No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.
—H. G. Wells
As Rolfe and I learned, the initial rounds of valuation work are just the first steps in the investment banking process. These inaugural throes are the opening volley in what will become a barrage of documentation necessary to, first, win the business and, second, process the deal. The associate has the task of making all the valuation numbers look good and the reasons behind the numbers look even better. The bullshit is set to accelerate. This is where the word processing department comes in.
Professional word processing is performed on any and every document an investment banking associate works on. When an associate does a pitch there is word processing, on internal memos there is word processing, on anything that leaves the investment bank to be seen by a client or prospective client there is word processing. Every sole, single, solitary document has to look good because this constitutes 90 percent of the associate’s value-added. If an investment banking associate is able to word process effectively and efficiently, then he or she will be successful for at least four years on Wall Street.
The word processing portion of an associate’s work is like the boxes of Raisinets at the movie theater. They’re a staple across the country, no one likes them and they should be rid from the planet, but they’re still there. Every associate detests word processing, but it’s a necessary evil in investment banking.
Unfortunately, that necessary evil occupies 40 to 50 percent of an associate’s time. This equates to anywhere between thirty to fifty hours per week of word processing per associate. The amount of time associates on Wall Street spend submitting documents to word processing, proofing the documents after they come back from word processing, reworking the drafts that were first submitted to correct some of the errors the word processing gnomes made, again submitting the documents to the word processing department, and then again proofing them is mind-boggling. After completing all this work, the vice president on the deal usually scraps 80 percent of the stuff the associate wrote, and the word processing cycle begins all over again.
At DLJ, the word processing department was staffed by a crew that seemed like they belonged on the brig of the good ship Lollipop. Rolfe boarded this ship many times and got to know the crew pretty well.
There were two basic groups of word processing people. The struggling actors and actresses and the Christopher Street fairies. All of them were temperamental and refused to take shit from any junior bankers. They were competent, but if they didn’t like us it seemed as though they would make lots of mistakes on purpose. They would fuck up fonts and underlines and paragraphs and make any long night even longer. It wasn’t easy to get on their good side. We had to be nice. We couldn’t pay them off. They got paid about twenty bucks an hour and didn’t give a flying fuck about money. They just wanted respect. It was a beautiful thing to watch a snot-nosed, stuck-up banker groveling to a guy who only wanted to go down to Christopher Street to pick up his boyfriend. Usually, the banker had a hard time relating to the word processing guy, but the word processing guy held the associates’ balls in his hip pocket. To cross the word processing department was one of the worst mistakes any of us could make.
The best way to convey the futility of the word processing merry-go-round is through an illustration. But keep in mind this won’t give full justice to the actual pain inflicted upon us by the word processing merry-go-round. We had to deal with this crap on a daily basis for just about everything we did.
On most pitches, when the initial valuation work is complete, the vice president tells the associate, “Take a crack at writing the executive summary.” The executive summary is used to state the business that the company being pitched is involved in, and to tell the company that the investment bank making the pitch should be chosen to lead manage the deal. The rest of the pitch book shows why the investment bank doing the pitching should get that business.
“Taking a crack” at something in investment banking is like jerking off on yourself in the corner. It’s bad enough that you’ve got to go and jerk off in the corner, but to add insult to injury you have to do it on yourself and it’s a mess to clean up. The associate works on the executive summary and sends it through the word processing department. When it comes back, the vice president rewrites the executive summary and the associate sends it back through the word processing department, gets it back, and proofs it. Then the senior vice president rewrites the executive summary once again, the associate sends it back through the word processing department, gets it back, and proofs it. Eventually, the managing director rewrites the executive summary for the fourth time. You get the idea. The shit continues ad nauseam. Rolfe experienced this clusterfuck firsthand while he was writing an executive summary for a telecommunications company:
I wrote
I walked up to the word processing department so that I could submit the document and get the ball rolling. Fausto was sitting there looking haggard when I walked in. Fausto was the Grand Poo-Bah of word processing. He was responsible for allocating all the work in the word processing department. I don’t know why he looked so haggard. Maybe he’d had a long night at the Vault, a sex club, or maybe he was just tired. I wrote out a word processing ticket and clipped my handwritten document to it. I was neither nice nor mean to Fausto. But I think he thought that I was a little curt with him so he gave my job to Elena. Elena was a beauty, but she hardly spoke English and I believed that if she tilted her head too far to one side pebbles would fall out. Two hours later a document came back that looked like this:
Cellular-net, Inc. (the “Company”) is a leeding provdier of cellulare periherals company with over $150 million in revenues and a strong backlo.
The Copany is planning to raise $1000 million to purchas companies in the cellul telecommunicationss industry that will be. Don aldson, Luskin & Jenrette is able to effectively raise equity or debt for Company and believes that the roll-up strategie.
DLJ is one of the premier investment banking houses on Wall Street and the Copany will have the full support of Mr. Howerd Isensteen, the number one telecommunications analyst on Wall Street.
DLH is the premier investment bank in selling “Story Companies.”.
I was pissed off. I made the corrections and submitted the marked-up document. I spoke to Fausto very nicely and told him that I appreciated all his hard work throughout the year and that I really didn’t know how he did it. This made him happy. An hour later a perfect document came out.
The following day I gave this “first crack” at the executive summary to the vice president and he scrapped it. He marked it up like this:
After he was done hacking at the executive summary it was about 9:00 P.M. I submitted it to word processing. Inevitably what came out of word processing was not perfect, so I had to resubmit it.
I waited for it to come out of word processing and got it back around 11:30 P.M. The vice president asked me to fax the finished product to him after it went through word processing. So I faxed it. Of course, he was awake because he only had left the office a half hour ago. When he answered the phone I heard his TV in the background. There was a familiar theme song playing and I was pretty sure that it was the Robin Byrd Show’s “Baby, Let Me Bang Your Box.” I vowed to myself that if I ever made it to vice president I’d go ahead and spring for either Spice or the Playboy Channel, so that I could at least watch some quality hoochie while my associates faxed me pitch books.
The vice president made more changes and faxed them back to me and asked me to have it to him by the morning. I could have either submitted his changes to word processing, waited for them to be done, checked them, and left the finished product on his desk, or I could have submitted the changes, gone home for some shut-eye, and then come to work early the next morning and checked the job that word processing had done. Either way I wouldn’t have gotten more than five hours of sleep.
The next day the draft clawed its way up one level in the hierarchy to the senior vice president. The senior vice president took a look at the executive summary and made his changes as such:
The senior vice president I was working for loved graphs and charts. He had already mastered the art of written bullshit in the pitch books and was pursuing a loftier goal of impressing companies with color graphs and charts. It was truly amazing.
I got the marked-up document back around 6:00 P.M. and the word processing marathon began again. I put the changes through word processing and when I was done the vice president wanted to see the finished product to make sure that it was OK to send to the senior vice president. This checking and double checking is a staple of investment banking. I then faxed the document to the senior vice president at his house. He made all these changes to the other changes and faxed them back to me. I sent it through word processing and proofed it. It inevitably wasn’t right, so I had to send it through word processing again. Then the vice president wanted it faxed back to his apartment, and he made even more changes. By this time it was midnight and the ridiculousness seemed like it would never end.
The next day the managing director looked at the executive summary and changed it again. His edits looked like this:
This managing director loved presentation. Colors had to be right, fonts easy to read, bolding clear, and underlining thick. I sent these changes through word processing, showed it to the senior vice president who touched it up a bit, sent it through word processing again, showed it to the vice president, who changed a couple of nits like commas and fonts, and sent it through word processing yet again. Then I faxed the document to the home of the managing director. It was about 6:00 P.M. He made some changes and faxed the document back to me. I sent it through word processing and faxed it to the senior vice president. He put his stamp of acceptance on it and then I sent it to the vice president and he also stamped it OK. Changes had gone back and forth and forty-eight hours of my life were consumed, and the document hadn’t changed substantially from its original form except for the addition of a couple of graphs and charts.
Cellularnet, Inc. (the “Company”) is the leading provider of cellular peripherals with over $150 million in revenues and a strong backlog.
The Company is planning to raise $100 million to purchase companies in the cellular telecommunications industry that will be synergistic. Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette (“DLJ”) will be able to effectively raise equity or debt for the Company and believes that the Company’s roll-up strategy is an exciting story that DLJ will be able to sell to investors.
DLJ is one of the premier investment banking houses on Wall Street and the Company will have the full support of Howard Isenstein, the number one telecommunications analyst on Wall Street.
DLJ is the premier investment bank in selling “Story Companies.”
So, when is the word processing of a document really done? The answer is twelve hours before the time of the meeting with the company. If a pitch to a company was in a week, then the vice president, senior vice president, and managing director would come up with more charts, graphs, and drivel to put into the pitch until there were just twelve hours till showtime. When it’s just twelve hours till showtime the associate has to put the pitch books into production.
Next stop: copy center.