"Search funds are the backdoor into banking jobs that no one tells you about"

I'm one of the lucky ones. I'm currently studying a Masters in Finance and when I graduate next year, I will start working in M&A for one of the top banks on Wall Street. I already have a job lined up. 

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Getting to this stage hasn't been easy. I got into this highly competitive Masters in Finance course because I already had a lot of work experience, much of which I achieved by working for free during my undergraduate course. If you want to get into banking you need excellent academics, but you also need experience. You can't simply graduate and expect to get a job.

I didn't go down the standard internship route. Instead, I spent my time at university working for a search fund. 

What's a search fund? Stanford Business School defines it as a fund in which an entrepreneur is supported by investors to grow a privately held company. Search funds are typically small - they might have $500k, they might have $20m. Their purpose is to find companies to acquire, to improve them, and to dispose of them again. They are like private equity fund, just smaller. They also have a lot of valuation and M&A work to do. This makes them a perfect place to gain experience.

I came across the search fund I worked for by chance. I sent thousands of application emails to employers across finance, and someone mentioned the guy who was running the fund. He was sector agnostic and invested in everything from healthcare to industrials. He was looking for help, but he couldn't pay. I agreed to work for nothing. 

I spent the next year doing my degree and working 40-hour weeks for the entrepreneur. I was modelling a lot of companies with between $50m-$100m in revenues. Another intern and I spent our time looking for companies to acquire and chatting about what makes a target company attractive. It was a huge learning experience.

By working at the search fund alongside my degree, I was also able to demonstrate that I am truly passionate about financial services. I love finance and I have no objection to working long hours. The people who don't feel this way are filtered out of the application process. Too many people are only in it for the money, but I worked for free.

I see a lot of people paying a lot of money to study masters courses, but they don't have any work experience. If you don't have experience, then trust me - you're wasting your time. Search funds are the perfect way to gain this experience and a fast track to real life financial modelling practice. They're also a lot less competitive than banking internships.

If I hadn't found the search fund, I wouldn't be where I am now. They're the best kept secret for starting a career in finance. 

Tristan Peters is a pseudonym

Photo by Efe Kurnaz on Unsplash

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