In investment banking, credibility is everything. If you’ve developed a reputation for successfully executing deals, having deep industry knowledge and being a trustworthy partner, your investment banking expertise might be highly sought after.
While it’s great to have people calling you with opportunities, it’s impossible to say yes to every deal. You have clear parameters of what deals you can work on and which ones you have to decline.
Sometimes you have to say no because the fee is simply too small to make a deal financially feasible. Sometimes a deal’s outcome is uncertain enough that it’s too risky to take on. Sometimes a deal is likely to require a disproportionate amount of time, making it an inefficient allocation of staff resources.
As an investment banker, you get shown deals because you’re a potential source of help. Once you determine that a deal isn’t a good match, you essentially have two options:
- Politely decline and end the conversation.
- Politely decline and say you can’t help, but you know somebody who can.
At Oaklyn Consulting, our specialty is being that somebody. We’re here to handle the deals that are too small, too uncertain and too complex to be worth the effort for other investment bankers.
A resource, not a competitor
We don’t view ourselves as a competitor to other firms. What we are is a resource. In the world of investment banking, our firm’s hyper-specific focus is relatively rare.
- We work solely with small- and medium-sized businesses on deals with values lower than $50 million — often much lower. (We do not have a minimum deal size.)
- We specialize in complex or uncertain mergers, acquisitions, capital raises and recapitalizations, including organizations with complicated governance or stakeholder management.
- We work in deal situations in which social issues, such as board-CEO tensions or family disagreements, can be more significant than financial issues.
- Acting more as a consultant than a traditional investment banker, we help clients carefully examine their options, decide on the best one, and pursue it, even if the outcome doesn’t involve a deal closing at all.
- We work on a time-based billing model instead of collecting a success fee, allowing our perspective to be fully independent of the outcome.
How Oaklyn Consulting’s model benefits partners
Our model serves a largely unmet need in the market, allowing other investment bankers to stay focused on high-value deals. Here are some other benefits of working with us:
- We help bankers be viewed as problem-solvers in all transactional situations, helping to put more leads in the top of their sales funnels. Anything they can’t handle themselves can be referred to us, allowing them to be more responsive to colleagues or referral partners.
- By referring leads to us, bankers can monetize more of what goes through their sales funnel. Because we share a portion of our fee, they can still make money on a deal even if they would never have entered into the engagement.
- We share any deal materials with our referral partners, giving them opportunities to call investors that they otherwise wouldn’t have had.
- If a deal comes to us organically and is out of our zone, we’re glad to return the favor to our referral partners and refer opportunities back up to them.
From one firm to another
As a fellow financial advisory firm, we understand the pain and frustration that our colleagues experience when they’re unable to say yes to a referral source. We help you maintain the strength of your valued relationships, ensuring that your reputation for responsiveness remains intact and you continue to stay top of mind for future opportunities.
If you need to quickly and politely move on from a deal, while still providing something of value to a referral source, look to Oaklyn Consulting as your trusted partner for structuring, executing and negotiating your smallest, most uncertain and most complex financial transactions.
