Speaker 1: as robust as any other finance job. And I fell in love with the process. Everyone makes mistakes and everyone benefits from years of experience. I spend a lot of screen times. This is about the marriage of two or more companies. I'm Linda Yao and I am working in mergers and acquisitions, which is M&A for a tech company. I've been doing M&A on and off for about five years of my career and spent another five years in other finance and quantitative roles. My main job duties performing mergers and acquisitions consists of closing transactions, which starts with the strategy of merging two companies or acquiring a company, identifying synergies and areas where two things can become more than the sum of its parts, structuring transactions and then executing them to close, as well as following the businesses through the integration life cycle to understand how they come together as one. One of the projects that I completed within the last year was a major acquisition for a market leader in the Fortune 500. These transactions are pretty important to company strategies. Companies are making multi-million dollar and sometimes multi-billion dollar investments. So they have to be well thought through and they have to be done correctly. And sometimes it seems like the number of checkpoints can become overwhelming, but they're all there for a reason. These are large and oftentimes irreversible decisions. And so when one of them culminates successfully, it feels like a big accomplishment for the entire team and should be well celebrated. The time that I spend at my job doing various different tasks really depends on where we are in terms of the deal cycle of any particular transaction, as well as the overall deal flow, which ebbs and flows with the market and depending on the industry with the production cycle of that industry as well. Overall, I would say that there are definitely days when I spend most of my time in front of the laptop churning through a financial model or reading through red lines of legal documents. And there are other days where I'm spending most of my time traveling from meeting to meeting or having dinner with counterparts and really understanding where they're coming from. Mergers and acquisitions at its core is about finding win-win scenarios. My favorite parts of this job come when I get together in a room with other people from other functions, teammates and collaborators that all bring their skill set and their specific skill set into the transaction. And we emerge from the room or at the end of the day with a solution, a solution that has come together by being able to balance the various different disciplines and take the thoughts and the ideas that we have in our heads and take the thought processes from different perspectives and a solution that works from multiple angles. Mergers and acquisitions is by definition very multidisciplinary. You have to know some strategy, you have to know some finance, business development, legal operations, processes, people and HR. And so every day I'm learning something new and it is a great discipline to meet a lot of excellent people across a lot of different functions and work together as a team. The less enjoyable parts of my day are the difficult conversations, difficult conversations with stakeholders. Stakeholders include people who are on my team, stakeholders include the people that I work for. And oftentimes the most difficult conversations are those conversations with your counterparts. So MNA, even though it's a combination of many disciplines, is actually fairly niche. So there is no set pathway, I would say, to get into a mergers and acquisitions role. What I will say is that you must have some knowledge of finance and strategy, industry background, wherever you're practicing mergers and acquisitions is always essential. I see a lot of MBAs, but I also see people who have undergraduate and graduate degrees that are not from business schools. It's just a matter of being very good at synthesizing information, structured and unstructured, having a strategic mindset, but also being very, very good with data. I would advise people who are interested I would advise people who are interested in mergers and acquisitions to accumulate a diverse set of business skills, but then to make sure that they focus on one or two critical skills within that set. Mergers and acquisitions is oftentimes about being a jack of all trades, but you have to be a master of one or two. So what I would advise is study up on strategy, study up on market intelligence and competitive analysis, study up on financial modeling and business case development, study up on negotiations and contract theory, and study up on how to communicate and manage stakeholders, including executives. To be successful in mergers and acquisitions, I think you really have to have a sense of empathy. And what I mean by that is, this is about the marriage of two or more companies. So this very much is about understanding where the counterparty comes from, being able to put yourself into their shoes, and again, reach those solutions that are win-wins for both sides. It's very much a process that requires lots of different disciplines, lots of different specialties coming to the table, some of which are very different. You know, culture change agents may be very, very different from financial modeling, but understanding everyone's perspective and having that overlay of how everything works together in order to create something that is comprehensive, but something that is also similar to M&A, more than the sum of its parts, that's a necessary skill and an appreciation for that type of diversity of thought and creativity is very important for the job. Common interview questions for M&A jobs definitely vary by where you are in terms of years of experience and the level that you're interviewing for. A very common thread, though, at all levels is around how you build strategic relationships and how you build trust, not only with your team and within your company, but of course with the rest of the market and with other companies in your industry. That's very important because mergers and acquisitions is centered around intercompany relationships and not just those within your own company. At the beginning of your career at the analyst type position, the questions will be more structured toward do you know how to perform the details of financial modeling? Do you know how to use the tools and the toolkit of mergers and acquisitions? How do you develop a network? And then how do you leverage that network to make things happen? How do you develop strategic acumen? And how do you use your experience to refine and enhance that strategic thought? And what are the unique elements and the unique problem-solving skills that the combination of your experience and your education and your relationships bring to the role? Compensation and salary in mergers and acquisitions is very similar to other finance roles from what I've seen. It's very similar to investment banking roles and maybe closer to the upper quartile of corporate finance roles. For someone who is starting as an M&A analyst, for example, in an investment bank, I would say that six digits is definitely achievable, especially after incentive compensation, especially after bonuses. And as you move upward in M&A, the bumps can accelerate. This is the type of discipline where it's very dependent on results. So establishing a track record as being someone who can get things done and who can create synergies and create win-win situations will help with the salary and compensation. In the beginning stages of an M&A career, it is rather structured, similar to the M&A practice at a law firm or the M&A practice at an investment bank. There is a pretty structured process generally in moving from analyst to associate and then up the chain, probably about two or three years per role. As you move into higher and higher levels, though, it is very much about your track record and can you produce results. If you can get things done, then you can progress very quickly. Otherwise, it may take a few years to gain those skills and the experience and to be in the right situation at the right time. My first major internship during college, my first corporate internship, was assigned to an M&A group in corporate development and I fell in love with the process and I fell in love with the multidisciplinary nature of the job and I've been on that track and performing related duties ever since. My family and friends sometimes don't really understand what I do. Upon explanation, I feel like they consider it as robust as any other finance job. They see how much I enjoy doing it. They see that I am always working on different types of challenges and I get to travel around the world and meet lots of different people and talk to lots of different types of companies and understand business models. So I think they appreciate the fact that I appreciate the job. When I first started in my career, I knew a lot of the mathematical skills that need to underpin any corporate finance job. I knew some basics around the process and I had some very structured tools in my toolkit. Compared to the beginning of my career and when I first started in M&A, now I do feel much more confident, in part because I realize that everyone makes mistakes and everyone benefits from years of experience and as I start to accumulate those years of experience and find the right mentors and the people that I trust, I know that no matter what happens, I will have the right network of expertise to call upon to make it work. I've changed jobs quite a bit. I've changed companies and locations and industries. There's always been a common thread of doing things that are rather quantitative and a good mix of strategy and execution. But my first few months in any job, I would characterize as overwhelming. There's always so much to learn about the team and the people and the culture, as well as the subject matter and the industry expertise. But after the first couple of quarters, I usually know whether or not the job is a good fit and when it's a good one, things start clicking and then it's just a matter of tackling challenges with the people you've come to know and trust. What I've learned in the past couple of years that I didn't appreciate in the first part of my career, the importance of flexibility. Not everything is structured and not everything is deterministic. So coming to terms with the fact that flexibility and creativity are not only good to have in the process, but they're required in order to make most M&A transactions successful was something that I've come to appreciate in the past couple of years. One problem that I would love to be able to solve in the world is to eliminate or greatly reduce our sense of waste. The second world problem that I wish that I could solve is how to help us all understand each other better and to trust each other. Can you say your hobbies? So my hobbies, I spend a lot of screen time. So I watch a lot of TV and I read a lot of blog posts. I read a lot of blog posts, more so Netflix than TV. However, I like to balance that out with outdoors, hiking, and I love animals as well. You should consider getting into M&As if... If you like to be constantly challenged and you never like to solve the same problem twice. You should not consider getting into M&As if you are... If you like to follow processes step-by-step. If you're very meticulous in terms of wanting to understand what tools to use that will guarantee an outcome, or you like to ensure quality or success with certainty, then mergers and acquisitions may be a difficult field for you because it's somewhat subjective and vague in nature. If not your current profession, what other profession do you think you would have picked and why? I think that I would like to do something completely different, something that is related to the performing or the visual arts because mergers and acquisitions has actually taught me that creativity is so important, that being able to enjoy your work is so important, and being able to relate to others is very important to the job as well. Those are all things that I'm very fortunate to have found in my current job, but I think that something in the arts would bring all three of those as well and stretch me in a different way.