Title is pretty self explanatory. Anyone with any insight could provide the smallest deal sizes that would get through? Would anything around 20 or 30 mil be sufficient enough?
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Less about deal sizes, more about fee structure and how that works. If it makes a minimum fee hurdle it could be v low, but that’s relative to what a potential client would pay.
Overall EV isn’t as critical at the lower end, more finding the economics to make a deal work.
$20-$30m isn’t really enough for those banks as they will have a minimum fee in the $1.5m - $2.5m range. Wouldn’t really make sense for a company to hire them when ~10% of the money from the sale would be a fee to the banker. That being said, if the company did agree to the fee the bank would do the deal.
FWIW from what I have seen if it’s an important relationship and that small deal is like packaged with other bigger deals / fee generating events for the bank, they could justify compromising and spending resources to help execute a smaller deal every now and then
This. I worked on a tiny sell-side M&A deal (~$50 MM EV) which was honestly below our bank minimum of $4 MM but we took it on because of an implicit understanding that we would get the sell-side on a ~$1.5 Bn EV later that year - which we ended up getting as a result.
When I worked at HW I think our minimum fee was 2 or 2.5mm. The smallest deal I personally worked on was ~$150mm TEV, didn’t see anything smaller than that really.
As with most things, the answer is - it depends. If the market is slow and you have directors desperate to prove they can generate deal flow/fees, you might see one of those banks go downmarket, so long as the client swallows the minimum fee. Some owners want to brag about using a MM name brand vs. a boutique.
Generally, you won't see those names much under $100 million unless the market is very slow (which it has been). I've seen HW on a $5 million EBITDA business, Piper was repping some small sell sides (sub-$10 million EBITDA), etc. in the past year or two. You wouldn't have seen any of them touching deals less than $200 or maybe $250 million in 2021 because of how busy things were.
That being said, imagine how shitty of client service you are going to get on a small deal from a big bank. You aren't going to be even thought about on a daily basis, compared to the multiple clients in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.
Lincoln
Yeah saw a deal they did in 2022 for 40 mil
For HL, BAIRD, WB you likely won't see any deals below TEV 200-250mm range (deal size average around 500-800mm) but it also depends on which industry. RJ, Piper, Lincoln and HW operate more in the lower MM but not too sure.
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