Work Hard, Play Hard

So I rode 310km last weekend. And now I've worked too much this week. Monday turned into a 7-11 type affair, and I was back for more on Tuesday at 5am. At least it was "for something"... we led/announced a deal for a marquee client. But negative feedback counters a lot of the exuberance. You can make money on a deal, but then the photocopier misses copying pages, and of course everyone is oh so needing that page, and human nature is that blame must land somewhere. I'm on the deal, so maybe that's me. I'm an investment banker/photocopier technician, so naturally I know why the friction mechanism didn't grab page 2. I didn't even do the photocopying, I stay away from that Satan machine. But that's irrelevant.

Client needed [equity] money for an acquisition, and up until last couple of days, markets for jr. oil and gas are... uhhh... tepid. As in "pure crap". Other deals that had gone out recently that were priced aggressively caused lead underwriters aggressive headaches. So we toe the line and make a prudent decision. But next day someone goes aggressive again, we see another deal in the marketplace. The client sees this better pricing point set one day later. My voicemail light is blinking on my phone: "Please call me, I need to give you shit".

Working on a private startup as well. So the night before our internal deal approval meeting I'm working away on some corporate forecasts. Deal approval meetings are also known as "beat up sessions", the target being of course the potential financee (who is not present). However, there banker, who's numbers are discussed by the managing directors from sales and research as well, often gets a portion of the beat up.

Companies come knocking on the door for money all the time, most get turned away promptly. Some are worth a lot of due diligence and number crunching. If they make it through that phase, we sit around a table, and internally debate if this is a piece of business we want to be associated with. Naturally, information is a key driver... models, comparables in the market place, etc. At dinner time the models are looking near a state of readiness, until I noticed that my colleague's Free Cash Flow to Firm model from a week ago took EBITDA and added back DA one more time. Technically speaking, that's too much DA, duhh. Not his fault really, the circumstances under which he created this model weren't ideal. You only add back DA if you're starting with EBIT. Company values always look good when you double count them, as long as it's not not the expenses you're double counting. Good catch, fix it quick. Then, as hours of value added work (or a close approximation thereof) elapse, company then sends us their updated model at 11pm. Yeah, we were working off one three weeks old. I'm still unclear as to why it wouldn't be obvious that we, the lead investment bank, would benefit from the updated stuff as soon as it was available. Anyway, we make do with what we've got. Pulling the pieces together. Giving it the ol' college try... and all that jazz. So what am I asked the next day in our deal approval meeting? What does this look like in 2010? What, you don't have a 2010 model? Uhhh... well... this is a blind pool company here with no assets and a management team telling us they can execute on what they've written on a piece of paper... and you want me to tell you what that's gonna be in 2010? The CFO's model only covers 2007 capital expenditures and run rate cash flow in 2008, nothing beyond.

My daily "pie" only has 24 hours, just like anyone else. I need my sleep, but generally I'm "doing something" from 7am to 10pm, none of which is ever at home. A few weeks back, I was fitting in Spanish and my riding, as work wasn't as scaled up. But I promised myself that if work picked up, I would make the right decision. Spanish gets scaled back before cycling. Not too hard, considering this edition of Spanish classes is a little less inspiring, my teacher doesn't quite have the same charisma as the first one. And cycling is my last bastion. Giving it up is symbolic failure. Actually, it's not even symbolic, it's just pure failure. I could be "living in a van, down by the river" and I'd still ride. I'm too tired for Spanish, work is encroaching on the life again now.

I'm gonna bring a white flag in to work, and hang it by my desk. If anyone came near enough to examine just why the surrender occured, the plaque at the base would say "gone riding".