How are you supposed to talk about your deals without drive access?

PE interviews in the past have grilled about certain line items, margin %s, etc. If oncycle goes this early, we don't have our emails and our VPNs to log in to intranets/drives to catch up on deals from a year ago. Can't reach out to our deal teams either: no one would ever send files past the firewall to some incoming analyst's personal email.

Sure I'm sure everybody has printed out a couple of marketing pages and googled as much as they can from publicly available info. Doubt that those are enough.

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Just make shit up. You’re talking about on cycle so this is “deal experience” from your summer, which for most isn’t too substantial anyway. 

If you don’t have it, make a list of what you remember about each project you worked on. Then, literally make up #s that seem reasonable. Hell, make up the whole damn P&L based off whatever you remember. Nobody cares, so long as you can speak to it. You might get grilled, but offering something is better than nothing.


Example: you give them a made-up EBITDA margin and figure, but remember the multiple, so you know the broad valuation. Maybe some smartass asks “oh that’s a high multiple for this margin profile, why is that?” You say some shit like “yes, costs recently ballooned bc of [something believable], but mgt had a pretty compelling growth strategy into xyz space that buyers underwrote”

 

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