What are the dumbest/ least value add edits you’ve received on a deliverable?
Everyone knows between the models and the bottles and the truly glamorous life of an investment banker, there are comment turns that make you question your reality at 2am in a bathroom stall. Comments such as:
- This entire deck needs to have squares with rounded edges instead of square edges
- Plz globally change all dates from dash format (7/23/2021) to words (July 23, 2021)
- Quick nit: globally ensure all numbers go to two decimal places instead of one and tie. Thx.
- Need to make longer (team any ideas for additional slides?)
- Change title from “expand market opportunity” to “enlarge market opportunity”
- Fix bullets to be not filled in circles from filled in circles
What are some other truly useless/ least value add comments you have ever gotten?
Spaces inbetween backslashes...who tf cares
the commenter below you
Oxford commas - none of them, globally. Thx
I mean, as much as I love Oxford commas, they are a big NO in IB and overall business writing.
Oxford Comma in the above is needed to clarify BK and McD aren’t sponsors. People that don’t use it just lack an understanding of the English language.
Thanks incoming analyst. This is entirely incorrect.
Comes down to personal preference
I can't believe this is the kind of stuff people sit around at 10pm/however late waiting for only to stay up in the wee hours of the night. I mean, obviously you have to if MD asks for it, but this just seems so useless to me. Why would any of the points OP listed need to be changed? Is this what people are routinely up late for?
Pretty much… it’s the banking culture I guess
.
OP here. Two reasons this happens:
As a note, I’ve never had a rainmaker MD make comments like the ones listed. Those guys usually are too busy and end up moving the conversation to a discussion anyway rather than walking through slides.
change c. to ~ on all pages, thx
To be fair, “c.” Is retarded
thats what I thought, but I started using c. instead of ~ because I was asked to change from ~ to c. on my first deal
M&A associate emails me:
"Swap the order of the distro list / I should be higher on the page than the sector team associate; I am a third year associate, he is second year"
I make change.
Sector associate emails me
"Hey, I should be higher on the distro list, please adjust. Sector team always goes above M&A as we lead client relationship"
I hate banking
surely the guys who actually do this realise how cringe it is? I would lose all respect for any co-worker who went to that hassle
its pretty common for bankers to get worked up about this
the amount of comments you get on a stupid team page for a pitch are ridiculous
"I should have "Head of Exclusive Sales" as well by my name, not just managing director"
"Please place the APAC banker team below the EMEA team (from a London banker)"
"I am actually now the global head of chemicals in addition to being the AMER Industrials group head, please also include that title by my name. If you don't have space, please remove the associate"
"Why am I as an executive director at the bottom of the team page? I should be moved up, please remove all analysts as well - we need to keep this to a concise group of team members, thx"
Such insecurity from so many bankers
How did you resolve this?
i lost respect for both of them well before this, it was truly icing on the cake
i almost screenshotted and shared with litquidity it was that bad
i ended up just sending the slide to one of the associates to work on
mines pretty savage
"we're looking like a sausage party here, let's remove the junior blokes and add some female associates from financing and sector"
This is so banking.
As a coverage banker, let me assure you we do that to mask our insecurity that execution bankers know more about the execution details than us.
During my SA stint, I was in the middle of being told to change the dates from "Mon - Thur" to "Mond - Thurs" format, then back, then back again haha
I've never seen "Mond" - I think that looks awful.
As a summer analyst doing a sell-side bake-off deck with 20 pages of international buyer strips (3 strips to a page). Was asked to make the flags corresponding to the buyers smaller by .08 in powerpoint. Absolutely asinine and mind-numbing ask
I was once asked in PE to make a revenue build for an LBO which was by country and then by SKU. No matter who you are you can't do this with any degree of certainty. I was also asked to provide rationale for each growth assumption. Total BS exercise which helped accomplish nothing other than adding more variables into our model. No one can forecast things on a SKU level with any degree of certainty lol.
Forecasting in general is always a crapshoot any is really useful imo when evaluating downside scenarios but yeah, totally useless
So many. a few that stand out:
1. universally changing it so ranges are represented by n dashes instead of hyphens (i.e., changing "2015 - 2021" to "2015 – 2021"
2. universally changing all page titles and table labels from title case (i.e., first letter of each word capitalized) to sentence case (i.e., only first letter of first word and proper nouns capitalized)
3. New VP who had recently joined the firm from a different bank and made us do all of these random formatting quarks of that bank's template Only to have to change back after the MD sees the deck. My favorite was that the VP didn't like our color pallet so we had to universally change our primary color for graphs to a different color.
4. changing a bullet 5 minutes before we need to print the decks from "the Company has ample opportunity to take significant market share" to " there is ample opportunity for the Company to take significant market share"
5. right before we need to print the decks, telling me to recut my income statement to breakout each line item within the "other expenses" line I create to capture 5 expense categories that collectively represent like 6% of OpEx that was properly footnoted to explain what was included. Ditto for an "Other Assets" line on my balance sheet
6. being asked to pull precedent transactions on situations so esoteric that there's maybe 1 other truly comparable deal ever done. Then having to send MD lengthy write up of screening methodology and explanation for why no comps. For a situation where the client said they want to be the first company to ever do x when they hired us, so dont think they would be surprised to hear that there are no precedents
7. universally changing all black font text from 0-0-0 to 10-10-10 and all gray from 60-60-60 to 80-80-80
8. My all time favorite. last minute comments to update the MD's bio page such that we referred to him as mr. lastname instead of his first name and to add some BS about Mr. lastname being the preeminent banker in xyz space
Never had a deck where an MD didn't edit language in their bio.
I've only worked on one pitch deck this summer, and I can confirm that both MDs requested changes to their bios.
That grey / black color switch is hilarious, my god
A company listed in the legend of a chart as a 4-letter acronym (won't say the company for obvious reasons)... MD asks me to change to their also-used 3-letter acronym instead. For reference, the 4-letter acronym is the one used across their entire website, but for some reason he thought the 3-letter one was better.
Man... this industry is fueled by pure autism (and not the intelligent kind)
What drives it? Just insecurity or some false illusion that makes bankers think they add value?
I think its just shitty culture passed down over the decades. I try to shield my interns / analysts as much as possible from the stupidity that comes from above (comments like the ones you see above) but its so deeply engrained in some people. We had an associate join recently that's an absolute cunt and you can see how much he's destroyed the culture of our office. On the bright side, it gives me a chance to bond with my interns / analysts as we get the opportunity to talk shit about him and make good meme content. Bonding over hate is a powerful drug.
In my opinion, people are scared to say they "lost" the pitch - so they want to blame an extremely small, likely not noticed, issue in acronyms or that they weren't title as Head of Jerking Themselves Off instead of Senior Stroker.
Always have something else you can shift blame to is the name of the game.
This all sounds like intellectually stimulating work that can only be trusted to a Harvard 3.9 GPA grad
Man this makes me so glad I recently left banking...
What industry did you move into?
SWF, same sector coverage
Can we convert all numbers in deck(a detailed 40 page pitch deck) to Japanese yen instead? Should be Quick change, id like to see in the next 1 hr.
Bro wtf.....
Same thing happened to me. We were pitching a Canadian company to one of our clients. Meeting was set to start at 3pm, got on a late call with VP and MD at 1:45pm. “Everything looks great, the team did a great job on this book. One final comment, the EBITDA numbers seems too low, lets change all the financials back to CAD from USD, it will give it more volume… have it on my desk by 2:50pm”. I told them it wasn’t gonna happen . Are you kidding me? Like a client won’t know the difference between CAD and USD.
Always curious if the consultants deal with the same stupid edits. Any consultants want to comment?
"make the font wider"
1. Global comment literally on the final turn of the deck: "Please add periods to the end of all footnotes"
2. MD's comment on his bio: "Please go back and add more of my deals to my bio so that it isn't the shortest on the page"
3. MD's comment on a 20+ person team page: "Think you can try squeezing in pictures for everyone? If you can't find one, feel free to use whatever is on their LinkedIn"
Just saying, none of these feel that out of line on what sounds like a bake-off.
so you cope with being forced to make stupid edits by bootlicking, got it
This guy belongs in banking. I’m happy you have found your calling.
"Factual correction - need to add rocket league to list of esports tx"
Actual Okay Boomer moment jfc
Genuinely curious - is Rocket League not one of the top eSports games? Done a fair bit of video gaming/esports focused deals and we would usually include it.
Do you work in TMT? That kind of deal sounds cool
Two spaces after a period
Most stupendous thing: "Can you please insert this GIF into the PDF-File?"
Have received most of the ones already mentioned - additional couple that I hit the wall on were "Go through and change all '$ & Share Counts in Millions' to '$ and Share Counts in Millions' and 'Change the fill between table rows to a slightly darker gray throughout'
Same VP who gave those two also dropped 'Change $mm to $M and $bln to $B throughout commentary.' Wasn't a matter of inconsistency where both were being used, was '$mm' every time throughout the deck. I was mad at the time but felt like a fool when the lender followed up saying "We were on the fence w/ this deal, still think that the borrowing base will be insufficient and the covenant package isn't market, but the "$M" throughout the materials allayed our concerns. Please send wire instructions - we don't even need to do diligence."
Happened to me too, but it was the oxford commas that saved the day.
1. Please change MD's picture, he looks too young in this one. (Yeah sure, let me just phone up his wife if she has a more recent one, wtf)
2. Deck signed off by MD's. Associate calls me: I think we could better space up slide 1-2-3-4. Can you amend that?
3. Pitching a financing for a football team. "Can you please make the logo smaller? I hate that team and don't want to see such a big logo"
That’s an absolute first. I remember when I was an analyst and one of the MDs would flip out if we used his internal headshot instead of his preferred one from 20 years ago in a completely different style from everyone else’s on the page. Fucked up the flow of the entire slide. Good times.
yea but this could be the case that the MD looked like a kid and too junior and they wanted to add gravitas by making him older
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