What You Should Do When You’re On the Beach – Besides Working On Your Tan

I get lots of questions on what you actually do as a summer intern: Modeling? Bottling? Working with clients? Making pitch books? Fetching coffee for everyone on your team?

In an ordinary year, yes.

But these days, you’re most likely to spend your time on the beach rather than doing any of the above.

I’m borrowing this term from the management consulting lexicon, but it applies equally well to bankers and anyone else in business: simply put, on the beach time is when you don’t have any real work, deals, or clients, and you’re watching YouTube all day out of boredom.

This is a big problem if you want to leverage your experience to move elsewhere – or if you just want to get a full-time offer in the first place.

So, what should you do when you’re on the beach?

Economic Conditions?

First, note that this problem is not just limited to recessions. Even when the economy is better and deals are actually happening, you still have a lot of downtime (more so in banking than in consulting). Just look at how little I did on Thursday a few years ago.

But when there’s actual work, you usually just want to rest during your downtime – which is perfectly fine.

Got Training?

Ask your Associate or VP what to do when you have some downtime, and he’ll probably say, “Go through your training materials or look at a model and try to learn something new.”

That seems to be the conventional wisdom, and it makes sense at first: if you have some “on the beach” time, why not take the chance to improve your skills?

But there are 3 distinct problems with spending your free time primarily on self-education:

1. It’s not likely to stick unless you learn it under pressure. “Stress is the fertilizer of creativity learning.”
2. None of this self-education will make a strong impression when you write about it on your resume, and it’s not good to discuss in interviews.
3. Your time is better spent elsewhere.

Training Day… Sometimes

This is not to say that you should never learn anything on your own. It just means that you shouldn’t focus on learning advanced/obscure accounting or modeling topics, because that knowledge won’t give you much of an advantage in recruiting.

If you do want to spend some time doing it, you should focus on specific, easy-to-describe tasks that you can bring up on your resume or in interviews.

How not to do it: Spend all your free time browsing random models built by other Analysts in an attempt to find that one secret, super-ninja LBO modeling tip that will ensure that you get an offer at KKR (yeah right).

How to do it: Take 30 minutes of your free time each day and build a standalone operating model for a specific company (ideally, a former, current, or prospective client), basing it on other models at your firm.

Notice the key difference here: in method #2, you’re actually doing something and will therefore learn it more effectively (this is one reason why I designed Breaking Into Wall Street to ensure that you would actually build models yourself as you watch the videos) – and you could even list it on your resume as a quasi-”deal.”

Face Time… Right?

Another common myth is that as an intern or new full-time Analyst/Associate, you should never go home “early” (i.e. before midnight).

After all, you have to pay your dues, right? Leaving before everyone else is unacceptable, even if you have absolutely nothing to do, right?

False.

You have to be intelligent about this one – don’t think that leaving at 5 PM every day is OK, either. When you first start, there certainly is an element of face time and you shouldn’t be the first one to leave every day.

However, if it’s 10 PM and you’ve already asked all the Analysts if they have any work for you and everyone says, “No, nothing that you can help with, go home” then you should take their advice and go home. Staying until 2 AM playing Windows Solitaire will not help you at all.

At first you should scope out your group, and stay as late as everyone else –  but once you learn how things work, you can afford to be more lax.

You should always ask your team and the others in your office if you can help with anything before you take off – but if it’s 10 PM and no one has anything, just go home.

So, What to Do?

Ok, so we’ve been over what not to do when you’re on the beach: spend time learning random models and staying late for no reason.

Here’s what to do when you’re on the beach:

1. Try to find work by being proactive and jumping on projects early.
2. Meet as many different people as possible and especially overlooked people – network, network, network, network…
3. Help out with other areas outside Excel/PowerPoint/running errands (hint: recruiting is huge).

Proactivity

Even when your office is seemingly dead, chances are that deals will come in occasionally… even if you haven’t seen any lately.

“Being proactive” means being the first person to jump on news of any potential deal, client, or even an upcoming pitch (since that could lead to a client in the future): don’t just wait to get staffed on projects.

Don’t go around asking people you don’t know about potential upcoming work: it looks weird. Instead, get to know them first, and then use your relationship to extract the relevant info… if they know who you are and you check with them occasionally on new projects, they’re much more likely to go to you first.

But If There’s No Work, There’s No Work

The only problem with being proactive is that you’re unlikely to go from 12-Hour Solitaire Days to 16-Hour Modeling Days in the span of 10 weeks, or even a few months.

So the best strategy for your “on the beach” time is to get to know as many different people at your office as you can.

This is in contrast to what summer interns who are relatively “busy” should be doing: if you actually have work, focus more on getting to know your own team very well.

But if you’re spending most of your time on YouTube, you should get to know as many different people as possible, which will not only help you with getting a return offer or a recommendation, but will also improve your chances of getting work if something comes up.

Ninja Networking Tactics

For a simple but highly effective way of meeting others in your office, try to go to lunch or coffee with 1 new person each day.

If the person is relatively junior (Analyst/Associate), go ahead and set it up yourself – if it’s someone more senior, you may be better off going through his/her assistant instead to actually set up and confirm the appointment (after running it by him/her briefly).

When you get to the end of your “new people” list, start meeting with people again or at least casually chatting with them (no need for formalities).

Your purpose in each of these meetings is simple: make sure they know who you are, and come across as an actual person rather than an Excel monkey.

Yes, you are just an Excel monkey – but senior bankers like to pretend that they like all their junior people as people.

It goes back to the themes we hit on when discussing informational interviews, following up, and even investment banking interviews themselves: set yourself apart by finding what’s unique about your own background and giving them something to remember.

The Overlooked

One of the most overlooked networking strategies is to befriend the overlooked – assistants, production, graphics, the IT people, etc.

This is extremely important because your own fate often rests in their hands – when you have 5 minutes until your MD leaves for the airport and you need page 157 swapped in all 25 copies of your pitch book, you better hope you have some friends in the production department.

Bankers tend to ignore these people or disrespect them – but that’s the wrong strategy.

Yes, getting to know the MDs will help you with getting a return offer, but befriending the overlooked will also help you with getting a return offer or a recommendation – because you won’t look like an idiot when your computer breaks, when you need a rush graphics job done, or when you need pitch books ASAP.

Volunteering to Help in Other Areas

Another commonly overlooked fact: at a bank you do a lot more than Excel, PowerPoint, and research. You help out with recruiting; you sometimes create training materials for interns; and you sometimes help with “internal planning.”

I’m not talking about the back office here, either: even in pure front office roles you do this because someone has to do it, and you’re lowest on the totem pole.

Helping out with these projects is unlikely to help you directly in the short-term (no, you won’t get a higher bonus for “selling” a recruit on accepting his offer), but they can give you many indirect benefits:

1. Helping with recruiting gives you more contacts and lets you meet different people across your own firm and on campuses.
2. If you work on internal materials like training programs you’re likely to learn the concepts much better yourself. Teaching requires a significantly higher level of understanding than copying someone else’s model.
3. Even if “company-wide planning” sounds like grunt work (it is), it puts you in contact with lots of senior people – and it’s always good to be on their radar.

On the Beach Full-Time?

Much of this advice assumes you are an intern who can’t find enough work to do – which is actually quite common, even in boom times.

If you’re a full-timer and you’ve been working for months without doing anything substantial, you may need to consider “strategic alternatives” – like leaving your group, moving to another office, or leaving your company/industry completely.

For the first 2 options (moving to a different group or different office), you need a strong relationship with at least 1 person in the place you want to move to (someone to “go to bat” for you).

These moves are quite tough to pull off, but can work well assuming that you’ve done your research beforehand and you know that your new destination has real activity.

The last option – leaving your company or industry altogether – should not be taken lightly and you should only do it if you’ve realized that finance/business is not for you, there’s something else that you’d much rather be doing, and you already have a clear path to get there.

Tanning Guidelines

When you’re on the beach, the worst strategy is to sit there in your cubicle playing Solitaire or watching YouTube.

But the second worst idea is to waste time on things that won’t make a difference, like browsing random Excel files or staying until 3 AM for “face time” purposes.

Get out of your cubicle, go meet people (both above and below you), be proactive, and think of other ways you can contribute.

Or at the very least, head to the tanning salon and take advantage of your free time to get a decent tan – because you won’t be seeing a real beach anytime soon.

Tags: downtime, financial modeling, investment banking summer internship

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