This is going to sound a little naive from a current monkey, but I've had a distinct lack of sell-side M&A deal experience, and as such have never run a data room.
Can anyone shed some light on what this exactly entails in terms of content in the data room (I'm sure I know some of the things, but it would be good to have input from others), and what exactly the analyst has to do on an ongoing basis with regards to the data room.
Hopefully this will also give prospective monkeys a slice of the realities of the job haha.
Basically it's a lot of uploading documents. But a lot of thought and discussion between the client and the deal team goes into deciding which documents, and in what form, go into the data room (and which buyers are granted access to those documents). All of the financial documents will need to tie out and there are often a lot of mind-numbing redactions that you have to do (like blocking out key customer accounts so that strategic competitors who are in the mix don't get access to anything competitively sensitive).
Most importantly, when you're in this stage of execution, your inbox will be blowing up all day long and everything will need to get done 20 minutes ago. So you don't have time to get much else done until late at night.
This is when the burnout phase begins. The pitch and CIM writing is cute...a little PWPT here and there, some nice relaxing time spent copying and pasting the same BS paragraph in 4 different sections of the CIM and then switching clauses in the sentences so the seniors think you did some work, etc. But diligence is when you really start to hate your life and get jaded. That's when you start realizing that this job is stupid and if you could go back and meet your year-ago-college-senior self you would kick your own ass for even considering IB.
tl;dr life's way too short for this shit.
nice +1
Any tips on how to mitigate the pain and make life easier for yourself (vis a vis data room stuff)?
By being super organized, you'll make your life easier, but it's still going to suck.
Damn, son.
^holy moly you are completely right.
bump^
is there any difference as a buyside monkey? if being given access to data room material, is the organization of data room stuff just as mind numbing ?
Buy-side VDR work is different. You need to understand what’s in there and how it can be useful for your / your client due diligence / modelling. Sell-side is more process oriented and literally is about managing the information flow. You will just be the middle man uploading documents, granting permissions, and making references to VDR documents during the Q&A process.
As an analyst, buy-side VDR work is much more interesting. As an associate (with analyst experience before), both will equally suck as you are too burnt out to care about the learning part on the buyside.
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