IBD Insights - Who's Hiring & Who's Firing

Hello and welcome back to The Deal Room. And internship season is well on its way. And as such, then we thought it'd be a good time to have a bit of discussion about generally what's the, what's the vibe in the office at the moment? There's lots of articles going around about the intensity coming back as deal flow starts to pick up. And what does that feel like when you're at the analyst associate level? Who's hiring? Who's firing? There's lots of use articles to discuss. And we can also throw in a little bit about Elon getting his mega pay packet as well. I did see him tweet last night, Steven. He said he's working on, I think it's Plan Tesla 4.0. It's going to be amazing, was his tweet. So it's almost like, uh, he was holding them ransom as their share price was getting hammered and hemorrhaging through most of the year, and now he's going to be fully invested back on it, it seems.

It's a remarkable story, as if the incentive for Elon from owning a good proportion of the shares and seeing that share price rise isn't enough. He obviously wants more and wanted, I think it was the 304 million shares that equated to a $56 billion pay package. This is pretty unprecedented. And again, he is holding them to ransom. I'm not going to be motivated until we move our headquarters to Texas, until we move, and until I get paid $56 billion. He was previously the richest man in the world. I don't know why he needs another $56 billion. It's quite remarkable. And just very quickly on this piece of news, because we're talking about all things money and jobs and all of this kind of stuff, very quickly, just on the Elon news. It's quite interesting because the shareholders back him, right? So back in 2018, when they, when they, when Elon was negotiating this pay package, shareholders, 75% voted in approval of this pay package. Fast forward to now and 70% still approve of the actual award of this pay package. So it's only a, it's a disgruntled shareholder who's going, wait a second, this doesn't look right. He's bringing this to Delaware court. He's bringing it to Delaware court to say, look, $56 billion is too much money. It's unprecedented. We never thought he would get there. And also, does he have undue influence on the board? Those are the two elements of this court case. But in the court of not necessarily popular opinion, but certainly in the court of Tesla shareholder opinion, Elon, still fine. Get $56 billion, get back to focusing on the company. Remember, there were Tesla shareholders that were suing Elon about starting x.ai because they thought, well, he's been saying Tesla's an AI company. Now you're starting another AI company. What's going on here? So there's all sorts of stuff swirling around, and I think $56 billion to get Elon back on the straight and narrow. Can't believe I'm saying these words. Maybe that's good.

Oh, good value.

What do you—

someone say it.

Oh, what do you think? What do you think, Anthony?

Um, I don't know the breakdown of the $56 billion. So presumably, like in his initial structure of that, the way he was incentivized was on certain milestones being hit. Exactly. So I'm assuming that he has to achieve XYZ over a period of years on the lock-in to get that amount of money, just to be clear.

Yeah, there were 10 milestones and they were ridiculous, right? When the package was agreed, Tesla's market capitalization was well under $100 billion. And one of the milestones was, it was a staggered release of share milestone for market cap increase, and it topped out at $650 billion, which obviously Tesla blew through a couple of years ago. So to one extent everyone's getting rich, so why shouldn't Elon get an extra bit of rich? But on the other side, it's like, well, Elon owns 15% of the company, so he's benefiting from the share price rise. So it's all pretty, I mean, if you're thinking about income inequality and distribution of wealth and things like that, this is a pretty nasty story. But if you're thinking From a simple corporate governance perspective, well, the shareholders agreed, the board agreed, he hit the targets, pay up. I'll leave an empty space in the podcast for you all at home to have a think about that.

All right. Well, look, let's move on then and let's talk about, yeah, there's quite a few headlines about pressure mounting, particularly probably even interns rolling up their sleeves at this point, getting stuck in, but certainly new hires where you've gone through this period of a couple of years where M&A activity dried up and now it's kind of full on. And obviously as a bank, you incentivize to get back to business as quickly as possible, but you also are presumably very cost conscious about your number of hires that you make and the kind of value per head of employees. So how does this all kind of transpire then? You almost— the company's incentivized by keeping costs down, but output and fee high, that's something's got to give, right?

Yeah, it's a really problematic environment for a lot of junior analysts at the moment. And just a shout out, by the way, to the interns that are coming in, especially in IBD. I know that this is going to be a busy 10 weeks. I was I was at Bank of America's internship launch yesterday. Shout out to Marilyn, who never listened to a podcast before our podcast, but loves it. Now tells everyone about it. So we need more Marilyns in the world. Come on, Marilyn. Come on, Marilyn. I hope your 10 weeks— look, I hope you're on the desk and you're telling everyone, senior and junior, come on, get on board with this podcast. But anyway, so I just wanted to give interns and obviously new joiners to banks a little bit of a view on what the vibe is in the office. We'll get into a bit of pay as well later on, but the couple of articles that I saw, one from the FT, pressure mounts on senior bankers as discontent in junior ranks simmers. So this is the FT picking up on message boards from Reddit and Wall Street Oasis complaints from junior analysts, right? It's just saying, look, We've heard this story before. The hours are too long. We're not getting enough sleep. This is too intense. We're being worked to the bone. Now everyone knows, everyone should know that if they go into a role in IBD, especially M&A, leveraged finance, et cetera, you are going to get worked extremely hard. Now the hope maybe misplaced hope a few years ago was that artificial intelligence and productivity tools and a little bit more of a rationalizing and gaining perspective over work and life and remote work and things like that might have shifted the dial more in favor of work-life balance and of 60-hour weeks instead of 100-hour weeks. But this doesn't seem to have transpired. And there's a couple of forces that are contributing to this. Now, firstly, it's a really annoying environment from a flow perspective because when you're in a deal, and obviously deal volume and values have picked up significantly. I was speaking to someone who had just come out of an industrial placement in leveraged finance. Usually when you're on industrial placement, you do pretty odd jobs, right? You're not working on too many deals, but he said he was just execution for the whole year. So you are in, when the going's good, it's extremely busy. And that's quite fun. You feel like you're doing good work leading to outcomes, and you can see how you are contributing to the fee of that, the fee target of that team. Now on the flip side, when the going's bad, which it has been for a couple of years, the rainmakers, so everybody in the kind of managing director, seat or the partner seat, whatever the structure is, the rainmakers are stressing out that they need to bring in business. So they go into pitch mode and they go into overdrive panic pitch mode, thinking, gosh, when's the next mandate going to come? So you've got this, you've got this difficulty where even in lean times, it's still almost frenetically busy. And it seems like, well, I mean, who knows? I think I'd rather be working on execution than pitches. It seems like quite a lot of these organizations are still relatively top-heavy, which means there's quite a few rainmakers relative to junior analysts, which means there's quite a few stressed-out individuals trying to make their name within an organization. Trying to pitch. And again, where do the pitch decks fall? Where do the Excel models fall? Where do the company comparable datasets fall? Well, that clearly still falls on the analyst. And by the way, this is not the first time we have probably had this conversation. And I remember, I don't know if you remember that, the famous Goldman Sachs presentation of 3 years ago, which actually did lead to some change. I was reading some of the comments from Goldman Sachs employees saying, you know, I'm working 120 hours a week. I don't even know how someone could do that. I haven't had a shower in a week. I don't necessarily agree with that because there are showers in the Goldman Sachs offices. So maybe that's a little bit of an exaggeration. But that, you know, some things did change after that. There were the concept of protected weekends where one weekend in four, you wouldn't be theoretically, you wouldn't be eligible to work. I think those have, and those have kind of stopped a little bit. Uh, remote working, obviously banks are now making sure that employees are back in, especially junior employees. So we're kind of back to where we were. And by the way, it is at the moment what it is. We're not saying that it's right. We're just stating that this is, this is the work environment. That you will be faced with when you go into an internship. It's a competitive environment. There's lots of big companies that have built internal corporate finance teams. There's lots more, the rise of the elite boutique. So there's loads more competition. Everyone's fighting for deals and everyone's working extremely hard. Now, I spoke to a very senior banker a couple of days ago who's 30 years in IBD, and he still says, look, 3 years, M&A, bulge bracket, big bank. Your options are almost limitless. Not necessarily totally, and you can become a doctor, but you've got a lot of options. So it really is that trade-off. Don't go into your first year in M&A thinking, all right, let me try and carve out a decent amount of work-life balance. Almost think it as a down payment for future job opportunities and future career opportunities. And if you really don't think that you would like working 70 hours a week plus, then maybe there's different, well, there's definitely different parts of finance that are for you. Trying not to sugarcoat this.

Yeah, I know you've lived and breathed this. So you as a graduate joined a big bank, you went through the program, you worked in these roles. Looking back then retrospectively, it seems quite clear what you're saying. You should just manage your expectations and know what you're signing up for. And yet the churn rate is particularly high in these M&A type roles. So what is it that's misplaced at the moment? Why do so many students land at the desk and 50% of them don't see out the 3 years or can't commit to the 3 years?

Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. Maybe firstly, there might be a slight disconnect between the glossy brochures and the nice words of the recruitment team saying this is the best place to work and you're going to be loved and cherished and nurtured and things like that. And then you get into a busy desk and some of that might fall out the window. Although I think you should, most junior analysts should have done their due diligence. I think there's just a hope for a lot of analysts that they can hack it. And then when hope hits reality, some of them can't, and that's totally, totally fine. This is not, you're not a failure if you can't work 90 hours a week. And I used to get so frustrated. I think my biggest difficulty was certainly in the pitch zone when I was working on a Saturday evening, working on the minutiae of a pitch deck, and I just thought, if the CFO of this company's going to read it, they probably read 5 of these before, and they're not going to do any deals anyway because they haven't done a deal for 10 years. Yeah. And you're thinking, why? And as soon as that little headworm gets in, you start questioning things. That's when you start going, why am I working it? 1 o'clock in the morning on a Sunday morning? Why am I knackered in the office on a Monday morning? When you're working on a deal, the why is quite obvious. Get the deal done. Add it as a bit of a tombstone to your, to your own CV. But when you're just pitching day and night, that becomes difficult. And then you have to start thinking, all right, 3 years, 3 years, then I can assess my opportunities, my possibility, even 2 years. And I can start thinking about, is it private equity? Is it going into the lending side? Is it going in-house, etc.? But yeah, do not feel like a failure if the idea of 80 hours a week intimidates you.

Is, is there any way to identify— so I know banks would have different cultures, and generally there's a leaderboard, so the intensity might be different in certain— certainly US to European cultures. What about MD specifics? You mentioned it earlier there, you were saying the MDs kind of got to hit revenue fee targets. But is there a possible way to deliver on that and manage differently, or is it all fairly similar in terms of the culture top down?

Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question. And the problem that you have in your early careers when you are probably working at your hardest, you're not responsible for bringing in revenue. So that element of stress isn't there. The problem is you, you're told what to do, you're told what team to work on. The chance of you being able to effectively navigate towards the nicest managing director within a couple of years probably isn't going to happen. And I think that this, this lands to a wider problem across the corporate world. Big revenue producers are horrible managers. So if you are brilliant at landing a deal, and driving through the execution of an acquisition, it's unlikely that you're going to have, in the words of a retired banker, empathy listening skills. A lot of the folks don't have it, right? So it's that horrible, you get good enough at something, then you get promoted to manager and you're a rubbish manager, and that trickles down into pretty horrible working environments. So it's a systemic institutionalized problem across all elements of banks. And they remember when they were young and they were getting beasted on deals in the '90s and the '00s, and they'll probably want to do a bit of beasting themselves, whether they're being explicit about it or not.

I just wondered, does it, would it exist? I always think of a military format and let's say you have a similar situation. The people at the top, let's call it the Colonel. And then you've got the troops, the ground troops, the infantry at the bottom. But in the middle, you have like the captains, and the captains can kind of take that hardness from the top and direction objective, but somewhat then manage those troops accordingly. Is there any kind of translation of that into that structure?

So the, the, the army analogy is decent, but there's a couple of variables. So in an army, your goal is to win the battle, right? And you are collegiate in the way that you try to win the battle. Yes, your divi— you might want to say that your division was more important in winning that particular battle and your strategy was a little bit better, but at the end of the day, you're all successful if you win battle. Whereas in an M&A team or an IBD, you've got the overall head of M&A or the overall head of investment banking, global banking. But then underneath you've got these fiefdoms where they are extremely competitive with each other. They are working towards their own bonus pots. Different banks have different ways of distributing bonuses, but it'll be a combination of your own desk's bonus, plus the firm's profitability. So it's almost like there's a bunch of renegade captains that pretend that they're working in support of the battle, but are actually going off and fighting their own little wars and plundering the spoils of battle to take the analogy even further.

Well, which has happened on numerous occasions in history as well as in corporate.

Maybe it is closer than I thought. Yeah.

Okay. Well, let's talk about who's hiring, who's firing, and maybe to kick it off, a The question I have on this is, who's hiring? You do, you get these kind of updates in some various different newsletters, and you see like an MD's moved from here to there. Would they often take you with them if you were an analyst or associate, or do you have no say?

Not immediately. It's, uh, I think there are, I mean, it depends, but there are often, um, non-solicitation agreements when you go and join a different bank, both from a client perspective and from an employee perspective. But if I was an MD and I had a couple of crack analysts in my team, I'd say, hey, just ride it out for a year. My non-solicitation is 12 months, so I'll come calling in a year's time. I haven't forgotten about you. But anyway, I think this is the story. The story is that Deutsche Bank, which we don't talk about that much on the podcast, Deutsche Bank is counting on its investment bank hiring spree to pay off. So this is the story that Deutsche Bank has hired over 100 IB bankers, investment bank bankers, in the last 18 months, powering revenues and actually cutting its reliance on bond trading, which if I look at the league tables is still about 50% of its overall IBD revenue. What's interesting about this move is that 75 of these bankers are at MD level, i.e., rainmaker level, many of which are from Credit Suisse. So if you think about what, if we're talking about extremes of working conditions, if I'm working as an analyst at Deutsche Bank and suddenly I've had this influx of people that A, need to make money, B, need to prove themselves, and C, are possibly still licking their wounds from Credit Suisse debacle. This is going to be a real hothouse. This is going to be a hard place to work. And they're really trying to diversify away and make a really big statement within M&A. Now on the plus side, from a strategic perspective, M&A deal flow has picked up. So there is possibly at this moment in time enough food to go around, everyone's eating from an MD perspective. But when the going gets slightly less good, then you're going to have a very, what seems like a very top-heavy organization, really pitching to try and get a bunch of deals that don't really exist.

Where does Deutsche sit on the rankings at the moment then? What are their, what are they gunning for with this hiring spree?

Yeah, so year to date, just from the FT league tables, it's 6th overall in IBD, which is pretty good, right? You know, we don't often think about them as a top 5 global investment bank. You know, this is— they're pushing on the door, but they're not in the top 10 for M&A or ECM. It's all about bonds. That's the thing that they're— I think it's only 14% of their IBD revenue comes from M&A, I think 6% from equity capital markets. So it's really trying to build up those franchises to decrease their reliance on bond trading. A couple of other things that are quite interesting about this story is that Deutsche Bank has a policy of cutting 4% of its lowest performing bankers every year.

And is that a common practice across all firms on the street?

I don't know if it is. People might know more than me. I know in certain hedge funds, you definitely have this up or out policy. It's if you're not in the top 80%, we just kill you. But from an IBD perspective, maybe it's not as explicit as, all right, the bottom 4%, we just get rid of. But there is definitely a, you know, the worst performers are going to get pushed aside or subtly given a package. So it feels like Deutsche Bank is a bit of a cutthroat environment and adding these 75 MDs, this is, yeah, this is going to get interesting. Whether that trickles down, by the way, from a career strategic perspective, whether that trickles down into, all right, we've got 75 new MDs. The next thing is we need 500 new analysts. And they ramp up their campus recruitment, then we'll see. I think they're trying to take a little bit of the Credit Suisse space. Obviously UBS has taken quite a lot of that, but yeah, they're hiring, which as an analyst is a good thing. Can only be a good thing. Yeah.

I always think the word cutthroat is open to interpretation of two ways. One being you say the word cutthroat and people think immediately negative. It's going to be bad, bad culture, bad things. I think you've also got to think on the other side, which is if it's cutthroat, well, if you're the best, you're going to excel and you're going to be there. And so, you know, I'd want people listening, you know, it really depends on you as an individual about how when you hear all these explanations, how do you feel about it? Is it opportunity or is it overwhelming, I guess? And, you know, there's no right or wrong. You see it one way or the other, but it's not necessarily bad. So what I'm saying—

no, it's, it's, it's not necessarily bad. And I've been in working environments where you're just looking at people and going, why are they still there? Like, this is, this is bringing down the rest of the team, and it's actually dragging down on my ability to perform. So in some instances, you're like, all right, okay, if the bottom 10% go every year, well, they're probably not in the right job. It's not necessarily that they're awful. This is not a, this is not a personal attack. It's just, they're probably not in the right job and maybe they would thrive somewhere else. So yeah, yeah, cutthroat does have bad connotations, but if you're not at the bottom of the pack, it actually feels like, all right, we're aspiring to a culture of excellence and achievement, and I want to be part of this.

Yeah. All right. Well, look, let's talk about the two other areas then. So we talked about hiring, let's talk about firing, and then also let's talk about probably the key question that a lot of young people will want to know is how much do juniors get paid? So maybe firing first and then pay.

Yeah, we'll do very, very, very quickly on firing. I only brought this up because it's a fun article. Wells Fargo fires a dozen people for a simulation of keyboard activity. Now I don't know about you, but back in the COVID 2020 days, there was a lot of, I'm not going to say I did it myself, but there are a lot of memes and hacks about ways that you can use a fan to move your mouse around. So it looks like you're working when you're actually not. This actually happened in Wells Fargo. So in the firm's wealth and investment management unit, 12 staffers were discharged after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity, creating the impression of active work. So they used what's called mouse movers or mouse jigglers. I'm not promoting any of these, but you can get it on Amazon for less than £20. Mouse jigglers. Um, and, and I think they got away with it for quite a long time, but this just plays into a larger story, which is banks are trying to get their bankers back to work physically more often. Now you can rely upon, again, you can rely upon the 80 to 90% of motivated, diligent, good employees being able to manage working from home effectively. Anyone that's watching on YouTube can see that I'm working from home at the moment, but that means that there's 10 to 15% that are really trying to find any opportunity and any excuse not to work. And I think the US, I think there was a Gartner poll that came out that said it's responsible, or a loss of productivity from remote working is responsible for over a trillion dollars of lost productivity in the US last year. Now that seems, that seems pretty high, but it's still a problem. So this is why you're getting back into work every day. And by the way, If you're a student and you're feeling resentful that you have to go into work 5 days a week, well, one, that's what it always used to be. And two, as a junior, that's where you should be, 100%. Especially if you're working really hard, you want to be in there at the coalface with a bunch of other people taking dinner and chatting about your hard day's work and things like that. So Don't feel like, oh gosh, I can't use my mouse jiggler anymore. Go into work and work 5 days a week.

Yeah. I sometimes think that there's an undercurrent of corporate narrative influencing the media when it comes to these productivity numbers, because I can only speak for myself, but I think productivity went through the roof when everyone went online. And I know that I would be clocking on earlier work. My screens would be on permanently. I'd be eating at my— like, I, I would say it almost started to become quite toxic in a way where there was a non-disconnect between your actual life and your work life, kind of emerged and blended into one. And actually, I was— I found that I was working much more, productivity was up, but maybe not in a healthy way.

Well, look, you're, you're not one of the 4%, and you're going to get kept on next year.

I thought I'd publicly declare it, but to just call, you know, call the, an even way. When I was at university, I worked at a call center. I used to sell during my uni days AXA PPP healthcare insurance. I'd be one of these awful guys that call up and go, Mr. Barnett, how are you today? How's your back? Would you like some AXA PPP healthcare insurance? And basically what we used to do, there was a shortcut on the keyboard. So we're all in a call center, about 100 of us. You'd close a few people, you'd hit your kind of target for the day, but you'd have to sit there for hours. So you do the little shortcut and basically your call system would get jammed. So you used to just finish a call and literally in your headset go, another call, and you're like, it's relentless. But you could jam the system. And I remember, yeah, we were about 20 of us got lynched for that back in 2002 or whatever it was.

So, uh, I got, I got, I got fired from a call center in 2008 for watching the Olympics. So, so there you go. We've got better since then.

Yes.

How much are juniors getting paid? That's the question. I'm going to give you a quiz. So, all right. I'm going to give you M&A, PCM, ECM, and private equity. I'm going to ask you to order. This is just average total compensation. So this is across analysts, associates, and directors as well. The average annual compensation, rank them from 1 most compensated. So PCM, ECM, private equity, and M&A down to the least well compensated.

So private equity, what, with grad positions we're saying?

If you weigh them up. No, so we're actually just saying average comp across the industry. This is the eFinancial Careers 2024 Compensation Report. We'll put it in the— Okay.

I'm going to go private equity 1. M&A 2, uh, ECM— no, DCM 3. Nah, well, is volume— volume or prestige? I'm gonna go ECM 3, DCM 4.

You're wrong, not massively. So this is really interesting. So M&A 1, $378,000 average compensation. This is salary plus bonus across all non-partner level employees. DCM2, 342,000. ECM3, 311,000. Private Equity 4, 263,000. Now there's a massive, massive asterisk hanging over that number because why do I, why would I work in private equity? Because I want percentage of the carry of the fund that I'm working on. You do not get rich in private equity through your base salary. You get wealthy by having access to the upside from the funds. So this salary number of $263K, again, no one's going to go hungry on $263K a year, but it's all about the upside, which is not baked into these numbers. So don't get too concerned for the PE cohort just yet. Next question. All right. Longest working hours, same 4 divisions, longest working hours, average weekly working hours.

The opposite of what I just said, probably. So PE is probably the least hours. So M&A most hours, just given the— we talked about this on the previous episode recently about the volume of debt deals. So I'm going to assume that that second there's fewer deals, but big when they come. So, but probably little spurts of our concentration coming in. So yeah, M&A, DCM, ECM, PE.

Oh, very close. M&A top, 67 hours average working week. This is across all grades of employee. So just think about that. Second, ECM, 64. Third, debt capital markets, 58, and then fourth, private equity, 47. Now again, that feels quite low to me, and a lot of my colleagues in junior, more junior positions, private equity certainly don't work 47 hours a week, especially when there's a deal on. So just again, star that private equity number a little bit. Third question. What about the best paid IBD organizations, IBD teams. So I'm going to give you 5 banks and you're going to list them 1 to 5 in terms of average pay across all employees. So HSBC, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley. Hmm.

Interesting. I would say, so 2 names that jumped out there were Deutsche and HSBC for the reasons of you want to incentivize people, because I think the others have some sort of premium on this invisible prestige factor. So I'm going to say Goldman's is probably not near the top, it's probably near the bottom, because people work there for the name. So I'm going to put GS, I'm going to put GS at the bottom. Um, I guess then there's, you've got So you said JP, right? So JP, I think JP probably has a lot of upside from the fact that, again, not so much— it's prestige in a different way. I think they're just such a dominant force in the industry. I think a lot of people want to work because they work on all the deals, the biggest deals, so not necessarily the biggest pay. So maybe GS and JP are like 5th and 4th. Then just following through on my idea about HSBC and Deutsche, they're going to be, they're going to be top. Who else is there? Morgan Stanley, you said?

Yeah, Morgan Stanley.

So I guess for the reasons I just said, I think prestige still, for right or wrong reasons, Goldman's is still seen number one and therefore JP's the biggest. MS is in this middle spot where they've got to be competitive. I would say. So I'm gonna put Deutsche 1, MS 2, HSBC 3, JP 4, GS 5.

You know what? I really like your logic and your logic is not wrong for 2 of those organizations. So at the bottom is Morgan Stanley with an average of $266K. In 4th is JP Morgan with an average of $299K. So I think your logic about, all right, this is a great place to work. This is a franchise, big franchise, great name to have on the CV, lots of deal flow. We'll make it up in other, in other ways. I think you're right about those two. Now in third place, HSBC, and in second place, Deutsche Bank. So I think you're right about those two having to pay a little bit more in order to get the best talent, but still way out in front with an average salary of $398,000, Goldman Sachs. So they still do pay the most. And I think that's one of their calling cards. We pay the most, we get the best. So there you go again. Goldman Sachs number 1, Deutsche Bank 2, HSBC 3, Morgan Stanley 5th, and JP Morgan 4th.

Just, just with talking with pay, because again, I know that you can talk from experience and you around a peer group at the same time, um, how do you reconcile like the level of pay you get when you come out of uni and you're earning, I think, the base average pay in sterling is, say, £65,000, which is double the UK national average salary. And that's even without the bonus in year one, straight out of uni. And so how do you— because I know when you're new to earning that kind of capacity of money, I think people could go one of two ways. So how do, how do you manage that environment amongst your peers when You know, you've got other friends where this is just like ludicrous numbers you're already talking in your first year, never mind your future career.

Yeah, I think, I think the best way to do it is to acknowledge that you are a bit of a sucker for working such long hours. So yes, you're getting paid more, but your pay per hour is still pretty low. So your friends that can really graduating on a, on a, on a normal graduate salary of you know, 30 grand, 40 grand, whatever that number might be, still quite reasonable. Obviously you don't flaunt that you're earning a lot more, but they'll probably go, well, what is this guy doing? What? Yes, he earns a bunch of money, but he can never spend it because he's always in the office. So they're taking a decent moral high ground and enjoying their life a little bit more. And you are keeping quiet about the fact that yeah, you're earning a lot more money, but you're really getting work for it. This is not money for nothing. So I think there's that quite nice joviality between the two sets in terms of friendship groups and things like that. It works out.

Okay. Well, look, any final thoughts before we wrap up?

My only final thought is that we should all be lawyers. So I'm going to finish with a final article. Insane pay rises for junior London lawyers raise concerns over culture. As you said, I'm sure you saw these numbers. So £180K a year, sterling, starting salary for newly qualified lawyers. Wow. Some of the magic circle firms. It, that, I mean, you know, to your point earlier on about £60K, £70K starting salary, imagine being hit with a £180K starting salary. I would not know what to do with it as a 21-year-old. Actually, I would know what to do with it and it probably would be to waste it all. But, uh, but, uh, but anyway, and by the way, this, links back to banking because deals are going up, deal volumes going up. Lawyers are very heavily involved, more so actually than bankers when the execution phase really kicks off. So, you know what, they think these, these organizations obviously think that £180K is worth it for junior talent. But whenever, just again, just as a bit of career advice, whenever you're thinking I'm getting paid £180,000, especially in an organization where you're billing your time. Just think about the fact that the organization needs to make probably a 100% margin on your business, on your work. So you're probably having to bill £360,000 worth of time in order to be a worthy employee. And then you have to think about the hours that equates to. So yeah, again, be careful.

Okay, and, and perhaps in closing, you having been a banker, an entrepreneur, working corporate finance, you, you've worn different hats. You've been a teacher. Philosophically, is there anything now when you encounter— because I know you do a lot of work as well, even from high school age students through to university and, and beyond— your relationship with money and the earning of money and things like that Where does that sit with you now, now having had the 40-odd years, or not quite 40 years of life under your belt? 38, is that right?

37. Yeah. You're close. I mean, this is the topic for many, many future podcasts, and it's a really interesting one. I think if you're in this business, if you're in this industry, you naturally think about money all the time. And it's a nice signpost, a nice representation of the work that you do. There are obviously so many different facets to fulfillment within a life. And just because you are working in investment bank and working 80, 90 hours a week doesn't mean that you're working less. You're working harder than people that are working less hours. So I found the work that I was doing as an entrepreneur, probably worked 50 hours a week, 60 hours a week, but the intensity was unbelievable. And then when you work as a teacher, the amount of energy it takes to teach is unbelievable. So a 50-hour week working in a school easily sapped up as much energy as a 90-hour week working in a bank. So if you're, if you, again, if you've got, if you've got friends and you're like, well, this guy's barely working, he's just a teacher, he's only working 5 days a week, just take a step back and go, They've got to deal with hundreds of humans in a room every single day. You have to deal with a computer screen. It's a very, very different kettle of fish. And obviously the rewards are more human than they are monetary because you're dealing with humans, not money. So again, so many more comments on that, but yeah, just, just remember that there are different frequencies and intensities of work.

Yeah. Cool. All right. Thank you, Stephen, as always. And yeah, look forward to our next conversation next week. Thanks very much.

Cheers, Ant.