How much does size matter?

If you work in a semi-related industry (i.e. FPA, financial due diligence etc), and you want to break into corporate development, what experience would be considered better:

  1. Spend 1 year working on a single large deal (think USD 100+ billion) that closes or
  2. Spend 1 year working on a couple (maybe 3-5) of smaller (USD 1-5 billion) of which some close and some dont.

In other words, is size more important than the number of times you do it or is it the other way around?

31 Comments
 

Work in DD. Also curious to know from someone who has more WE. I would think more deals (depending on how small the deals are) just because more reps = more knowledge (generally). I would think five 300k deals are obviously not as valuable as one billion dollar deal, but five or seven 100 million dollar deals could possibly be seen as more of an asset than the former.

"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
 

More reps. Obviously you want your deals to not be small deals but every deal is different. More reps = more experience = more value add going forward.

MM IB -> Corporate Development -> Strategic Finance
 
"SECfinance"

More reps. Obviously you want your deals to not be small deals but every deal is different. More reps = more experience = more value add going forward.

This.

Also - it may seem like $100bn deals just get announced and happen, but it likely took years of analysis, board meetings, CEO lunches, and analysts running merger models before anyone announces anything. Verizon/Vodafone txn for Verizon Wireless ($130bn) took 8 years to actually take place. It wasn't constant work, but that means that ~4 classes of analysts had sleepless nights running different scenarios over the course of their tenure and had nothing to show for it.

 

Depends on the type of deals the three 1 to 5 bn dollar ones were. If one was a full sell side, one was a buyside and one was an asset sale..then you pretty much have seen the full of investment banking and that makes you very attractive. Also a 5bn deal is legit, if you do three of those in a year...God have mercy on your soul because I'm sure you worked 110 hours a week the whole year.

 

What about the fact that you probably would get exposed to more complex work on a larger deal? Dont smaller deal tend to be more straight forward (relatively) than larger deals?

 

Size matters for "prestige" purposes because the thought process is that "the best analysts work on the largest / most important deals" so maybe it is more important for a MF PE job. For corporate, I would imagine that # of deals is way more important but really it's the different types of transactions. Once you do 2-3 sell-sides, you've got it figured out but I personally would say working across buyside, sellside deals and doing a handful of debt / equity deals are what every analyst should look to learn in his 2-3 years. The debt / equity deals can get a bit repetitive but you really just need to see 2-3 here and hopefully work on different sides of the M&A table.

Diversification of the number of deals > # of deals > size of deals.

 
Best Response

It's very important to learn modeling when you're an analyst, but modeling is also a very, very small part of IB. If you actually want to learn about M&A and it's legal, tax, M&A, etc. intricacies, I would say deals below $75M are probably ideal. I have found that on those deals, the amount of third party advisers (e.g. QOE, FDD, tax, etc.) you use is minimal, which results in more being expected out of the IB, and therefore a better opportunity for the analyst to learn. If I were to pick one deal that I've worked on that has taught me the most, I'd say it was a $50M sell-side M&A deal.

 

I've only been doing M&A for a year or so in the MM but I've been on a number of transactions (and have closed a few). A small sell side (depending on the bank) will be a good experience and the senior folks are probably less focused on it given the fees will be 'small'. The upside is you'll have more room to run and really tag team the process with the VP.

 

Do you want to stay Tech focused after this or does coverage group not matter? I feel that #2 will get you more of an overall broad experience in the M&A field if that's what you wanted to do post analyst stint where as #1 would probably get you more experience for other options post analyst stint.

make it hard to spot the general by working like a soldier
 

i feel like #1 is a no brainer unless you feel #2 is a better cultural fit or are looking to do Tech long-term. Bigger deals, more breadth, smaller analyst pool should lead to more responsibility

Array
 

PE will value quality over quantity in most cases. Quality being larger, more complex deals over smaller deals and pitches that don't materialize.

Array
 

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