August is shaping up to be one of my busiest months.
On top of three webinars every weekend, I have a couple of two-day on-campus classes. I think Zoom fatigue is real and the offline classes provide a huge reprieve.
However, the valuation and financial modelling classes always made me think about how I could enhance my existing content and in-class experience in each successive session. I don't claim to be the best and most experienced on the street, but I think where I am different is my perspective of looking at financial modelling and business valuation. Perhaps that is the unique value-add I bring to the table.
I thoroughly enjoyed the 2-hour talking session last night on Zoom and was possibly the youngest panellist.
We spoke and shared our views on what to expect in the next 6-12 months, personal experiences and opinions on valuation and investing, amongst others.
We also discussed the current situation around the pandemic and how people and companies should remain flexible and adaptable for the uncertainties that lie ahead.
Learning on the job.
During my corporate finance days, I tend to be the junior 'play-maker'.
I don’t crave to be in the limelight. I'm happy to just sit in and meetings and watch the show. Occasionally, I get the ball, I pass, someone scores a goal, sometimes I score. Everyone gets paid at the end of the day. Everyone wins. I'm happy. Tired, yes - but happy. So I had spent most of the early chapters of my career being the nice guy, helping out where-ever I can, whenever I can.
On one occasion as an analyst, a VP had requested some help for work to be done for an RFP due on Monday. An email was sent out to the analyst pool on a Friday and I was the only sucker that said yes. Sounds like a common Friday evening horror story?
I ended up burning my weekend doing up the presentation deck. In fact, many weekends were like that.
It was a sacrificial rites of passage as an analyst in investment banking. Someone put this in perspective for me: You're basically trading time for money.
I still enjoyed what I did. I disliked the mundane work, but just wanted to show up and be a team player.
As time passed, I increasingly became the go-to guy for a lot of what we knew as JIT (just-in-time) projects. It could be a comps table that needed refreshing an hour before a client meeting., a model that needed updating before a meeting, or a pitch-book that required assembly in 24 hours.
I had proven to be one of the most efficient and effective analysts in the team. I took pride in what I did, and I still do today.
But in the frenzy and rush of producing all the work, I had unwittingly lost sight of the "bigger-picture" investment banking business model - I just did what I was told and dedicated very little bandwidth to develop myself more professionally in other aspects.
As the days passed into years, my professional growth became increasingly stunted and fuelled by the mindless monotony of spreadsheeting and churning pitch books.
Compensation.
In negotiating any compensation, one must first ask the difficult question: What value do I bring to the table?
When you graduate from school and someone hands you a $10k paycheck, you are expected to be the most powerful sponge on earth. Your job is to soak up anything and everything as fast as possible.
You are the "smallest gear" in the entire system required to produce the highest torque - that’s your leverage. That leverage has a premium and that is what companies are paying for.
When you eventually evolve into middle and senior management, you become the large gear. You are measured based on your ability to drive as many smaller gears as possible. A large and heavy gear which does not drive anything is both costly and redundant, and will inevitably be scrapped.
Therefore in starting up any business or pursuing any career, one needs to first understand your role within the firm - are you a small gear or a large gear?
If you can't make a difference to the organization you work for and its clients, there is really very little that you can ask for commercially.
Don’t get me wrong and under-price yourself. Shoot for the sky if you can. But remember that if you ask for high fees or draw a high salary, you must deliver.
And don’t get cocky. More importantly, don’t ever be complacent.
羊毛出在羊身上
Everything has a cost, nothing comes for free.
It was much later in my investment banking years, and after starting a business, that I truly appreciated what revenue model and cost structure really means.
As an employee, your salary is a cost to the organization, and your main job is to bring in revenue for the firm. Everything else that you do in that process is ancillary to that main task.
Beyond salaries, the firm incurs other overheads such as rent, administrative expenses, entertainment costs, etc - all of which are important in supporting the operating infrastructure of the business.
The firm's most critical focus is to be profitable. To do that, it needs to grow revenues as much as possible, and it depends on the best employees and sales people to achieve that goal.
Usually, the people who are most instrumental to that growth will be rewarded, but in larger organisations, there is always bound to be some dislocation of credit. Don't get too quickly disgruntled when you get paid a lesser bonus than expected.
Unless you run your own enterprise, your remuneration is never perfectly correlated or proportional to the firm's profits.
You are just an employee, a cost center, and not a shareholder.
Understanding this corporate dynamics early on in your career makes you more sensitive to not only the firm’s P&L, but also the need to intelligently source for sales and develop yourself personally.
Over the years, when I started my own business and spoke with more people outside the banking industry, I increasingly appreciated the costs of customer acquisition and the value of relationship building.
Your work experience gets increasingly diluted and worthless if you choose to sit behind a desk doing endless powerpoint pitches and spreadsheets.
In banking, the one thing that many junior analysts (and even associates) fail to realise is the importance of doing small talk with professional parties, engaging colleagues from other departments within the bank, and even client interaction.
Every individual is different. Some like to go deep into numbers, others like to hear the big picture. Some like bragging about their achievements while others just want to complain and vent their frustrations to an external party.
Regardless of the shapes and sizes that people come in, the interactions - whether direct or indirect - are ultimately contributory to helping the firm bring home the beef that pays the salaries and bonuses.
You can choose to systematically and independently acquire technical skills from a corporate finance manual, but there are no handbooks for learning the ropes of business from the "school of hard knocks". So don't get too frustrated if you aren't hitting home runs by showing off your beautiful presentation or financial model to your bosses or clients.
Sometimes, your greatest value is in just showing up or being a small cog in a big system.
Being commercial.
From a statistical point of view, not every one will make managing director in an investment bank. This is not abnormal.
In an ideal world, the funnel is straight, and 100% of all analysts would make associate, 100% of all associates would make VP and VPs to MDs.
But the reality is that attrition happens at every rung.
Making Partner or MD isn’t the pinnacle of your career. I used to think that MDs were the creme de la creme in the investment banking world. But the truth is, many of them are just successful in navigating corporate politics and hierarchy within the firm.
MDs are really just highly paid salesmen within the bank.
MDs exist only because the banks believe that their relationships with senior industry people and clients can be monetised at some point of time. Their KPIs are based on the bank's revenues and not on whether they make your life easier. It is also because of this that most cultures in investment banks appear to be toxic.
Don't take it personally, it's all just comes down to sales and the bottomline.
As someone lower down the rung of the ladder, if you focus too much on pleasing your bosses and co-workers as part of climbing the corporate ladder, you'll find yourself rudely awakened ten years later into a miserable job.
So, everyone - junior or senior - needs to learn to be commercial, and that means understanding how the business of your firm works and who the real customers are.
Above all, be smart, be a good listener and nurture good analytical skills. Learn more to solve problems rather than pleasing people.