What happens to the Excel God analysts after a few years?
Title. Excel God means knows all the shortcuts and formulas can build a model much faster than an average analyst. I can see only two paths, they either die a hero (leave the industry) or live long enough to see themselves become the villain (mds&vps cannot convert word to pdf).
Have you ever seen an Excel God MD or VP? Like he’s much faster than an analyst 2-3 knows all the shit can work out models faster than their associates, can point out to mistakes or gives advice to improve the analyst’s models?
One of the heads of a vertical within the coverage team made MD in 12 years or so. From what I have heard, he was a rockstar analyst and was very technically sound. He regularly gets into the models and backups and once spent 30 mins walking us through in excel how he would reduce the size of our (very large) financial model lol.
Should be a great resource for juniors but there's not much correlation between having great technical skills and being a great senior banker tbh. I think it's better served exiting to HF (even PE doesn't require great technicals beyond a certain level of seniority)
Great technical skills won’t make a great partner I agree, but with great technical skills I believe you would be more competent therefore I don’t think there’s low correlation between tech skills and being a great partner.
This is mostly anecdotal, but most I knew who were excel heroes have ended up in PE or CFO of a MM PE backed company.
Modeling is a foundational skill set that may be a differentiator early on but needs to be complemented with a much broader package of skills as you move up. Whether banking, buyside or industry, technical understanding needs to come with relationship management, idea generation and execution.
Like someone with good technical ability can think through the implications of different deal structures and the like, which is really important. Model outputs give us good goalposts for value and outcomes, but you don't negotiate deals comparing models. That's where all the other skillsets come into play.
That being said - what would these other skills be and how would you go about developing/learning them
For a banker, the biggest one is people/ego/stakeholder management and it really comes from experience. Managing clients, boards, internal parties etc.
Yep this. Some go on to be PE/HF rockstars because they are able to elevate their technical knowledge, but I also know way too many former top-bucket Excel savants who struggled to get past VP because they only had technical skills and weaker soft skills - or could not let go of the model and didn't spend enough time working on relationships.
Generally at ASO/VP and beyond you need to be way less in the model weeds and thinking bigger picture. MDs shouldn't be anywhere near the model - I'm sure some can do it, but that's a delegation issue - their time is wasted if they are messing around at the 0ft view playing with the debt amort line instead of the 30,000ft view thinking about how to structure the deal.
Know one. Thought too much of himself and struck out of HF interviews. Now a VP at a smaller bank impressing analysts with his excel skills. MDs like them btw
I actually think most of the successful MDs / VPs I've worked with were excel wizards at one point. It's not so much about excel skills as it is seeking excellence in your current role. That mindset tends to correlate with success.
The other angle is that the best analyst at modeling often gets the best deals where they can learn more than their peers. Some of the posters here were commenting that being excellent at excel can trap you into being an excel monkey. I think it's the opposite -- it will pull you into higher levels of responsibility because people will want you to work for them.
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