The summer takes on a rhythm of predictability that borders on bliss, or as close to bliss as one finds inside an investment bank. The lows are low and the highs are sometimes lower.
I lose track of the days. My only touch point is listening to brief elevator conversations on my way up to the forty-fourth floor each morning—Monday and Tuesday small-talk consists of recounting the prior weekend’s happenings. By Wednesday afternoon, conversations turn to discussions on upcoming weekend plans. There’s a perpetual longing for weekends past or weekends to come. In banking, no one wants to talk about the present.
The majority of my time is spent creating the roadshow presentation, which the company will use to market itself to potential investors. Mornings are spent turning the client’s comments, while nights are spent turning Masters’s comments. After completing Masters’s comments each night around 2:00 a.m., Kwame and I send the updated deck to the client, who typically provides comments by 9:00 a.m. Kwame and I get into work around 9:30 a.m. and turn those comments, finishing by early afternoon, after which we send the deck to Masters for his review. He sends comments around 10:00 p.m. And the cycle continues.
“Get any sleep last night, boys?” Steve asks on the bad nights, when he sees our emails sent out in the early morning hours. He’s not apologizing. After all, he isn’t the reason we stay up all night. But simply acknowledging the fact that Kwame and I spend most nights at the office is just enough empathy we need to chug forward.
Those of you chronologically inclined may notice there’s a gap from early afternoon to 10:00 p.m. The never-ending stream of pitch staffings continues through the summer and eats up some of this free time, but I do an admirable job of dumping most of that work either on my analyst or my friends in Chennai, where my requests to the MAKS team no doubt are responsible for India’s outsized GDP growth.
Some afternoons, I head home and take a nap; other afternoons, I sit in my cube and Netflix and chill; and occasionally, I’ll just sit there and guzzle water, inducing pee and forcing me to get up just so I have something to do. Like most of life, these periods of boredom are punctuated by bursts of all-out panic when Masters or the client see a number that “makes no sense” and Kwame and I scramble to make sense of it. Masters makes weekly cameos at the office, typically on Tuesdays and Thursdays, instilling low-level terror in Kwame and me each time he storms by our cubes. The pit stops are always of the same nature—he has instructions for us and doesn’t want a paper trail.
Every couple weeks, we receive “good” emails, news of “reinforcements” coming from M&A. Translation: more senior bankers from the M&A group are hopping on the bandwagon to get credit for the deal. While seemingly harmless, the addition of each new senior banker means another MD who provides comments on books, another MD who barks orders on calls.
Periodically, it’s imperative to recalibrate one’s idea of boredom. All transactions require participation by lawyers to help draft SEC filings and other black-and-white documents with tiny font.
Redlining legal documents involves lawyers marking up documents and telling you how DB is getting fucked by whoever we’re negotiating with, when in reality, DB is really getting screwed by the lawyers, who bill hourly.
On days when we head to Midtown to the law firm we work with to draft the red-herring prospectus, I’m reminded why I didn’t go to law school—aside from my shitty LSAT score. Spending days at the law firm debating placement of semicolons and constructing incomprehensible sentences makes life on the forty-fourth floor of DB feel like Saturday night at a bachelor party in the mirror room at Club K5 Relax in downtown Prague. Staying awake during these drafting sessions should be reflected in junior bankers’ bonuses.
* * *
“They’re starting,” says Kwame. The first loud bang is followed by a succession of louder bangs.
I join Kwame in the corner conference room that overlooks New York Harbor and watch the red, white, and blue July 4th fireworks sparkle, dance, and explode across the dark summer sky.
“Blows working on the Fourth,” I say.
“This transaction will look good on our résumés, though,” says Kwame. Nearly every analyst has an eye on a buy-side job even before starting banking. Landing one of these highly coveted jobs requires relevant deal experience, though. Thus, the most motivated analysts are typically driven by the desire to leave the bank before they even start. It makes me wonder if the job encourages mediocrity for those who aren’t sold on the buy-side exit.
In the distance, Lady Liberty stands, lit in her perpetual salute to freedom, as the vibration of the BlackBerry in my pocket reminds me of the freedom I lack: Project Liberty summons me.
“Masters?” asks Kwame as he turns, trying to read my face for an indication of how much longer we’ll be in the office and if he’ll be able to make the party in Tribeca he’s been talking about.
“Yeah,” I say scrolling through the comments. “Not too bad, actually…but he’s still hung up on the EBITDA charts for the Laminates Division.”
“What’s his comment?” says Kwame. “We checked it six times—numbers are right.”
“Says ‘numbers look wrong still,’” I say, reading Masters’s comment verbatim.
Here is the chart in question.
The numbers are right—they’re from the client. What Masters doesn’t like is the absence of stratospheric growth. As you most likely won’t recall, since you’re skimming over my periodic financial tutorials, credit investors salivate at charts like this—steady, consistent EBITDA numbers over time. All they care about is that the company whose debt they purchase can service the interest payments. But equity investors (like the ones we’re marketing to on this deal), they’re interested in the dream—the through-the-fuckin’-roof growth. For reference, here is a chart from a prior IPO roadshow deck I worked on.
Now those are IPO charts. Part of me felt like I was committing a crime when I input those projections into Excel and saw the final charts on a roadshow presentation—honestly, there may be a crime in there. If it’s not already abundantly clear, the projected financials, as provided by the company, begin in 2018. Your run-of-the-mill, 238 percent, five-year revenue CAGR should get that issuance ten times oversubscribed.25
“What the hell does he want us to do?” I say.
“Got an idea,” says Kwame. He disappears to his cube as I work on some of the other comments. Fifteen minutes later, Kwame sends me an email: “Look better?” I open it:
William Keenan: looks money. Where’d you get new numbers??
Kwame Adeyemi: same shiznit. Messed with scale
We turn the rest of Masters’s comments. “Looks right,” he scribbles in red pen above the updated chart on his final markup before we send the deck to the client. (See charts next page.)
And this is why Kwame earns his new spot in the bullpen, where he moves the day before we begin the roadshow.
