AI Issue 5 2017

66 Acquisition International - May 2017 Business Support for the Financial Sector What do M&A, corporate finance, private equity and venture capital have in common? They all require a significant amount of cumbersome desk work, particularly in the early stages of your career. But how many people join the world of corporate finance because they have a particular interest in carrying out hours of desk research, or a love of aligning slides in PowerPoint? anish company no-more is assisting corporate finance clients and their employees across the world at various stages of the M&A process, including support with pitch decks, IM, teasers and even due diligence research on the non-confidential aspects. The service, which company founder and ex-McKinsey management consultant Anders Thomsen calls ‘micro-outsourcing’, is proving to be a popular service amongst young analysts keen to climb the ladder quickly. There has long been a belief within the industry that newly graduated analysts must ‘earn their stripes’ through long hours, hard graft and many hours of research and pitch deck preparation. However, Thomsen believes that this comes with a cost. According to an article published in the Harvard Business Review in 2013, “Knowledge workers spend a great deal of their time - an average of 41% - on discretionary activities that offer little personal satisfaction and could be handled by others.” 1 To look at it from the perspective of cost-benefit analysis, micro-outsourcing adds value and enables junior consultants to do more with less. Early adopters are already using no-more to handle intensive workloads and create new insights via bottom-up analysis. When the flawlessness of the pitch deck is already guaranteed (no-more’s in- house quality assurance team checks every slide individually before release), the analysts are free to spend their time doing what they’re best at: analysis. Thomsen says: “When you employ a teamof intelligent, highly educated individuals – it simply doesn’t make sense for them to be spending ten or more hours a week aligning PPT slides; you are essentially paying someone a corporate finance wage to carry out tasks that could very easily have been done by someone Business Support for the Financial Sector D less skilled. In short, you’re not getting their best, and their best is what you hired them for.” Saving time Time is widely considered to be the most precious commodity in business. Just as it is impossible to manufacture more crude oil, so too is it impossible to manufacture more hours in a day. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. The tradition of heaping extra work onto junior analysts is not only damaging to employee morale, but it also has a negative impact on your use of that most valuable of assets – time; and for an industry that is largely built on asset management, this is an oversight, to say the least. When it comes to finding the information that makes the difference between a good pitch deck and an outstanding one, time is the key metric. If you are working to a tight deadline, sometimes it is necessary to make tough decisions. Researching the complete brand spread within the German market is extremely time-consuming; you know that it might make the difference between winning and losing the mandate, but if you don’t have the manpower, there’s not much you can do. Micro- outsourcing provides the opportunity to delegate this task to a global network of fully vetted specialists, who will also make sure the information is beautifully presented, freeing up your team to spend that time working on something that only they can do. With low costs and fast turnaround times (typically less than 24 hours), micro-outsourcing is enabling more corporate finance companies to improve their offering and compete with the larger firms, without extending their employees’ working hours. The importance of a happy work force It is often said that a happy team is a productive team, and keeping your team happy might just keep your accounting department happy, too. According to a study 2 by the Center for American Progress (CAP), the cost of replacing an employee who falls somewhere in the mid-range pay bracket of around $40,000 a year is around 20% of that employee’s annual salary. However, that figure quickly increases as you move further up the ladder, with highly educated executive positions with an annual salary of $100,000 or more costing as much as 213%. If young analysts’ brains were free to work on more complex problem solving, whilst still getting the pitch deck completed in time for tomorrow’s pitch and still getting home at a reasonable hour, wouldn’t that be the holy grail in terms of productivity and employee satisfaction? More significantly, wouldn’t it represent a huge disruption to the status quo? No more staying late and missing the kids’ bed time. No more having to cancel date night for the fifth week in a row. No more having to choose between your career and your loved ones. Outsource your desk research, PPT tasks and excel models, and enjoy finishing on time for once. Micro-outsourcing is like having a limitless supply of junior analysts on demand, except that they don’t want any recognition, you don’t have to pay them an analyst’s wage and you don’t have to keep them on hand when you don’t need them. They’re perfectly happy just sitting in the back office, content in the shadows, but enabling you to deliver above expectations, giving you a competitive advantage. And after all, isn’t that what being in finance is all about? 1 https://hbr.org/2013/09/make-time-for-the- work-that-matters 2 https://www.americanprogress.org/wp- content/uploads/2012/11/CostofTurnover.pdf