conversations with former employees.
Working more than 10 hours a day means over 50 hours weekly assuming no weekend work, possibly more hours if assuming weekend work.
There was a poll where it looks like most analysts here were working under 65 hours a week or something even in IB
UNDER 65 hours? In IB 😂😂
How do you recommend searching for former employees? I’ve tried to do this but not sure the best way other than just scouring Linkedin pages
On LinkedIn you can filter for “past company” and it will output the people who have previously worked at the firm.
This post should be included in a "Best Of WSO" series.
Well said, OP.
Yup inadvertently learnt this trick when interviewing at the start of this year - reached out to someone I thought was a current employee to find out he'd left a month ago and I was being recruited to replace him. He gave me a lot of inside detail - including things I already suspected after the first interview but couldn't confirm otherwise.
That said - does anyone have any tips for finding former employees, especially those who left within the last few months? Trying to do exactly this now for a new opportunity, but having a hard time finding people on LinkedIn.
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