Thoughts on Boutiques (Career Banker)
Hey all - currently an ASO1 at one of the large EBs who’s been looking to lateral, and I’ve been taking a look at boutiques of the likes of Dyal, Consello, Tidal Partners, etc. main reasons for looking at those have been senior exposure, deal flow (basically guaranteed to be working on quality deals with the best seniors in their respective areas), compensation, and upwards mobility. Would love to hear more perspectives about how life generally is like at those types of boutiques. Thanks!
bump, intern at a small but well-established boutique and would love to know others thoughts about this topic
Fellow associate at another EB, but can offer my two cents looking at it from an outsider perspective. There are definitely both pros and cons to being a career banker at a boutique. The biggest pro I see is the ability to directly work with the cream of the crop - I'd imagine that if you were at a place like Lazard or Evercore it'd be tough to only work with the best seniors and spend all your time on getting quality staffings and deal experience, and that probably wouldn't be an issue at a boutique where you'd be working with Gordon Dyal on everything, as an example. You'd also likely be getting far more exposure to the "top" seniors at a 20-person shop than at a large EB or BB. Of course, comp would likely also be materially higher. Furthermore, I'd imagine that you'd be getting far more senior client exposure as well (most MDs at BBs or EBs have their strongest relationships at the VP or Head of Business Development or sometimes CFO level and pitch their ideas to those types of people, rainmakers like Dyal or Handler or Tierney often completely skip those levels and have the ears of the CEO or Chairman).
The biggest con I see is key person risk. I don't think this applies as much to boutiques that are looking to scale at the senior level (Consello, maybe Tidal Partners), but at a place like Dyal & Co or M. Klein you'd be effectively attaching yourself to a single senior. If that senior suddenly retires, your career trajectory would probably be upended unless you've also made it to the senior ranks by that point and have truly started relationship-building. Those places also all focus on large-cap strategic advisory, and likely don't have strong sponsors coverage if any at all, and having sponsor relationships is a big part of building your own book and getting on those sponsor mandates down the line.
At a firm mentioned above and everything above is spot on.
Do you mind sharing more about your experience? How has senior exposure and deal experience been for you? Has wlb been bad?
Dude you would have to seriously enjoy banking a lot to consider going from a likely sweaty shop to an even sweatier boutique
Heard a lot about the sky-high comp at Dyal, but anyone know what the comp is like at the newer firms on the block like Consello and Tidal?
hear consello is 120 base for first year
If you are interested in FIG definitely consider Ardea. Pay is top of the street. They are very active in FIG and are expanding in other areas. However I also heard it is a competitive firm - people don’t always get promoted and hours sometimes are bad given the top heavy structure.
What's the base and bonus like for AS and VP levels? People don't get automatically promoted to VP and D like at other banks ?
I’m ngl I don’t see how tidal can be super sustainable unless they bring in some new relationships. It seems like all the deals so far, such as Cisco, were old relationships.
I'm at a similar boutique with a very similar model.
New relationships come through word-of-mouth when executives or board members at core clients (like Cisco for Tidal) move to other companies and bring the boutique along with them. We don't do pitches nor bakeoffs and mostly advise on the buyside.
We do a lot of work on retainer, far more than just deal work. We help with quarterly earnings prep. We help with random board presentations on capital allocation. We help with M&A targeting. We help with activist defense prep. We help with a lot more other stuff also.
That's a lot of value for a retainer that's barely even a rounding error for a company like Cisco.
Other thing to consider is we're often advising a specific executive, not necessarily the whole company. Perhaps the Board prefers to hire a name brand bank like Morgan Stanley, but the CEO might trust Tidal's independent opinion, so both can have a role.
If you really want to do a career in banking, I think the sector you focus on has to factor into your decision making. Eventually you have to build a book of clients and, in the case of EBs, sell M&A as a product. Advice and perspective is the most difficult thing to sell. If you're in a mature industry like DI or NRG, boards are typically 60+ years old and won't have much interest in hearing from a 30-something. As such, many folks trying to get to the senior banker level in these industries really struggle to generate revenue. EBs or boutiques often say that they're fostering junior talent but look around - there's a massive gap at all of these firms of people from ~40 years old to ~50 years old. Instead, they have partners that are 50+ who spent 25 years at BBs and are now cashing in on the relationships they build. While they'll definitely mentor you, they definitely do not intend on handing off their relationships or giving you free revenue. It's the business model of the Yankees -- hire old bats to hit home runs and don't worry too much about the farm team.
The only contrary point is in industries like tech or healthcare or FIG, where there's much more whitespace and management teams are younger. These sectors provide many more opportunities for rising bankers to find new clients and generate revenue.
What do you think of Infra, RE, and PCA?
Infra is getting some attention with the AI build out but the traditional space is well covered by O&G/M&T/industrials bankers and truthfully the sponsors are the most painful and lowest fee paying clients i've come across. Think 100+ advisors/consultants/lawyers on weekly team call of $5bn+ take private for $10mm advisory fee despite full engagement from 12 person deal team.
RE I don't know too much about. Seems like a lot of asset deals and financing but they do have a willingness to delve into financial engineering / complex transactions.
PCA is the most interesting thing going IMO. Deal activity is growing in leaps and bounds every year and the market continues to see innovation. To me, IB has become pretty commoditized and you don't see a ton of new deals/concepts/strategies. PCA feels almost like banking in the 80s where individuals came up with novel concepts to meet client objectives in new ways. Plus there's so much white space due to growth and limited historic attention. The amount of capital sitting in private markets only continues to grow, LPs regularly change investment policies and/or need liquidity, and GPs don't want to be forced to monetize into unfavorable market conditions. Even just see the growth of secondary funds. This sector is going to be huge
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