Title says it all really; what makes you like IB/Corp Fi aside from being a good paying job? Do you actually find making Excel models and PowerPoints interesting?
This is no shitpost, this is a genuine question as I'm drifting away from this and more into S&T I think
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This is like asking "why do you like that hot girl aside from her being hot?"
But she has a great personality and is probably loving and caring!!!!🤡
Two things can be true at once. Someone can admire a girl for being hot and enjoy her company/personality.
The sex
You say this (as many guys do), but if I was to question you further there would be other qualifiers for you to a date a girl, even if she’s attractive.
Would you consider someone who:
lacks a college degree?
had daddy issues (single parent home)?
grew up in the rural South (uncultured)?
tatted?
multiple body piercings?
is extremely religious (or diehard atheist)?
has a body count of 100+?
flips burgers all day?
crack/meth addict?
physically slaps you in arguments?
cheats on you openly in your relationship?
If you said no to even one of these, then you wouldn’t date a hot girl solely because she’s hot.
Most guys (excluding beta simps) have some sort of baseline criteria that a girl must pass and among the girls who pass said criteria these guys try to optimize for beauty.
P.S.
Before anyone draws assumptions from the above not every potential deal breaker I mentioned above is a deal breaker for me personally but can be deal breakers for urban upper class males which this site is.
For me, it's mostly about getting a great start in my career. Doing a few years in IB will give you a level of detail, stamina, and efficiency that will remain with you during your entire career. It also opens up a lot of doors in your career. You can either choose to be in IB/PE/HF if you find it enjoyable and enjoy great pay but work long hours. You can also take a step down and go to corp dev/VC where hours are better and pay is still very good. Obviously, you could also transition into pretty much any other area of finance as well. When it comes to the work itself in IB, I do not find it to be very fun at all most of the time. Many times you do not get to see the big picture and you can spend many hours on creating slides that might end up not being used. The attention to detail is great for the learning experience but really sucks when actually having to do it. Staying until 3am to double-check every slide of a management presentation for the 7th time is not that exciting.
This is exactly what I'd expect of it. For me it just seems quite miserable to do something you really dislike every single day tbh. Although I do agree on the stamina and detail-oriented part; but surely there must be different ways to gain this while working a job that is actually fun? Or am I just naive?
The latter, I’m afraid.
Like everything in life, if you do it for 14+h per day for 2 years, you’ll inevitably become good at it. Not the best, but way better than average. IB is a paid way to work 4 years in the span of 2 and get better at something.
Surely you can learn these skills at another job as well. You could also learn to build models and pitch decks on your own. However, IB gives you a very structured setting where you are more or less forced to learn these skills very rapidly. With that said, you can surely become great at financial modeling by working at big 4 as well, but that will require a lot of initiative and effort from your side. Especially as there won't be other people double-checking your work with an IB standard or able to provide you feedback that enhances your skills. Also, even if you were to learn these skills on your own in another industry, recruiters would not recognize it. It's very difficult to show in an application that you are a master at financial modeling and are able to work 16-hour days if you did 2 years in accounting at PWC. As such, you would most likely never even get to the first stage of a PE interview. On the other hand, the guy with experience from an EB or BB would get an interview because they know that he has been forced to learn these skills.
I get to apply my academic interest (economics) in the work place (IB Structured Finance). That's why I like it. I get to do stats, I get to consider the macroeconomics behind what's driving spreads e.g., I get to interpret the different distributions of graphs created from strat analysis... All this combined with being able to have my work discussed seriously when presented to clients, the corporate bankers, whoever. It's a lot more than money and exit opportunities for me.
From a senior MD / group head perspective
- at any given time, I am personally working on 5 to 10 deals and I enjoy doing deals. These tend to be quite diverse in terms of sub sector, geography and type of transaction. I’m not the sort of person who enjoy focusing deeply on only one thing (of course, some times I have to focus on solving one problem or getting something executed to the exclusion of everything else) and value the variety
- I’ve been doing this long enough that many of my clients are my friends so much of my work involves shooting the shit with my friends
- There is real satisfaction in helping clients grow; more than one client I’ve advised since they were just a concept is now a 10bn+ business and in that time, I raised their first major capital round, did their transformative M&A deal, did their first bond, did their IPO, etc. in many of those cases, I know those companies and their boards / shareholders better than 99% of their management
- Our business is global and while traveling is a double edged sword with a young family, I love London, Paris, HK, Dubai, Sao Paolo, Mexico City as well as Chicago, LA, Boston, etc. and it’s great to see friends in all of those places
- I like politics and enjoy the geopolitical and macroeconomic elements of what we do, and get to interact with a lot of the key stakeholders. (possibly a future career)
- I am close to 80% of the people I work with at all levels, and genuinely enjoy watching the people I’ve mentored grow and develop whether that’s with my team or outside of it (my first A2A is now a very successful MD with us, some are partner level at PE firms etc)
- As long as I make money for my partners (like Hyman Roth), I can pretty much do whatever I want when I want to.
- NYC; it’s had its ups and downs since I moved here but there is no better place in the world to make a mark
- I like beating my competitors
Things I don’t love
- Managing poor performers or people with bad attitudes. Thankfully I’ve not had too many but hate it and bad at it
- I’ve made a several of my clients very rich over the years. And I’ve always felt like I could be a successful investor or entrepreneur but I’ve always a) enjoyed my job a lot and b) have done just well enough to not make the trade off worth it. Still, one always wonders.
- it was a grind getting here. Ironically, I always enjoyed my analyst and associate days but being a VP was shitty and being a Director and building a client base and a reputation was a true grind. I’m surprised I didn’t leave.
What did you enjoy about the associate years? And what tips do you have for someone looking to make a career of banking?
I had lateraled as an Associate 1 to a high quality firm building out a business in the sector I covered, and was working for a serious MD. There were a couple VPs and Ds hanging around, but I quickly made myself his go to guy both on origination and execution. I was in front of a lot of clients with him, and we built a real business and got to execute some great deals where my counter parties were VPs, Ds and often MDs. I was top ranked and paid well. I also was responsible my teams analyst pool and got some real experience hiring and managing, which served me well as I got more senior. As I said earlier, VP years different story as I got on the wrong side of bad politics and belly flopped and D years, just very hard because I took on an emerging sector and while I made it work well in the end, it was like getting my nuts crushed on a daily basis building traction.
as for some tips to success, here are a few (May build this out in a longer post if I have some down time)
1. Understand what is real and what is window dressing. Real work adds value to clients - commercial insight, analysis, investor positioning, valuation and pricing, understanding deal competitive dynamics, coming to high quality recommendations, actually delivering the money. Everything else is window dressing - the long, fancy pitch decks, the formatting, the meeting notes, the working group lists. I’m not saying the window dressing isn’t necessary sometimes (every store needs a good shopfront), but it’s a whole lot less important than the real stuff. Bankers that can draw a line between what adds value and what doesn’t are the ones who succeed.
2. Spend as little time on the window dressing as possible to reach the minimum level of acceptability. Use the rest of your time to actually understand and master what matters.
3. Be excellent at a) deal execution and b) something else. Deal execution capability is a sine qua non. You are just a concierge if you don’t know how to execute a deal in and out. But you need at least one other point of excellence, be it industry knowledge, structuring capability or something else differentiating.
4. Focus on excellence, not relationships. Relationships come in due course, being a top performer and adding commercial value to clients is the only thing that really matters in building good relationships. The long lunches and golf games come after you’ve added value not before. A lot of bankers forget that.
5. Commercial awareness is critical. Good bankers know what a client wants (even when they don’t know) and how to make it happen.
6. never be fooled by an expert. Good coverage bankers know as much about products as product specialists. Good product bankers know sectors well. Know the law, accounting etc well enough. That way you can deliver without being depending on a third oarty
7. Not all senior bankers are created equal. There are rainmakers and there are bureaucrats. In banking, power follows money. You should too. Rainmakers tend to be a lot less focused on the BS window dressing.
8. build a coterie of analysts that like you. Most analysts are good smart kids who the industry chews up and spits out. If you can actually take to make their lives easier, manage through the BS (see point 1) and teach them, the best analysts will want to work with you. You are already way ahead of the game
What school did you go to for undergrad? What did your parents do for their professions?
It was a target state school
my dad was an engineer and my mom a cpa, very down the fairway middle class upbringing. I was studying engineering and had no idea what IB was until the middle of my junior year. I got myself into a boom time analyst program and never left
Wanted to ask something on your second to last point. I feel that maybe being in IB for the long term and getting a good rolodex + developing great soft skills as MD would put you in a great spot for the next big thing as it did for Steve Schwarzman. Is it dumb of me to think that maybe it's better to keep being in IB and develop all that skill set rather than doing just 2 years and exiting to PE in which time you don't really learn the true IB skills?
I was helping my friend who is a mid level partner at a top PE shop who feels blocked by the top guys evaluate his options - and there is no question that I have a greater “diversity” of options when and if I choose to move on than he does, just by virtue of the fact that I see a broader range of things. Even on the buyside.
That said, his options all involve high eight figure carry amounts over fund life and more if things go very well, so no one is complaining here.
On the joining clients and entrepreneurship side, do you think there is a 'right time' to jump over? I don't feel like the risk is worth taking as an analyst, but at the VP level maybe it's the right move to enter a growing company in a more senior position?
I've also thought about going PE and then trying to make the jump after that.
Out of curiosity, may I ask at what age you made MD?
Removed
This is indeed far more relevant in terms of interests. Going to read through your HF Q&A in a bit too. Mind if I would PM you afterwards?
Sure go ahead.
If you don't mind me asking, what's your PM's background?
Removed
Can you explain a bit more about what macro RV means? Is that like what a macro pod at Citadel/Baly/P72 does by trying to stay market neutral?
Influence. Think it's pretty awesome meeting or being on calls with some of the most influential people on the planet. The work has a large impact and can change the landscape of an industry. Closing a billion dollar deal at such a young age is just super baller. The people are hardworking, highly educated, cultured, can't imagine a better environment. Feel like I'm on top of the world.
I feel like the exact opposite. Spending a lot of time double-checking fonts, font sizes, figure colors, borders, spelling, number of decimals etc. Also spending a lot of time just compiling and structuring data in excel. Taking notes on meetings. I don't feel that I am on top of the world and make decisions that will have a great influence on people. I am treated with less dignity by seniors/clients here than I was when working in a fast-food restaurant when I was 17. This is one of the things that surprised me the most in IB. You've made it. You are making more at 22 than most people will ever make in their careers. You work on huge deals. Yet you feel as if you are nothing more than a slave.
The two posts above sum it up for me. It’s both, some of us are just able to only see the big picture stuff, which is awesome. Personally, I’m much more like the second poster where I struggle to enjoy it bc of all the little bshit.
Literally nothing lol. This job sucks. I still think we are underpaid for how much bullshit we put up with
If your goal is to work in finance long term, in almost any capacity, there's honestly a ton to love about the role. Sometimes feels like most of the people complaining about the role have just never worked anywhere else and have certainly never felt the frustration of trying to advance/stand out in a finance leadership development program. A handful of examples:
Learning the inns and outs of the businesses you cover at a very accelerated pace
Role has probably the most broad corporate finance knowledge base / training (i.e., it's pretty much the only role outside of being an actual CFO where you cover basically everything under the CFO umbrella without having to rotate across various functions)
Both in the weeds financial knowledge + high level strategic view
Clear and logical progression at an accelerated pace (each progressive roles is responsible for everything below them + their current role and each progressive level of seniority allows you to build complementary skillsets - quantitative at analyst levels, presentation + project management at associate, leadership at VP, business development at VP/MD, etc.,)
Obvious downside is you need to pay your dues for the first few years before it starts to get interesting, and work/life balance.
Can you elaborate on your FLDP experience?
30+ motivated people all competing for 2 or 3 of the "desirable" rotations (corporate development, corporate strategy, IR).
Ton of FP&A and controller type functions, which can be interesting, but only give you a small piece of the picture. If you're at the business level, you can see how a business is run but miss the high level view and only learn about one small section at a time. If you're at the corporate level, you see the external facing and IR view, but are really spending most of your time consolidating info put together by others.
At senior level, most of the sexier roles are taken by people who started in front office (e.g., CIO and hedging are ex traders, head of corporate development is an ex banker, etc.,). Progression and learning curve is much slower vs. banking, even if you're a total rock star, and the vast majority of people get stuck at the director level because the number of good people far exceeds the number of spots.
exit ops
Tbh, I love modeling and understanding how a company operates, but fucking hate powerpoint, and building out CIMs. Pretty sure I only have this job because of my ability to speak, not so much my powerpoint skills(no longer an intern)
The people are better than most other high paying fields. As nerdy as some of my coworkers are, I know it would be 100x times worse in tech or medicine
.
Listening to earnings calls at the gym and spending the few hours you have free on finance... I admire your passion for the field and I am yet to meet someone with that level of passion in IB. Everyone I've met so far thinks the job sucks but everyone keeps their heads up because of the learning experience and the pay.
Which group are you in?
.
Nothing
Summed it up perfectly
Literally nothing else but money
You actually learn way more than you think you do at the time. Just started a job at an UMM fund (ignore title) and was able to come up with most of an IC paper pretty much on my own as a result of years of grinding on M&A within a particular sector. As someone with a passion for investing, really interested in what makes a company “good” and wanting to learn how to realise value this was a huge moment for me, after all the crap of banking I’d actually learnt how to produce a piece of work I was quite proud of.
You have an unparalleled advantage if you specialize in an industry to start something on your own. You’ll know the business models, TAM, major players, deal process like the back of your hand. Idc what anyone says for capital light businesses like tech 90% of your success is dependent on savvy business acumen. You can buy builders if you have an idea and Capital access
This is a great perspective.
Closing parties!
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