Between Two Firms is an interview series accompanying Economics@Work. We ask alumni speakers the candid questions students can’t ask in person. This week’s guest is Greg Pearlman, a Managing Director and Head of the Food & Consumer Group for BMO Capital Markets, with past experience working at Morgan Stanley and Salomon Brothers/Citigroup. Greg discusses how to discover if banking is a fit for you, what is important versus irrelevant in the recruiting process, and finding a work-life balance in his industry.
Between Two Firms will be on break till the Fall 2019 semester. The schedule will be posted on this website in late August.
C: So when and how did you know you wanted to work in the banking industry?
G: That was in business school as a first-year. I was at two or three presentations every night for corporations and industry clubs, just listening and learning, and trying to figure out where I could fit in. And to me, banking made the most sense. It was where I could get access to senior decision making and a steep learning curve, which were the only two things I was interested in at that point in time.
C: You’ve mentioned that students have less and less time to discover an interest in banking. Many students feel the need to “know” their intentions before they’re even eligible to declare a major. Do you think there’s a problem with this system, and how should people determine whether that interest exists?
G: The system is flawed, but at the end of the day, you gotta have a job. I don’t think anyone wants to turn a liberal arts college into an occupational school, but it’s the job of all liberal arts educators to lay out where their students can go. How many people are going into banking, the masters programs, pre-med…what are the choices? Educate people in those options and the prep you have to do to get there. If banking is on your interest list, then sometime between when you walk into the University of Michigan and when you come back from sophomore Christmas break, you’ll need to have done a lot of work. You can’t just show up, start going to presentations in January, and then interview in April. A lot of that work is networking and reading—it’s not fancy stuff. Find the alumni. Find your fraternity brothers or your sorority sisters. Find someone’s older brother, buy them a cup of coffee, and ask “What do you do and why do you like it?” Then apply that to your own circumstances.
C: For our upperclassmen readers who are now sweating, is it too late to explore banking?
G: No, it’s not too late. If you’re a first-semester senior and you’re just figuring out that banking is interesting, let’s lay out a career path. You’re probably not going to get a job at an investment bank that anyone’s ever heard of, or an investment bank, period. But—can we end up in jobs in companies’ finance departments, strategy departments, or a boutique investment bank in your hometown? Can we get into a small commercial bank where you can do credit work? Can you get to a diligence accounting firm working in their deal diligence team, and lay out a path? It’s not too late for that. You did not miss the boat to be a banker. But yeah, you’re probably not gonna get a job at my firm or at a firm that you’ve heard of.
C: Some people discover that banking is not for them. There’s also the obvious incentive of a high salary. How do people know that they’re in the industry for the right reasons?
G: Very good question. The answer to that would be: You probably don’t. But if you’re having your third cup of coffee of the week with someone in the banking industry, and what they’re telling you sounds horrible but lucrative, you’re probably looking in the wrong place. However, if you pick up the Wall Street Journal and are jazzed by the corporate articles or by what companies are doing, that probably helps your interest level. But nobody has it imprinted on their DNA that they’re gonna love banking.
C: The common belief amongst students is that you need to get that elusive freshman internship, to get the sophomore internship that’ll lead to your junior internship, etc… What are your thoughts on this strategy?
G: So for banking, the internship that is critical is your junior year internship. We all understand as professionals, some of us as parents with college-age kids, that there aren’t a lot of high-quality freshman and sophomore summer positions. And the jobs that people put on their resumé probably came from a neighbor or an uncle, so we’re really not impressed by the freshman and sophomore internships. When we hire full-time, we’re very impressed by what you did your summer after junior year. But we hire very few full-time folks. So my advice is to go out, have fun, and try to gather an experience. Saying, “I did not work this summer, but I spent three weeks at Wall Street, talking to a bunch of people and learning all about what you do,” is a perfectly fine interview answer. Then you gotta nail the rest of those questions.
C: Are there any other myths about the recruiting process that you’d like to debunk?
G: I guess I’d say a couple things. Yes, the interview is really important, but getting the interview is almost as important. We [the recruiters] know beforehand which candidates we will probably like, because we’ve already met them a number of times. They’ve been in our Chicago office, they’ve been on the phone with three of last summer’s interns who then tell us about this great candidate. You’re halfway to an offer at that point. Now, if you lay an egg in the interview—offer’s not gonna happen. But a lot of it is already pre-determined.
C: Moving on to work-life balance, or the lack thereof—we all know the demands of your industry. How has your personal life collided or adapted to that commitment, especially after you started a family?
G: So in our business, we all make a deal with the devil on work-life balance. At my firm, and hopefully others, if you’ve got something important, you can tell me. There’s almost nothing that cannot wait, or that I cannot staff around so you can go to your sister’s wedding, or your son’s eighth-grade graduation. But I can’t do it if you don’t tell me, and that’s where some of the horror stories come from. My personal life has been hugely supported by my wife, who gets it. She’s had to step up and I’ve had to make some sacrifices, and we’re all aided by technology. I’m not afraid to take a telephone call from the sidelines of a soccer game.
C: Going off of those advances in technology as well as cultural shifts, do you think that it’s becoming easier for people in the banking industry to advocate for their personal needs?
G: It’s way easier and I’d like to think that we’ve gotten to a point where you don’t have to over-advocate. And these are all fair questions to ask firms in the recruiting process: “What is your weekend policy?” We all have weekend policies. BMO’s policy: no work from Friday at 9 to Sunday morning at 9 without group head approval. But then you gotta ask, is this actually adhered to? I know a buddy of mine at a firm, who’ll say, “Oh yeah, we have that policy. What a bunch of crap, I didn’t have it when I was a junior, I’m certainly not gonna give my team a weekend off.” But in 2019, it should be expected that there’s some amount of personal time.
C: It’s crucial to like one’s coworkers, who one will see for 80 hours a week. You’ve switched firms due to unpleasant environments; is that the only option or is the culture more flexible?
G: That’s a tough question, you’ve finally got to one tough question. That’s a dicey one. It’s a very personal decision for folks. It’s not just liking people, but also working in a culture where you get treated fairly and that you respect. If it doesn’t work, you should leave.
C: Do you have ideas on how to increase retention and incentivize people to stay longer?
G: We spend a lot of time trying to identify talent that we desperately want to stay. We try to give them more responsibility, and find advancement opportunities and exposure to seniors. This isn’t a job for everyone, and there’s some very green grass on the other side of the fence. We need to make this business as interesting as it can be, and have not gone out of our way as senior bankers to do that. Industry-wide, junior people spend a lot of time doing PowerPoint slides—doing, not thinking. We’re trying to make sure people think and do, and cut out the analysis that nobody needs.
C: On a personal note, once you retire, what are you going to do with all that free time?
G: Fair question. I won’t retire for a long time. I might stop being a banker, but I’m not wired to play golf every day. And I think it’s a great question to any perspective employer, what do your folks do when they leave? When investment bankers my age leave, they get on boards, and they still do some side advisory work, they invest, and yeah, ski and play golf more. I don’t know when that would be, but I’d like to become a better skier and golfer while I can still stand!
C: As always, what do you recommend all Michigan students do before they graduate?
G: Well, I am a football-biased person, so I would say, go to a Bowl game. I’m sure that every student goes to the home games, as it were, so go to a Bowl game. For me, rallying around the football team was always a defining moment.