No MBA, no BA/BS, 29YO M&A Director's Next Career Move

Feel free to chime in with any advice on next steps for my career. VP of Ops/Strategy where I am? Startup route? Full-time into real estate investing?

Currently an M&A Director running corporate development, M&A integrations, and strategic initiatives for a $500m company, reporting directly to the CEO. The CEO is more of a deal lead so I've been focusing 80% of my time on managing diligence and building out the massive integration/post-merger programs recently. 

I love the deal rush but I'm honestly really preferring the integration side these days. Most people I've met with backgrounds more on the integration side seem to jump into VP/Exec Ops roles and I think that's the direction I'm headed. When you run an integration you basically need to know everything about everything. Every department/workstream/practice area - understand their people, systems, and processes. Basically the only person who knows more than you do about your company and how it operates is your COO.

Quick overview:

• Left college (Finance and Econ dual major) in my junior year to help family 

• Ended up working in retail banking while I applied to local schools

• Never finished school

• Built out a plan to get into corp strat

• Retail banking for 1.5 years - Lose your debit card at the bars? I'm your guy. Need a HELOC? I'm your guy. Worked 6 days/week maxing out my numbers and loan volume for bonuses. Applied to 1063 jobs (literally) the last 2 months I was there. Apply, research, cold email or cold call for every single one.

• Business Analyst for 2 years - Cold emailed a variety of potential email addresses with the hiring manager's first and last name until one of them ended up being correct. She responded, I grabbed a coffee with her in the lobby, she took me upstairs to meet her team, accepted an offer the next day. Reported directly to SVP of Strategy of an F100, managed tons of strategic initiatives for the org, admin for their CRM, built out tons of new workflows and reporting tools, I was an absolute sponge. Any problem the org had - I was there asking questions and building out solutions to fix them. Company went through an acquisition and I ran the integration.

• Sr Strategy Manager - Took an offer running corp dev for a "start up", ended up working 80hrs/week in construction project management for some reason. Quit 2 weeks in. Took a job in Tech with a Product Team. Ran strategy, change mgmt, and GTM. I "owned" a very niche product suite, basically the face of the product and managed all enhancements and Go-To-Market activities. Their Product growth model was M&A. Back into the M&A world. In two and a half years I ran full-lifecycle M&A for this F100 company, with almost 2B in deal volume. Built out a pipeline, handled 90% of the modeling, managed due diligence, the transactions, then the monstrous integrations (company, tech/app, then the massive product integrations). Company went too "woke" and myself and my entire team resigned on the same day. 

• M&A Director, current role - Now I run M&A (internal corp dev) for a mid-sized consulting firm. I own the M&A program with FTEs under me on the diligence side doing most of the modeling and project managers helping with the integrations. In the last 12 months we've almost doubled our revenue and head count. Welcome to 80hr weeks again and living in the Delta Sky Club. 

• Outside of "work" I invest in single family housing and looking to expand into multi-family. Work has been pretty crazy but in the easier periods it's closer to that magical 40-50hr/week commitment so I should be able to invest more in the summer