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Been in this exact situation. This is your MD distancing themselves from a file that is likely going to fail. For multiple reasons - distancing themselves from failure, fee economics don't justify their time, don't want to be shit on by the client etc. etc. They likely don't want to have the difficult conversation with their client. And likely won't as long as they can keep saying shit like "we reached out to x new parties this week". Which means they likely won't let you disengage.

I don't know what the best path is tbh. The third option is truly nuclear. At a small firm, everyone's time is valuable, including yours so I don't think anyone will take kindly to any time spent on a loser file. I did a mix of your #s 2 and 3. I weaponized our big outreach list and a shit ton of feedback from potential buyers articulating why the asset was a piece of shit to both the coverage banker and head of banking. The middle ground we reached was client was going to "manage the process" and we would support.

Good luck man, this is a really shitty position to be in. Ignore all the "this is a time for you to show leadership/this is your path to senior banker" bullshit.

 

Thanks, it's good to get the validation that there's no good outcome here and I can only try to mitigate my time & effort on this.

Being on a team with only the MD means that this deal is a complete black hole, since the project is completely forgotten about by everyone else and any work output is seen only by MD (and I doubt that he even opens the attachments on emails anymore). So there's very little motivation to bring myself to do some great work. Sometimes I even pull late nights scrambling to produce some work on this deal, otherwise my bank will have been idle all week and it only makes things more awkward when that becomes apparent to the client.

And noted on not being bamboozled by their "it's time to step up" bullshit. If I actually owned the deal end-to-end, I'd actually be incentivized to put in the extra effort but I fundamentally don't agree with how we positioned the company from the get-go. I'm not going to be sinking more hours than I need on what is currently our smallest engagement.

 

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