Long Night's Work

For the past three days I have been getting killed on this book. One analyst described what we were going through as "the gutter of investment banking." On Saturday it started. We basically just started creating a book for a meeting on Tuesday. We worked on it for a few hours Saturday and made plans to keep going through the weekend.

On Sunday I went to church and then had to come straight to work. I was there from about 11:00 am to 10:00 pm. All we were doing was aggregating information. We had to do about 10 different company profiles, accretion/dilution scenarios, shareholder information sheets, and financial data sheets. I was working with a new associate to the group. It was his first book so he was extra sensative to everything. He would have us check, re-check, then re-check again every single calculation we put into the book. Then he would have us recalculate it by hand.

Monday came along and we just went through the process: make changes, print out book, find new things to update/change/add/delete, make changes, print, etc. ad infinitum. Throw in there an occasional print off and delivery to the VP. After the VP looks things over he decides he wants to add another company in the mix, so we pull the financials, build the models, get the data, and put it in the book.

Then the VP looks again and decides that he wants to change the order that the comps are in. So you have to go back and re-format and arrange the entire book so that company #8 is now company #2 and things like that. It's just a tedious process. It wouldn't have been so bad, but the associate was constantly breathing down my neck and was really paranoid that one of the numbers wouldn't tie. We literally flipped the book over 20 times. That is about 5x more than I have EVER flipped a book. I've made books that were well over 90 pages long and this far and away exceeded anything I've done before. This guy was just excessive.

We basically built the book three times because when we were done (this was at about 11:00 at this point) he said, "Ok we're doing well. Now I want you to read every single page of the book to check for errors, grammatical changes, or anything else you might notice. I want you to have an opinion about this book when you're through." The crazy thing was that we had already flipped the entire book together multiple times and hadn't found anything. To "flip" a book just means to go through page by page looking for errors and correcting marks that someone else has made.

We continued to change little things, re-calculate numbers, and re-read slides until finally at 3:45 AM I told him that if we didn't send off the books to production we wouldn't have them printed in time for the meeting in the morning. We sent them off and I was getting ready to go home and sleep for a few hours when he said, "Ok I need you to stay here until you have flipped the printed books." So I stayed at the firm with another analyst and just waited until 6:30 when the books were finished. We finally got the books, flipped them, and put them on his desk. He had asked us to come in at 8:30 this morning to flip the books with him one last time (this is about flip #24 or 25 looking at EVERY page). I got home at 7:15, ironed my shirt and took a 15 minute nap, then came to work.

Needless to say it was a long night. In the end it wasn't so bad. It felt pretty inefficient the way we did things, but at least I can say with 300% surity that every single number in that book ties and is correct. It's kind of sad that I know the order of all 93 pages.

I guess if I had to pick a way to go out my last week this would be it. I'm not trying to complain about working long. I didn't mind that. I just didn't understand why we had to do things the way we did. But, as an intern, you don't ask those questions. You just do it with a good attitude and pretend like you couldn't be happier if you just won the lotto. The analyst I was with was really cool, and we had some good conversations while we waited for the books. It was a pretty good night.