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. 

12 Comments
 

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

 

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.

 

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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