Tricks of the Trade

Always interesting to see what other people are doing. Totally agree with the daily industry alerts. I always set a bunch of google alerts for industry activity and just set it for the mornings so that I would get an info dump for when I got in. Nice to be the one on a deal team to circulate something pertinent.

On the sourcing front, I found that having a bare bones excel file was the best way to consolidate contact info of companies when crushing outreach. Just a quick file with columns for company name, website, contact info and result of the outreach made it so that I didn't waste time taking down too much info when most outreach yielded no response.

Always hyperlink the company name to your CRM so that you can log activity and more detailed notes as you gain traction.

This website (http://mailtester.com/testmail.php) was also a godsend when trying to figure out if I had the right email for an exec. Massive waste of time just trying to guess at someone's email....

Does it go without saying that you should download the FactSet or CapIQ plugins for excel Day 1 too?

It's really dumb in hindsight, but I didn't think of having a to-do list outline in Excel, grouped by deal/portco, until nearly the end of year 1 as an associate. So much better than paper lists or trying to remember everything.

The organizational stuff is huge - piles of paper for every portco, a foolproof electronic filing system.

I also think having a routine is huge - I get to work the same time every day, have a coffee and eat a clif bar, spend 20 minutes on industry newsletters, WSJ, and the daily news screen. Gets the easy stuff out of the way, but you feel like you're being productive, and if something hit the fan overnight, you know first thing.

Contactout extension in LinkedIn for emails. Windscribe VPN to use WSO on work PC.

I scan all call notes - I find it easier to quickly find/reread when grouped in a folder as opposed to a note book.

"babymonkey357"Just want to share best practices and hear what other people do to be more efficient.I'm wrapping up 1st year associate in middle-market growth equity shop...PortCosKeep a folder for each portco in outlook where I save all correspondenceSave all files received from each portco in specific folder on the drive (and copies of important docs on my desktop)Run daily news screens for each portco sector to stay on top of everything (google actually pretty good for this)Research / outreachUse mainly CapIQ and google, but also use BamSEC for public cosSalesforce to track outreach... (kind of hate this, but it's our system)MiscellaneousRecently discovered www.Logointern.com for logo slides / industry landscapes (1 of our partners LOVES industry landscapes for new companies)

If you dont mind me asking, how do you use google to run daily news screen on an industry?

I keep a fleshlight in my desk, serves as a stress buster and it never complains!

keep a nail clipper in your desk. you never know when you have to jump out to meet with someone, whether be potential LP, co-investor, or even banker. First impression plays a large role in our business!

Issue trackers in Excel. Columns: Unique Identifier, Status (open/closed), Open date, Issue, H/M/L priority, Related Risk, Remediation, Solved by/how/impact/etc., Close Date. Has saved my skin multiple times.

Excel 'toolboxes' designed to perform specific functions to compliment day-to-day work. 1) Have a model utilizing Black/Scholes for things like beta of risky debt, real option (invest now v. wait 6 months), and other things that require Black/Scholes. 2) Dashboard (no VBA): 3 tabs, tab 1: the user interface aka dashboard made up of graphs and distributions, tab 2: the pivots driving the dashboard, and tab 3: where the flat file goes. 3) credit tests (e.g. altman's z-score) and quality of earnings tests ready to go.

Oracle Crystal Ball plug in for easy Monte Carlo and great probability distribution outputs. Great tool.