Corporate Finance At Smaller Companies
I've heard a lot about corporate finance at F500 companies on these forums, but I've heard very little about corporate finance at smaller companies. Does anyone have any experience with this? How is the pay/hours/exit opps relative to F500 corporate finance? I'm also going to assume it's a lot easier to break in.
PS: I'm not talking about corporate finance at a sexy tech start-up. I'm talking about corporate finance in very traditional industries, at companies with less than a billion in revenue.
Headhunters have approached me with smaller companies. Since they aren't as well established as F500, you are back office support so expect a salary much less than your F500 counterparts. Not like the pay is very good at F500 either (its alright and making senior is pretty appealing I'd say).
In terms of sexy tech start ups, their expectation is for you to automate the reporting processes and become more of an analyst, than a data enter-ER. You will then have more value at the company and that's is the main reason they pay a very good salary in comparison to other companies. Hope this helps.
As an aside, I worked for a F500 tech that paid really crappy. I lateraled to a different F500 that pays really well and really rewards the movers and shakers.
I do Corp Dev for a small public company (~$500 MM in revenues) at a traditional industry, and I can tell you that the comp is very competitive and in line with F500 companies. The hours are good (9-6:30/7 on normal days, in the office till late when getting close to closing a deal). I couldn't say much about exit ops as I haven't gone through that experience yet. As is reiterated on this site, most exit ops at this level become a function of your networking ability.
See below link for a thread I posted on WSO about my experience:
//www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/corporate-development-personal-experience-advice
Thanks guys. That was a great write up too. I'm surprised smaller companies are so selective. The reason I brought up this topic was because one of my finance professors said ~80% of people with finance degrees don't end up working in the investment industry, but work in the finance departments of other companies. I was sort of under the impression that CD at smaller companies would be a refuge for non-targets... apparently that is not the case.
Most "small companies" don't have a Corp Dev team unless they're pretty active with M&A. Small companies that do the sporadic deal will simply utilize a middle-market bank to do said deal. The smaller companies with actual Corp Dev teams are generally in high-growth industries where there's a lot of M&A activity occurring. Otherwise, it would pretty pointless to have an internal team dedicated to deals.
There are a lot of "finance" opportunities at companies outside of Corp Dev, whether it be treasury or FP&A. Most companies will have an FP&A function, while most large companies will have a treasury function. In my experience, Corp Dev is usually the smallest team of the three.
I think if you go on LinkedIn and look at CD jobs, even the lowest level of employee (usually Sr. Financial Analyst) will have pretty strong requirements, and that's for all companies (not just large ones). Same goes for manager/director positions.
When you work at a smaller company, you typically bear more responsibility than you would at a larger firm, where your roles are more defined. At a smaller company, when something goes wrong then you need to fix it - you don't have another team to rely on. When you don't know what to do next, you better know where you can to turn to know what the next step is. As a result, the job nature of smaller firms typically necessitate more experienced or driven individuals as compared to larger firms. IME the payout is also significantly greater, but this definitely depends on your skill set.
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