Where do you actually lose time in your dealflow process? (not the sexy parts)

EDHEC finance student here, spending a lot of time trying to understand what the day-to-day of M&A analysts and associates actually looks like not the technical stuff, but the operational friction.

Everyone talks about modeling, valuation, the deal itself. Nobody talks about the stuff that kills your week quietly: tracking 15 deals at different stages, knowing when to follow up on a target you qualified 3 months ago, keeping context on why you passed on something 6 weeks back.

For those of you in boutiques or mid-market shops specifically where does your time actually go that it probably shouldn't? And what does your current setup look like for managing pipeline (Excel, Notion, actual CRM, something else)?

Writing a paper on operational workflows in mid-market M&A, this is my primary research.

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