100 Investment Banking Career Tips 

The more time you can save for your supervisor, the better rating you’ll get. Always think, how you can save time for them. If you do, they will want to work with you

Quality over speed. Yes, you need to be fast, but there is nothing that would slow down the process more than turning comments 3-4 times instead of once or twice

If it takes you 60 minutes to save 30 minutes to your VP, do it

Do a few little things they don’t except you: e.g., add a few bullet points / suggestion to a slide they told you just leave blank; that’s how you will stand out

Don’t just ask what you should do. Describe what the issue is, tell them what you tried to do. Tell them 1-2 proposed solutions. It shows that you think ahead and do some homework

Don’t just pull the research reports they asked you to do, but skim through and highlight sections

They will often get back to you on which public comps to include in the valuation analysis, but you could just send your thoughts and they will appreciate it even if they ignore most of it

When sending work, flag anything you are not 100% sure so they know where they should spend more time when reviewing

Always repeat to-do at the end of the meeting to ensure your understanding is correct

Keep a status report organized, thorough and up to date at all times

Your goal should be that people request you on their projects

There is not a "master plan" to manage your career. You are responsible for managing it. What projects are your getting on? Are you being exposed to different sectors? Have you mastered every type of typical financial analysis? Have you worked on multiple products? Are you gaining increased responsibility?

Be aggressive: staffing, work product, coffee chats, meetings, questions, etc. Don’t wait for things to come to you

Take calls from the senior banker’s office to increase presence and interaction

Invite yourself to pitches, negotiations, client calls. Simply tell your Vice President (VP) that you would like to join the client meeting to learn and whether it is OK (most of the times it is OK)

Say yes to opportunities

Be a leader in the office. Organize events. Contribute. Mentor. Volunteer. Give presentations

Share initiatives / your opinion with influencers

Stay on top of industry news and what’s happening in the markets

Seek feedback at the end of every project, don’t wait till year end to get development point feedback. You obviously get better rating if you can show that you already started to make steps to improve in certain areas

Every Sunday set up reminder and ask yourself: What can I do for my client especially something they don't expect us to do?

When do I talk to CEO / My contact 1:1?

What work process should be prepared during the week? Think about random things we could do for our clients

Become a trusted partner by the client, understand the numbers and be insightful of your industry

Demonstrate professionalism

Be able to give big picture guidance on process and analytics

Set up alerts with your client names

Follow them on LinkedIn and Twitter

Send news articles, congratulations, industry pieces to your client contact that might be relevant to them

Triple check emails before hitting send especially sent to and subject line. No grammatical errors, typos and don’t forget the (right) attachment. This happens more often than you think and can have devastating consequences

Always open and check every attachment before sending your email

Respond to Client MDs emails/calls within 5-10 minutes, acknowledge task immediately even if no time currently (don't worry about wordings of quick internal emails)

External emails: assume it will be forwarded, proofread subject, body of email and email chain below, make sure you copy the right people

If you are an analyst, give your associate 15-30 minutes to respond (you don’t want them to think you try to cut them off), but if they don’t you should go ahead and acknowledge receipt directly with an email so Client/MD is not wondering too long if it is on our radar

If you are an associate, same thing, give your VP 15-30 minutes to respond first so they don’t feel like you try to cut them off

Communicate. Keep the right people informed

Don't communicate to people who don't need to know (i.e., some processes are confidential even internally)

Attention to detail, no formatting error is too small to fix!, spell check, correct font, quality is more important than speed most of the time

A typo in presentation is similar to a typo on your resume. It ruins our credibility

Print everything out -> It Is easier to see mistakes with tangible version -> alternatively print it in a PDF and double check

Don't do the same mistake twice, make a list of things you had to correct previously (and keep it on your desk for reference)

Use Ctrl + H to find and replace double spaces

Pay even closer attention to “sensitive” parts of the analysis such as: Are the client’s numbers correct? Are the names of the management team spelled correctly?

[TBU] use brackets for sentences to be updated. Bankers will search for “[“ in a presentation to see what is still outstanding

Use [bracket] for any word, fact, you are not 100% correct, so it can be easily found / searched for in presentation

When repurposing existing documents: check headers, master slides, check/delete named cells, check footnotes and references

Make 5 minutes break and reopen documents to get a new perspective if you work on it for a long time

Understand big picture, why we do this. It is often very obvious if someone doesn’t get the context

Footnote everything, but never have a footnote on the title of a page

Understand every number and how to calculate it, Check consistency in numbers (does the LTM revenue on one-page matches to the number one page later? Are we showing $ signs in a table for all numbers or just the first one and the total?

Once you send a document to review you took ownership of the whole deliverable even if you were not the one who prepared the calculation. You need to be able to explain all numbers

Don't pass work to reviewer until you think it is client ready. You’d be surprised how rarely this happens

If you are stuck. Ask for help. Spend 15-30 minutes to figure out a problem, but never more as you will slow down the project

Know how to hand check a work product

Become an expert in building and manipulating financial models. Do not skip this step. This applies to Associates.

Do models and analyses in parallel with your mentor and compare what you did to what they did and reconcile

Get in the weeds. It'll help you later.

Don't develop holes in your arsenal: flow of funds, stock options, working capital analyses, overlaying financing options on top of an m&a model, etc.

Reviewing live is much faster than reviewing alone and writing long review notes

Positioning: think of talk track how you would connect the slides, be creative. Attempt to come up with something that no one else has thought of regarding how to position a company. This can actually impact whether we win business

Check every sentence. Is it necessary? Does it add value? Does it follow the previous sentence? Is it well written? Typically, the shorter the better, the less text heavy, the easier to follow

Read every sentence and tie every number. Footnotes. Side Bars. Does every sentence make sense?

Footnote all your research, assumptions and judgement calls

Keep track of your judgement calls, footnote them, and discuss them with your associate at the appropriate time

Never hardcode a cell in excel without explanation

Check for consistency: Do some sentences have periods and others do not? Are numbers and bullets aligned? Are numbers tying throughout the deck?

Search for stats -> Use Google Image to search, use key words: "Infographics" and/or "G2 Crowd" to find relevant stats, then check the source on the bottom of the page and trace it back original source/website to see if we can reference it

Graphical displays of information are more important than you think. Visit the dailyinfographic site. The ability to simplify and display complex analysis is a key work-life skill

When we want to show dramatic growth, compress longitudinally 

Be mindful of things looking different on paper than on screen

Make the bars on PPT look as high as possible to make the revenue growth look bigger than it is

Bullets should be well-written, succinct, and necessary (avoid fluff). There is no excuse for a misspelled word (F7)

Don't just copy client materials or website, at least reword and reorder

We get hired for financial advice. Don't cut corners or let it be sloppy – ever

Make sure we show our bank in the best possible light. Examples: Are our deals in the comps? Are our deals in the buyer profiles? Is our best contact really the Manager of business development at IBM?

Learn how to leverage other people's work. We create far too much stuff over and over again. Maybe even take responsibility for fixing this

Create Review Checklist section which you could put on your desk. Some examples: Are forward revenue multiples lower than trailing? Is the shares calculation correct? Do the sensitivity tables relative increases (or decreases) make sense? Do any multiples look off (.2x revenue? 17x revenue? 2x PE?)? How was the discount rate calculated?

Make sure you understand all the comments/edits that you’ve been requested to make / turn

As you turn comments, mark/highlight/tick them on the markup as a confirmation that you’ve turned them

Once you turn comments that are part of sentences, read the sentence to make sure it makes sense (grammatically and from a commonsense perspective)

Once you’ve turned all comments on screen, start from the beginning, and quickly check that you’ve turned all of them

Upon double-checking everything on screen, print out the work and check it again (often, work that looks correct on-screen is wrong/incorrect when printed)

Always print out your work and read and check everything over before sending it off to your Associate or VP

As an analyst you will make mistakes but the analysts that submit work with very few or no mistakes are generally the highest ranked (this really stands out as you save time for your reviewer)

Read every single word in the document, checking for spelling, sentence structure, tense, consistency, context

Tick and tie every number in the book, including calculated numbers

Read every footnote; check that every footnote reference matches the footnote and search for stray footnotes

Review for general look of the document: object spacing, line spacing, colors, formatting consistency

Then, hand a printed copy / send it (based on person’s preference) along with the original markup so that the person can check it

At that point, if there were any issues that came across when turning the comments, let the person know

If your reviewer is busy, put a post-it note on the page or a TBU box saying that you would like to discuss this comment or page

Remember: be proactive when turning comments, not reactive

Make sure you understand what the point of the task/pitch/etc. and if the comments you are turning make sense in accomplishing that goal

Footnote references are superscript, a superscript space is present between the text and footnote reference (1)

Source then Notes should always come before footnotes

A period should appear at the end of each source/note/footnote

Always ask VP if I can join the client meeting

Be on time Dial in Zoom calls 5 minutes early. Take a note who has joined the call and when VP joins give a summary who is on, who is missing

Check conference call numbers before sending it out

Be on mute unless you’re speaking