How many expert calls do you guys do?
My firm does an ungodly number of expert calls. I'm fine with doing some, and it's sometimes pretty interesting to talk to the experts, but if I knew doing expert calls is such a big part of an associate's job at my firm, I would have deliberated more about my decision. There was one time when I did 7 calls in 2 days. Some of my peers probably did 40 calls in 2 months. I never even had a chance to work a model since I started during summer.
Is this firm dependent? Kinda wish I went to a "financial engineering" focused fund.
If done right, expert calls are the best bang for buck dd activity. You will learn much more from these than 100 model iterations.
I'm at a consultant-friendly firm and have to agree. Calls are painful but there is far more potential for alpha in expert calls than in cutting data and doing 20 cases of the model. (which are table stakes for any competitive process)
Literally. Building your model off of business understanding & assumptions gleaned from expert calls goes hard
These numbers don’t shock me. Have friends at the more consultant friendly shops who consistently rip 20-30 expert calls a month on various processes (with some weeks of none and some weeks of several per day)
I worked at an expert network for a bit. It was always funny seeing 3-4 clients on our book chasing the same deal. We would offer the same experts across whenever a new process kicked off on the same company and we automatically knew which experts were our bestsellers.
I truly think that PE firms that are large enough should build their own market research / expert network arms. The margins on that business are large without any major differentiation (lot of cost saving potential). For legal purposes, maybe make it a separate corp / entity and make your PE firm a client. I’m not a lawyer, just saying that we pay our experts $120 for the call you paid $1200 for.
You would need to wall it off and bill the PE side as a client.
Can I pay you to tell me which companies my competitors are targeting with expert calls...
14-15 million
They are good but some people do too many as a way to show that work is being done and we are very smart on a topic
10-12, but really depends on the variances of their perspectives. If the first 4-6 have validated the same things, then 7+ is rare (unless it's the former C-suite or something).
What is this number in reference to? Per closed platform? Per every IOI submitted?
Not enjoying expert calls is kind of a red flag to me. Do you not want to understand how the business works?
Maybe you just really enjoying modeling (which btw is a commoditized, junior-level workstream), but you gotta understand that the model will spit out whatever business assumptions you put in. If you put in shit assumptions you get shit model accuracy. Also when you pull up to IC the partners already have this insane intuition for deal returns so they won't even spend much time looking at your model outputs unless there's some weird structure. Rather they're going to be focused on the upstream assumptions like share gain/loss and value creation opportunities. These are very tough to uncover without expert perspectives
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