Why Do We Turn Comments?
For reference, new AN1. I’m sure there’s a reason for this that my infantile career thus far and bottom-up POV prevents me from fully appreciating, but I’ve always felt that turning comments seems to be the most inefficient and error-prone way to get a deck done.
It looks like a game of telephone to me: SMD asks for a deck broadly with X, Y, and Z criteria. D / VP shell it out. Associate adds more granular text boxes / callouts. Analyst tries to get it done. By the time it gets to the analyst, the big picture is likely already jumbled in some way or another - let alone, more granular things like which comps to screen for or which pages to include / exclude.
Then, we go back and forth, passing the deck like a hot potato to fix things - not even necessarily mistakes but just preferences - mainly pertaining to nitty gritty details, like wording, which comps to exclude, or WACC to apply. In the process we introduce mistakes, since one change in the deck has a domino effect; e.g. numbers have to tie, FNs have to change. With each change, we go through every page one by one to check for mistakes.
God forbid a mistake slips through, then we need to pass the deck back and forth one more time with the whole team: from Analyst to Associate, then Analyst to VP (then maybe even Analyst to Director), before finally, the deck gets into the hands of the MD or SMD… and he tears every page to shreds b/c he had a completely different vision. The whole process starts from square one.
Now, my question is: why doesn’t the SMD take a few extra minutes to offer finer detail into what they want in the deck, and why do we not confirm as we’re working through that this is precisely what they want? Because in doing so, we could not only save ourselves countless hours of “turning comments” (both the SMD’s and everyone else’s before it reaches them) but we could avoid making mistakes, since our focus would only be on the few versions of the deck that matter, and not v1000_final_final plus everything in between.
This is not cynical or jaded; it’s genuine curiosity. Why do we do this? Is it b/c 50 hours of analysts’ time = 1 minute of an MD’s? Is it b/c we need to keep mid-level bankers just long enough to replace MDs?
Not a banker but I do manage people and I imagine it all happens for similar reasons. You probably won't get this until you're also managing people but
a) You are underestimating what "thinking through a few extra details" actually entails. It takes longer and requires more effort than you are imagining. It is much easier mentally to feed back on something that exists than to fabricate something new in your head from scratch and then have to describe that, in depth, to someone. I say that as someone who has tried to do the latter with an underlying (because they were re*****ed and needed that much guidance) - it ended up taking a fuckton more of my time - time which I should've been spending on higher leverage things. And also b) was still a problem. Ultimately it can be more efficient (although tedious for the do-ers) or rather economic of my time, to simply have the underlings learn your likes and dislikes over time and anticipate how to handle problems. It's like having an AI Vs a python script.
b) Sometimes you don't know what's going to happen/go wrong etc before you're in the weeds doing it. You may have some way you want to handle such an occurrence but you don't know even if that thing will occur. You can't give instructions on unknown unknowns.
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