Notes from a live deal

Context

In summer 2025 I was an M&A and restructuring summer analyst at Piermont, a boutique investment bank. The role came from someone I had first cold-emailed as a freshman and kept in touch with over the following year.

The problem

At GreensLedge I had learned how products are built. At Piermont I was on a live deal: a company being sold. A sale has many moving parts, a buyer and seller, lawyers, accountants, a deal team, and a clock. Buyers ask hundreds of questions in due diligence,¹1 Due diligence is the buyer’s investigation of the business before agreeing to the deal: financials, contracts, operations, risks. and every unanswered one slows the process down.

What I did

• Supported the deal through to closing. I helped the team build the valuation work for a sell-side M&A deal, including discounted cash flow analysis and trading comparables, and stayed on it until it closed.
• Made the research reusable. Pitch preparation kept starting from scratch. I built more than five market reports the team could reuse, which cut pitch preparation time by about a fifth.
• Kept the questions moving. During the live deal I organized and tracked more than 50 due diligence requests: who had asked what, who owed the answer, and what was still open. Buyers got their answers about 10% faster.

What I learned

The most valuable work on a live deal wasn’t the most sophisticated. It was keeping track of what everyone was waiting for. A model can be perfect and the deal still stalls because one answer sat in someone’s inbox for a week.

Finance trained me in analysis and in the discipline of executing carefully under time pressure. But by the end of that summer I noticed something else: I was most engaged by the parts of the work that touched how the business actually ran, not the transaction itself. That pull got stronger over the next year.

Footnotes

1. Due diligence is the buyer’s investigation of the business before agreeing to the deal: financials, contracts, operations, risks. ↩