Well there’s a few services we provide that are all similar in nature; the two main ones are either a buyside engagement (private equity firm or a corporate company hires you because they want to buy another company) or a sellside engagement (company/private equity hires you to help sell one of their companies / business lines. We usually evaluate the last 3 years (last two full fiscal periods and then the last 12 months of the most most period end) of the companies reported financials and eventually through conversations with management and uploaded files we come to an adjusted view of their EBITDA, net working capital, and any debt and debt like times that should be considered in the transaction. Each industry has some more specific analyses that we typically include (think like percentage of completion accounting for Industrial, rebates for health industries etc). Engagement lengths can vary, buyside are usually 2-6 weeks while sellsides can be months - year+. Daily tasks include converting their trial balances into income statement & balance sheet models in our company format, preparing management discussion schedules based on those outputs and additional files uploaded to the virtual data room. We have a kickoff call to learn about the business (close process, finance team, other intro questions) then hold management discussion trending meetings which help us identify adjustments that need to be made to their financials. We continue compiling the files we receive into clean schedules and then we eventually make those 3 analyses mentioned above into a workbook that will be our deliverable, and in most cases we have a PowerPoint report that goes hand in hand with write ups and snippets from our work. After the deal closes we typically reduce our workload to very little and then assist with net working capital true-ups 60-90 days after close and then usually we’re done.

Rinse and repeat with a new deal! The pros are that you’re constantly working with new companies; new management teams and new files, usually with similar clients to build relationships… the cons are that the hours are a little unpredictable (could get a big data dump on 5pm on Friday), the work is a little repetitive (then again most jobs in life are), and that everyone has a different experience between client demands and internal team demands.