Top boutiques = sole/lead advisers?
I was talking to a senior guy at MS and he was helping me choose between offers for the summer. There seems to be a love/hate relationship between BBs and top boutiques -- oftentimes, bankers at BBs don't like bankers at boutiques and vice versa, but they happen to co-exist fairly well because of their different strengths.
Anyway, the MS banker told me that boutiques like Evercore, Moelis, Greenhill, BX M&A, Centerview, etc. will never be the primary advisers on a big deal. If they do get a mandate, they generally play a secondary/tertiary role in the transaction. This seems to make sense on an intuitive level as these smaller banks don't have the balance sheet or financing capabilities that BBs have to do a large bulk of the work. One recent example is Pfizer-Wyeth.
Thoughts and comments?
BBs will usually always be the "primary" adviser since they can readily access capital. But from a workflow perspective, an analyst at a boutique will likely go through less of the bullshit that one at a BB goes through. Companies depend on boutiques more for an advisory role than a capital-raising role.
By helping you decide it seems like he was trying to sway you to work for a big bank...
As an Analyst, you'll probably have a much better opportunity to do the "good" work at a boutique; at a BB, since teams are so huge, you'll probably end up doing the same shit over and over - and it's not really a lot of fun.
I don't know about other places, but at the BB I work at, almost every deal team is MAX 1 analyst, 1 associate, maybe 1 VP and then 1 MD. Probably only a handful of instances where there's more than 2 junior people (analysts + associates).
Boutiques definitely do by and large have lean deal teams, but due to the large amount of layoffs, if you are in a group that has any kind of decent workflow the majority of your staffings will be pretty lean. Plenty of my projects are just me + a VP + an MD.
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