I’ll start. The client’s 10-year financial projections (based on user count) were on the basis of exponential growth. And by the time he got to year 10, he didn’t have to forecast anymore because by year 8 he had already attracted 1.26 Billion Users for his app, and was raking in $636B EBITDA per year. Great job buddy.
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Lol, my old MD always found a way to make our boutique tech M&A shop #1 in something so niche there were less than a couple dozen firms even active in the space.
haha, you can see this even with BB annual investor presentations.
#1 bank in the mid-large corporate* acquisition market
*(>$747MM - $751MM acquisition size)
.
Using deal count in mid market is rather the standard as most deal values are not disclosed
have seen this in two banks I worked at. Hilarious
Giving away the name of another client basically by using a previous presentation as the template and forgetting to replace all the correspondences. Damn.
harsh
Savage*
10 year projections are retarded in and of themselves. Might as well tape a Magic 8-Ball to a piece of cardboard and slap a title page on it.
“H-here you go. Now where the FUCK is my goddamn retainer? Soothsaying isn’t cheap, bub.”
Bank not even including any profitability figures even though it was a well-established company. You're just asking for people to assume the business is struggling or worse
Had a bake-off against a BB that had a book riddled with formatting issues but the best had to be a REF error showing on one of their excel links
Yikes, that is bad.
How did you get to see their book?
Our team sat in on the meeting and was given a copy because we were pitching as joint-book runners. Really odd set up but our associate was able to bring the book back for all our amusement.
IB team spelled my name wrong in the WGL that got included in the final deck :(
did they accidentally call you john123068?
lmao, good one. no they misspelled my real name hahah
Yeah but then there were 10 more distributions of the WGL, and at some point it probably got corrected...
Well known investment bank spelled the company's name wrong throughout the deck and also used a pitch template that had the wrong coverage group on the front cover.
Company name wrong as in missing an apostrophe? or was it like Wammart instead of Walmart
I've seen a Strengths/Weaknesses slide make it to committee with the classic [need to downplay this point or credit is going to hammer us].
This one is brutal.
All you interns / first years, make this a standard part of your double checks before you send out any draft! Ctrl+F "TBU" Ctrl+F "[" Ctrl+F "]" Ctrl+F "Update"
If it's a complete draft you'll catch any huge screwups, and if it's an in-progress draft you'll be able to verify that all your TBUs / bracketed items are appropriately represented.
Yeah...but pdf it first in case any of those relics are in an embedded excel or word file.
don't forget Ctrl+F "cite" Ctrl+F "insert"
When I was in IB, we put together a product comparison chart for a potential client who took offense to us rating his product lower in one category than a competitor's and decided to go with another bank. They told us we're lying and he doesn't hire liars.
Not pitchbook-related, but once had a banker send me emails addressing me by various names. It was pretty obvious he got us confused with another strategic.
The deck they show you at training the street where Tony the Tiger is pasted unevenly on the top right of every slide and dances as you go down
Also the slide that obviously didn't get used but when I was an intern I didn't know we had a photoshop team or whatever they're called and drew the map of the U.S. using MS paint.
Instant bonus if I was your superior there.
This is a major BB in the fairness and board decks on a $50bn+ deal you've all heard about:
They have only a couple of comps and because the comps output has logos instead of names, when they price updated, the rank-sorting switched the order but they didn't update the logos. So the comps are now completely fucked. For example, Amazon has Walmart's financials and Walmart has Amazon's financials. Just plainly mislabeled. Pretty sure if people knew which deal, they'd be filing a shareholder lawsuit as we speak.
Logos on a comps output. Good lord. Classic ultra-high-risk / super-low-return move by the MD. Note to senior bankers: By the time you get to committee / board, it's a pretty safe bet that you're already hired...
When I was an intern, a director made me paint over a guy's goatee because we were using a picture of the guy we stole from the internet. The director wanted it to look "professional" and we didn't have Photoshop (graphics understandably refused to alter a picture of some random hedge fund PM who didn't even work at our IB), so I recolored pixel by pixel trying to match his skin tone. It actually looked okay. We also stole another PM's picture where he was holding a fish, so we just cropped it above the neck.
Not an error. REALLY funny though, because once upon a time I could imagine my chairman making me do that, because “either you grow a full beard in a weekend, or you shave it off” was a directive I got once.
That was a wild ride of a story. +1 SB
When I reconstructed a sell side pitchbook I realized that they had been ADDING taxes to the pre-tax revenue in their model.
:D Speaking of which, capital raising pitchbook where year 3 cash balance goes to NEGATIVE 5.5 million. That’s a classic.
Group next to me has hanging on the wall in their pit a page from a near final LP that reads “$xxxMM Ass-on Term Loan B” in the title. I hope LP_vF2 got printed.
"Pubic Finance" instead of Public Finance
Investment "Baking"
Pubic was caught, investment "baking" took a couple decks to notice haha
If I was on the other side of the table, I might actually give credit for pubic finance. After I'm done spitting coffee through my nose.
Goes to show how stupidly precious and conceded you have become from this industry.
Who gives a shit if once in a while it has baking instead. Everyone knows what it’s meant to mean. Move on and get a grip on reality and what actually matters in life. Loser
Investment Baker would be a good name for a coffee shop/bakery in NY
Guy had "Investment Baking Associate" in his email signature for a while before someone had the heart to point it out to him...
Couple that I have seen this month:
1) Spelling the client's / CEO's name wrong multiple times through the deck
2) Forgetting that 10Ks are reported in 000,000 so $45 million becomes $4.50 in revenue while showing it on a graph with competitors being in millions
3) Using the wrong stock ticker for a foreign company and then showing all of the wrong financials
an AVP where the % change in share price was not locked on current share price - effectively compounding the effect and you have multiples of 100x ebitda... pretty silly mistake on a key page
We put panoramic photos on our cover sheet. I was doing a deck for Chinese PE fund, and I put a panoramic of a Taiwanese national monument on the cover. It looked Chinese (and culturally it is) but that is a major political faux pas to put Taiwan's national monuments on China's PE deck. Kind of like putting a North Korean statue picture on a South Korean deck, etc.
Holy shit
It was presented in China.
Some guy part way through was like.... "wait, isn't that... (wait for it) Taiwan???"
This is another one of those classic low reward, high risk additions to a presentation
Seriously.
I had just image searched for "Chinese building panoramic" I got tired of seeing pics of the Great Wall on our deck week after week. Oh well.
I was working for a major Chinese PE firm at the time.
Nowhere near as bad as some of these, but in a pitch the partner wanted us to swap out one financial sponsor for another with very similar names about 5 mins before printing, but we forgot to update the logo, so it ended up having ones logo and the others name listed. Honestly not very bad, but the phone call he gave us before the pitch may have been the worst I ever got. I think it was the first client he sourced one hundred percent independently so thats probably why.
MDs who make changes 5 minutes before the pitch are asking for trouble. You'll sooner hard boil an egg in 30 seconds as have a banking team check an entire deck for errors (and fix the ones they find) in 5 minutes.
Unfortunately it's pretty common for banking / consulting leads to change things last min - at times I think they do it on purpose, probably makes them feel macho / compensates for insecurities
Not too crazy but one of my Analysts recently sent a Disposition deck over and made the property we were considering selling sound like some type of AIDs infested crack den. I'm like dude, we have to take this to our LPAC, they're going to think we're mental for ever having bought this property if we show them this. I told him to include data that "tells the story we want to tell" and he includes pictures of the fucking paint chipping. Super literal guy, cracks me up.
if your property has AIDS you can probably get it at a discount, right?
Depends on the absorption rate.
Not a pitch deck, but when I did an equity research rotation I put a few Zoolander jokes in the writeup. I even called the title of the doc "the center for kids who can't read good." The other associates got a kick out of it so I just kept editing that doc, always intending to remove the little jokes. When it came time to submit the report, I failed to correct the title. So, yeah, I submitted an equity research report with a Zoolander title, and a joke in the body. It didn't go well.
Was this for a company that offered tutoring services/ after school programs? If so I would lose it hahah
This was a model not pitchbook error very similar to OP story, but I saw one analyst for a huge developer completely mess up the rental growth rate for a $750mm construction project. Instead of growing rents at 3% a year, he grew them at 3% per month. I mean all I had to do was look at the apartment rents doubling in one year to immediately realize something was fcked, no clue how it got all the way to us (brokers) before anyone noticed. Pretty sure he was fired lol.
awww,,, hope they don't fire him. Yes, stupid error. But too funny to fire.
I see errors all the time. Bankers don't know much about industry in general. Calc errors fairly common.
“Pussibly” instead of “Possibly”
This is one of my new favorite threads.
1) Fucking hysterical, especially since I'm still outside the ring 2) Super useful to know about these ahead of time and hopefully catch most of them in the future.
I let my analyst work on it. I mean, talk about a colossal error.
One trick (for the newbies) is to print out the PPT, get your supervisor to make the comments directly onto the printouts. Then once you go thru the PPT, and make the changes, highlight the changes that you completed. That way no missed corrections enter into the final pitchbook.
intern was working on something related to Deutsche, first sentence contained the term "Deutsche Bang"..
Allow me to clarify something for you. We don't actually read your pitchbooks.
Your bosses have almost no reason to ask you to do them. I can't imagine anyone on the buy-side gets their information from a pitch. If I ask for specific numbers, it's because I need some slides formatted, and the bankers have more junior leverage than I do.
"Some of the parts" instead of "Sum of the parts"
Also, heard a story of a disgruntled analysts planning to quit, who wrote F**K all over the pages in the middle after everyone had signed off. MDs didn't see it until they were walking through with the client. May be folklore, but even if there's a seed of truth, that's how you go out in a blaze.
I would have made it less conspicuous so the MD would have overlooked and it would have been seen later
Not the worst I've seen, but relatively bad and cringey: Was doing analyst work for angel investment organization, guy is last at our screen meeting (top 5-7 apps do in person pitch for a few of us, top 2-3 then move to the whole org). He's a musician, which was interesting for me since that's my background too. He says in a very cringey way at the start: "I don't do powerpoint". lol ok. He still gives a strong presentation and we put him through to the next round. Next round: he goes like 10 minutes over bc he had like 3 videos that weren't really relevant in his ppt. Not that bad when reading it, but it was mega-cringe.
Now I actually remember the WORST I've ever seen: PM class in MSF. Had some really long case studies. Due to scheduling probs, two of them got due at the same day. Worked in small groups. Everyone obviously split to where one person just did a whole case themselves for efficiency. Had a smart Chinese guy as my partner with a good work ethic, so I wasn't worried(most of my classmates sucked). Mine was a convexity/butterfly trading case. Nailed it. Partner had L/S equity optimization case. Looked good to me at a glance, and I trusted him. Day of presentations and we went last for the L/S equity(partner was very late, close call already). For everybody else's presentation, partner was always VERY confidently and bluntly saying each team's numbers were way off for the whole case. Whole class was already tripping out over it. I thought whatevs, "he's my quant" a la big short lol. We finally present, and teacher outright confirms a ton of his numbers are way off. Class is losing it. Partner was so confident he was still in denial. I'm hiding behind the podium computer. Turns out the fucker didn't uncheck no negatives in solver so his optimization didn't include shorts. There went my A... This was baaaad too; whole class roasted him so bad. The one time I don't neurotically triple check a partner's work bc they actually seem competent I get burned bad.
It's funny when you send a deck to presentation services to add photos of management. And the page comes back with someone totally not on the management team (eg some other random famous person)
When they projected 4000$ for the entire YEAR 2. Wasn’t sure if I should be pissed or glad they realized no one wanted their product
We were in negotiation stage of a deal - BD person forwarded an email summarising key discussion points to the team. 2 deal directors then replied to the email chain on suggestions to negotiate up price and terms we could trade off as it didn't matter to us... sellers were copied on the chain from the very first email....
When I was interning for a boutique, I sent out teasers to prospective buyers, but I forgot to remove the name of the company out of the file name. Not good
teasers?
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