A head hunter reached out to me about a corporate development opportunity, and asked to speak with me tomorrow. The pay is roughly 15% higher than what I get now, so I said I’d meet with him. I feel bored at my current company as I’m not being challenged enough and I feel like I’ve reached my growing potential (experience wise/educationally) in my department. I got into an “enthusiastic conversation” with my manager about the 10 yr bond yield a month ago. She argued that the 10 yr very rarely changes, and I argued that it changes every day and has been very volatile over the past year. One of my other managers told me that I’m not allowed to adjust the financials the way I see fit because “they’ve been audited and we’d be telling the company that their financials are wrong if we adjusted the financials.” I like the company but the only thing really keeping me here now is the benefits, specifically my vacation days, other than that I feel there is nothing here for me.
Anyway, seeing as the ER industry is pretty much dead/dying, I considered corporate development at my company. However, our corp dev group isn’t really active as we are not allowed to do anymore acquisitions in the USA, but we do make a few occasional acquisitions in other parts of the world. Basically, the head of our corp dev department said I’d have to quit the company and join another company to do that kind of work because of how infrequently we make acquisitions now. What are the some of the exit opportunities for corporate development? What is the likelihood of transitioning to PE or VC?
mah dawg benzo will shine some light on this soon, he’s all over corp dev topics recently
but in all seriousness, as you have already alluded to, how good of an opportunity this is highly dependent on the company - how acquisitive they are, what’s management’s strategic vision, what’s the ownership structure (public? PE-backed? family-owned?), are they sitting on a lot of dry powder. A good corp dev team that is part of an actively-managed company in an attractive industry provides great experience - both in terms of deal structuring and acquisition integration. It should provide solid exit ops to a PE operations team in general, or just upward career trajectory to C-level roles in the corporate world.
dude Corp Dev!!! yo OP tell me where this is so i can apply too haha.
Corp Dev is an awesome place to be but this really depends on which company you’re working for…I got dinged by MSFT few months ago and that job would have been very cool…They make several acquistions per year from several dozen million dollars to multi billion dollars and in essence you are the buy side M&A. The candidate pool was similar to that of buyside fund in NYC in my opinion.
From what I have heard say you are a corp dev at MSFT or RTN for a few years…You’d probably have vast amount of knowledge about the company, its risk factors, industry, the whole regulation stuff, and political stuff (especially for RTN due to their funding on specific projects). You’d also have vast knowledge about the feasibility and profitability on their products (both company specific and industry specific) etc etc.
Now with all this knowledge, I would think a lot of hedge funds that focus on one of these sectors and PE firms that invest in one of these sectors (this would be tech since you don’t see start up defense firms pop up every year) would love to have you in the team.
I met with the head hunter today. By the way he was talking, he made it sound like a Corp dev role for a comoany that’s in the growth stage doing several acquisitions a year from our initial phone call. It turns out the position is an acquisitions analyst role at a real estate firm.
