The Kruelberg Kretin Saga - Episode VI: The Headhunter Call

You sit comfortably at your desk. Excel is looking you straight in the face. You feel like a concert pianist, performing a masterpiece in front of a concert hall full of appreciating fans, as you format the pie charts on the powerpoint on your screen to absolute perfection. It’s the list of profiles for Frank – who asked for a detailed profile of every single precedent transaction of relevance since 2002. Now a good senior would have picked up on the ‘of relevance’ bit and limited the exercise to three or four profiles. Not Rupert, overjoyed that his mistake landed him an M&A mandate, he asked you to profile every single deal and do a 90 page profiles book for Frank.

You truly don’t know who to curse first – Rupert or Frank, so you decide that both of them are to blame, being the useless muppets that they are. But you are in a good mood today, and there’s no room for bitterness. You are one of five lucky analysts working on the task and you have a week to do it so plenty of time to smile and enjoy the sunshine outside.

You are smiling like a baby at your good fortune, when your mobile phone rings to give you a fright. It’s a withheld number, which is not a good sign – it means business. You pick up the phone, look at it for a second, and answer.

“Hello”

“Hi, is that Mike?” says the female voice on the other end of the line. You are a little puzzled by the fact that you do not know this person, yet they know you. What is more puzzling is the fact that someone who is definitely not from the office is calling you as you are by now well past the stage where friends give you a call, as they’ve forgotten you as a lost cause. Finally, it’s a female voice, and let’s face it, you definitely haven’t got a significant other working the hours you’ve been working lately.

“Yeah, that’s me, who’s this?”

“You don’t know me.” She says. No shit. Would I be asking if I did? “My name is Rebecca Nicholson. I’m a recruitment consultant at Assbury Moron.”

“A what?” you ask, thinking what the fuck is a recruitment consultant. This HR chick has obviously misdialed and has no fucking idea that this is not Assbury Moron, or wherever else she’s looking for.

“A recruitment consultant. A headhunter. Are you free to speak for a few moments”

Shit. A headhunter! Wow. Ok. Sure you have time to speak!

“Um, er… yes” you mumble in a whispery voice as you stand up and walk away to find a little privacy. Like it isn’t suspicious enough that an unknown caller rings and after they introduce themselves you get all secretive and hide, but you obviously don’t realize this as it’s your FIRST HEADHUNTER CALL!!!!!

“Um, er… yes… I can speak now”

“Great” says Rebecca “Mike, I’m calling because you’ve been recommended to me and I would like to see if you’ll be interested in coming in to see a private equity firm for an interview.”

Wow! A private equity firm. That’s the kind of shop filled by assholes like frank fucking Johnson. Why the fuck would you want to do that? You remember a bit of advice Rob gave you on one of your first days: don’t dismiss any opportunity. So you decide to humor Rebecca.

“Sure. Who are they?”

“They’re a firm called Blunderstone. Have you heard of them?”

Wow. Blunderstone are competing with Kruelberg on the deal the firm is advising them on. Anything to pull a fast one on Frank, so you accept the interview and pencil it in your diary. Tuesday. 8am. Blunderstone offices.

You have waited long and hard, but you really will get Frank now!

Mont Blanc and the BPM

You are by now well aware of the fact that i-bankers don’t make much sense. They talk the talk, and rely on their BPM to dazzle their audience into believing that they have something very meaningful, something profound to say. Looking closer at the BPM, it consists of two parameters:


Parameter 1 = bullshit
Parameter 2 = time


Bullshit in its own right is insufficient to daze the audience and the i-banking “magic” does not happen. It is only by manipulating the time element, that a true i-banker can manage to say nothing but at the same time impress their client. Remember, that if the audience has sufficient time to step back and think about what the i-banker is saying, the BPM principal breaks down and the cause is lost. The client will realize that what the banker is saying has no meaning and does not make any sense whatsoever. They will also be able to identify the numerous flaws in the argument and inconsistency in the data used, stemming from the inevitable fact that the investment banking professional will naturally be bullshitting.

Why then, does every banker have a Mont Blanc pen? You look around you, and every monkey on the floor has one. The little plain black pen with a blob on the cap. That’s it. Rob has two tucked away in his desk. Rupert carries one in his jacket at all times. Frank used one in the meeting at Kruelberg. EVERY banker has one of these babies. Why?

It’s a complete contradiction to the BPM theory of investment banking existence. BPM, as described above, is underpinned by minimizing the timeframe within which a specific quantity of bullshitt is uttered by an i-banker. While in its on right, the use of a Mont Blanc pen is not in contradiction to this theory, its use substantially reduces an i-banker’s BPM through increasing the time over which the target audience may absorb the bullshit. One may say that it creates the effect of the available time approaching infinity, and as your excel spreadsheet can tell you, even the biggest bullshit, when divided by infinity is zero. Ergo, using a Mont Blanc pen reduces an i-banker’s BPM to zero! Why? Because once bullshit is put on paper, the audience can take their time to try and understand it, and in not being able to do so, figure out how useless it all is. Even worse, the client may choose to give up on the bullshit altogether and simply bin it!

So why, you ask yourself, do i-bankers still swear by their Mont Blancs? Simple. Because a Mont Blanc with the unmistakeable whit blob on the cap is one of the easiest ways of telling someone that you can afford to pay £200 for a pen, without even opening your mouth.

Reading the Morning Paper

You’re in the tube on your way to work, and you open your copy of the New York Times. Not because you want to know what is going on in the US market, not because you are interested in what the Fed is going to do next week, not because you are working on a US deal so you need to be up to speed. You want to appear more American. The firm has brought in a new executive director from New York and he is 110% by the book. Comps need to be superscrubbed, books need to be crisp clean, formatting needs to be 100% - sorry, 110% - firm standard …

There is no better way to be liked by these champions of the establishment who constantly whine that the standard of work delivered here is below that of an analyst in new York, and the coffee is not as good as that in New York, and the Italian Restaurants are not quite as Italian as those in New York… So, why not just give him a little bit of New York right in his front yard. Solution: you read the New York Times every morning (£2.10 each morning is a small price to pay), and leave it conveniently visibly on your desk so he can spot the Yank as he passes each morning.

You page through your copy of the paper and hey presto, right in the middle of the hottest i-banking market since the late 1990s, you read a shocking headline about an i-bank planning to shed jobs.

The usual story: Commercial bank buys investment bank. Commercial bank is jealous of investment bankers BSDness. Commercial bank messes up bigtime on a number of occasions and is penalized by regulator. Commercial bankers exercise frustration by firing investment bankers.

Step one: commercial bank likes fat margins of investment bank.
Step two: commercial bank buys investment bank at very, very, very high valuation.
Step three: market turns.
Step four: commercial bank gets jealous that it has to pay expensive i-bankers also in a downturn.
Step five: commercial bank fires i-bankers, and is happy to reduce costs.
Step six: market conditions improve.
Step seven: commercial bank has no i-bankers left to take advantage of upturn and goes back to being the commercial bank it was in the first place, but billions of dollars poorer for the acquisition of the i-bank that no longer exists.

Image courtesy of www.rightvoices.com.