I decided to thoroughly revise my CV. The problem is that I’ve worked on several M&A deals which for some reason were unsuccessful. What is the best way to indicated that these deals have failed ?
Don’t include them.
Why wouldn’t you just list all the deals without noting which ones succeeded or failed? That’s a good thing to talk about at interviews. “Yeah, this one failed because the stock market crashed and this one failed because the Justice Department went after it and this one failed in due diligence when it turned out that the corporate headquarters was built on an ancient Indian burial ground”
What was the reason they were not successful and what did you learn from them? If you screwed up its going to be a hard sell.
Well, I thought of that but that has been a lot of modeling, presentations. Most of the deals were a sizable. Otherwise, I’m left with the small ones which do not seem attractive to me. Some failed in final negotiations, others for political reasons, or for selecting different party to transact. “Why wouldn’t you just list all the deals without noting which ones succeeded or failed? That’s a good thing to talk about at interviews” I think the is a very good idea and yet I am a bit hesitant. This may make a bad impression or considered as lying or something…
I’m not an expert on this but it doesn’t seem to be lying to me. Isn’t M&A deals something like trading? Win some, lose some but try to make your winners more frequent and bigger than your losers?
JoeyDVivre Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I’m not an expert on this but it doesn’t seem to > be lying to me. Isn’t M&A deals something like > trading? Win some, lose some but try to make your > winners more frequent and bigger than your losers? Yes you are definitely right on this. The deal can die at any juncture for a multitude of reasons so I don’t think it is lying. But from what I have seen thus far, out of 10 projects going on within the company at any one time, possibly 5 are ongoing, 1 is completed, 4 are either dead/on hold. By half-year, we had something in the order of 100ish projects, of which about 20-30 of them are mandated, and 5 of them completed. I cannot say for sure if what went on in my firm can be generalized though 2x2, was wondering why do you think that small ones are not attractive? I’d say put those successful ones on the CV and if you get the interview you’d probably be forced somehow to talk about a deal that did not go through and you could talk about the reasons/lessons learnt etc? If you are going to include everything wouldn’t your CV span a few pages?
The best plays in poker are often the hands you passed. Often true in the real world too.
Agreed, sometimes deals SHOULD die. “Boy, my boss wanted to push XYZ deal through, but I found out ABC during my due diligence which would have made it a disaster for pretty much everyone except this one other guy. My boss might have taken a big hit on his bonus if I hadn’t done some good research for him.” Now if the deal went through because you fell asleep while meeting a critical deadline… well, you might want to de-emphasize that one. 
maybe you’re just a terrible banker. /kidding.
I think that you have to take the perspective of it being relatively easy to look smart in a raging bull market, for; f/x, equities, M&A, IPO, LBO, whatever and that the fact that you didn;t close a lot isn’t necessarily a reflection of your work or ideas as being flawed. I haven’t closed anything in 6 months myself…but not a single client has LEFT me. In this market, I’m pretty pleased. Willy