I have an interview coming up for a corporate development and financial planning role. The roles main focus is on M&A but it also has a strategic planning compontent. My background is in Transaction Services with a primary focus on performing fair value opinions on buisness entities.
I know the typical career path for these types of positions is through Investment Banking, but my background in valuing businesses has a lot of overlap with investment banking when it comes to valuation modeling. However, I lack deal making experience. Based on my first phone discussion, I sensed that they are a bit concerned about this lack of experience.
What kinds of questions do you think I should expect in my interview, and what kind of questions should I be asking them? I think there will be a focus on my lack of deal making experience to see how quickly I can think on my feet and how quickly I can pick up the skills necessary to fill in this gap in my experience.
When I was in corp dev, we sometimes would ask candidates which company they would prefer to purchase: one with high sales growth but no operational overlap with your current business or one with little to no sales growth but tons of operational synergies.
We’d give a bit more detail, of course, but the point is to see what follow-up questions they ask and how they decide.
It’s kinda like a brain teaser, but far more relevant.
Lower level they’ll likely be looking for intellectual curiosity, strong fundamental knowledge, and a very strong ability to process, arrange, and communicate information on the fly.
i.e. Here’s some facts, figure out which ones are meaningful and how they relate to each other, now build from that factual platform to explore the issue in the right direction and ask the right questions.
You pick B. Revenue synergies are harder to realize than cost synergies. Therefore you’d pad your operating income nicely by picking B.
Did you have you interview yet? Knowing nothing else, I would feel TS would be at parity with IB regarding valuation work. In the past, I’ve found that being excited and demonstrating that I WANT the job is what sets me apart. Most companies are looking to bring people on who are a low risk of screwing something up, leaving, and train drain. Express that you work well under limited supervision, you’re confident you can add value to the team, and that you really want to work in xxx industry at yyyy firm, doing zzzz.
At the end of the interview, be premptive and say, “Everything sounds good, what more can I share? Do you have any hesitation about me that I may address for this position?”
Make sure your company does deals, and a lot of them otherwise it is the most boring job on the planet. I work in it now, and everyday is a fire drill with 15 hour days, but no deals. That makes for the worst job on the planet.
I worked with a guy who came over for this exact reason. Unfortunately, we stopped doing deals shortly after he showed up. We also realized that he was difficult to work with, so it wasn’t too bad that we slowed down. He then got fired and the deals picked up like crazy.
At least in my experience, strategic fit/rationale comes before the valuation/pricing in the decision tree. Obviously you have an initial resonableness filter, but I’d be hestitant to push through too quickly to the purchase price in a case/interview.