M&A job difference between Banks and Accounting firms

They are completely different jobs - as a banker you do the financial modelling, arrange financing, execute the deal, etc... accounting firms are there to support with accounting stuff (and maybe tax implications). Do you want to be a banker or an accountant? That's the question.

It depends on your experience and what you are looking to do. Given the size of transactions that M&A groups in accounting firms work on, I will stick to MM IB shops because they are not comparable to BBs or EBs. I will attempt summarize some of the pros and cons.

Pros: *Much better work life balance

*Earlier exposure to business development (meaning it isn't just MDs or Directors looking to drum up deals)

*Potentially more involvement quicker with all aspects of the deal (some MM groups are good at involving junior members of the deal team in management presos, pitches, etc., others are not)

*Work tends to be more focused and less busy work, such as churning pitchbooks, updating comps and pulling industry data

*Creativity is strong for maximizing client value given the ability to leverage in-house resources (e.g. tax, wealth management)

*More exposure to buy side assignments and capital raising (MM shops are notoriously sell side heavy and take on far fewer buy side engagements unless they believe it will lead to a sale down the road; more tend to work on private placements since it typically leads to a liquidity event). I believe this can be spun as a positive if you are looking to exit to Corp Dev (most of the buy side work is from strategics).

Cons: *Compensation is significantly less than MM shops (part of the work/life balance trade-off) particularly on the bonus portion. Salary is slightly less too in most cases.

*Expense budgets are tighter than MM shops (e.g. you can stay at a Westin for a conference, but not the Four Seasons)

*Deal flow tends to be more lumpy than MM shops as Accounting M&A groups source many mandates directly without going through a pitch process (the premise being, all of these trusted advisors are out there should know if their client wants to sell, raise capital, acquire, etc.)

*Prestige is lacking at times with exit opportunities compared to well-known MM IBs. Also can be an uphill battle in pitches going against top firms for larger mandates (e.g. Harris Williams, Houlihan).

*Size of the transactions is, on average, going to be lower than the premier MM IBs (e.g. Blair, Baird, Houlihan, Lazard MM, HW) - part of the reason comp is lower.

Having worked at both a Big 4 M&A team and now a MM M&A team, I can say that there is little difference in the actual day to day work, running a sell-side process isn't rocket science and is basically the same pretty much across the board in terms of materials preparation.

This is possibly skewed as I am/was a generalist in both and based in London, but the only material differences in my opinion are: - overall compensation - much less at Big 4 - lifestyle - much better at Big 4, weekend work was non-existent and I never really stayed in the office beyond 10pm - deal size - at the time I was at the big 4 firm, the overall deal size never really exceeded £60-70m and the fees were much much smaller than what are charged at my MM currently