A Day in the Life: Researcher

7:00 AM: I get on the train and head into the city with a sheaf of research notes from the night before.

8:00 AM: Arrive at work. If it’s Monday, I prepare for the weekly meeting. The Monday meeting tends to last most of the day. Everyone talks about everything the company’s doing, the state of every investment or potential target. And everyone chips in. People come in and out as needed, but for the executive committee, it’s a 9-to-5 thing. Since it’s not Monday, I gather the latest research from Wall Street on potential takeover targets.

9:00 AM: Present updates, if needed, to the executive committee on previously discussed targets.  This is generally done through e-mail.

9:30 AM: I hit the phones. There’s always more to find out beyond what you read in the papers, on the Internet, or in the research notes. I’ll call clients, suppliers, anybody that the target deals with to see how they do things and what their problems might be.

11:00 AM: I participate in a previously scheduled interview with a representative of a target company. This is purely informational, and both our guys and their guys know we’re doing it. We’re just saying we want a stake, they’re saying they don’t want to sell, but that’s how the dance begins. So we meet and get a sense of each other at a lower level before we hand it off to the managing directors and the C-level executives.

12:00 PM: Lunch, target company rep in tow.

1:30 PM: Back in the office, writing up the report on the meeting along with potential follow-up questions and research.

2:00 PM: More phone work and computer research.

3:30 PM: Meeting with the deal team on a current negotiation. They seem to think they’re overpaying, and they want us to take a look at a piece of the target’s business again. Turns out we hadn’t revisited the topic in a few months, and it was easy to find out what was going on. Probably saved a few million there.

5:00 PM: Conference call with portfolio company managers about the latest in supply chain research.

6:00 PM: Order dinner while going over the day’s activity on portfolio and target companies.  Write up developments for directors as needed.

8:00 PM: Home.