Are Long Hours Worth it for the Firm?
This has been on my mind for some time now, so I thought I'd raise the question: How much value is derived from the 90th hour of a given work week? At some point, the trade off of using that hour working will be less beneficial to the firm than to have the employee well-rested (yes, I know that the industry sleeps 5-6 hours a day). I haven't worked in the industry, but I've had friends who have told me they worked 9am to 3am, and several all-nighters on a monthly basis. I don't see how it's valuable for these firms to have consistently exhausted employees handle Excel docs for multi-billion dollar deals and then expect no screw ups throughout the process. For those who've worked in the industry, and have put up with these work weeks, are the long hours necessary?
The value to the firm of lost productivity? Hundreds of millions of dollars.
The value to your MD from paying forward decades of trauma to the next generation: Priceless.
One of my first posts on this forum was detailing the horrible hours on a deal that lasted for a year and a bit. Now looking back though, I'm inclined to say that the long hours are at least somewhat necessary for those staffed on a lean deal team. If you're the only analyst on your deal team, you kinda have to be there for every inch of the deal process. You're the one that knows the numbers, projections, dates etc. I was being brought into meetings and would sometimes get pointed questions on where liquidity was expected to be on a certain week, how much cash X many weeks of forbearance would save etc. Obviously the higher level questions and answers were posed by my seniors, but I was still expected to carry some weight. This meant that it really didn't make sense to staff a second analyst on the deal - one person needed to operate and be familiar with all the numbers and projections. It really takes a banker to understand this, but you really REALLY don't want another junior guy coming in and screwing how your massive model works. At the end of the deal, I think we had versioned up over 500+ times, had a dozen side-scenarios (different capital structures, debt/equity considerations, capital sources etc.), and countless standalone output versions of the excel that we would send to client / counterparties.And given the lengthy and intricate nature of some deals, you just gotta sit in the driver's seat for the majority of it, and pull the all-nighters that are asked.
That being said, there were of course tons of down-time in between asks. I think we fared a little more poorly because one of our senior deal team members liked to give comments at 6pm right before he left to CT each night so... So I would say even on the most involved deal, maybe 20-30% of the time was wasted just turning nit picks, waiting around for comments / responses / questions etc. But these weren't really extended periods at a time so it's hard to save on time by trying to reduce these blocks.
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