There’s a saying we pass around the floor here: You don’t work on deals; the deals work on you. I didn’t quite get it during my first year, but after surviving a high-stakes merger between two Fortune 500 giants, I now know exactly what it means.
The target was a logistics company with aging assets but a goldmine of contracts. The acquirer—a private equity-backed industrial conglomerate—was looking to vertically integrate and squeeze margin efficiencies. On paper, it made sense. In reality, it was like stitching together two completely different species and hoping they’d mate.
From the moment I was staffed, it was a sprint. Models were flying across our team Slack channels at 3AM, valuations being torn apart and rebuilt by VPs like we were drafting new constitutions. We had to thread the needle between debt capacity, integration costs, and public optics. Everything was confidential. Even internally, entire groups were left in the dark until the last minute.
What struck me wasn’t the scale of the numbers—it was the psychology. We weren’t just crunching Excel sheets; we were managing egos. CEOs wanted legacy. Founders wanted out. The PE guys wanted their IRR. And in between all that, our MD had to play diplomat, therapist, and executioner.
At one point, the deal nearly collapsed. The target’s CFO flagged a potential labor issue buried in a West Coast union contract. The acquirer balked. Our team scrambled to model worst-case scenarios, revised the EBITDAC (yes, “C” for COVID adjustments is still a thing), and somehow framed it in a way that didn’t scare the lawyers.
The night before the board vote, we were holed up in a Midtown conference room, redoing comps and spinning narratives for the press release draft. No one had slept more than four hours in a week. My associate leaned over to me, half delirious, and said, “Is this what people envy when they say ‘Wall Street job’?”
And then—just like that—it closed. A press release. A stock pop. A tombstone for the deal toy shelf. The senior guys smiled, shook hands, went off to celebrate at Cipriani. I took the subway home, watched the city blur past, and felt an odd mix of triumph and emptiness.
People think banking is about money. It’s not. It’s about control. It’s about orchestrating chaos into structure. And occasionally—if you’re lucky—getting a front row seat to history being made in dollar signs and shareholder votes.
Tomorrow, there’ll be another deal. Another sprint. Another all-nighter.
And I’ll be here.