You don’t have to work on Wall Street to master these skills, but it sure does accelerate the process of acquiring them.
Society seems to have a morbid fascination with certain sensationalized jobs and industries, Wall Street being one. Simply put, working on Wall Street gets a pretty bad rap — and with good reason. While I definitely have a treasure trove of banking horror stories to call upon, it wasn’t all bad — and I took a lot more than 6+ figures of savings away from my time there. In fact, some of the peculiarities that make high-pressure finance jobs so polarizing are what also make them so valuable for the employees-turned-entrepreneurs who use them wisely.
The bright side? You don’t have to spend 18 hours a day chained to a desk for 6.57 days a week (averaging here) to acquire those skills. Some can be mastered in seconds, others minutes or hours, and others may require weeks or months of practice, but they can all be learnt and practiced on your own time, outside the confines of a dungeoness investment bank (or other similarly suffocating corporate office building).
When I first started my finance job, I was 22 and fresh out of business school. Other than a couple summer internships under my belt, I really had no clue what it meant to be an adult professional. Thus, I did what so many first-time employees and entrepreneurs do: I attributed magic to the ordinary.
As I looked around at the other newbies hammering away at their keyboards, I instantly fell prey to the most damaging assumption: They must know what they’re doing.
I must have missed a course or skipped over a training. They must have more relevant experience. Or they must just be magnitudes brighter than me, waltzing into their first encounter with [pivot tables/VLookups/biotech projection models/any other seemingly scary project or task] like it’s no big deal. For the lucky ones, they had a mentor: someone above their rank — but below their boss — to show them the ropes without consequence or judgment. From those mentors, I learned the secret weapon of most every great new employee or entrepreneur: Nobody knows what they’re doing the first time.
Okay, maybe if you went to school for neuroscience and you’re about to perform your first brain surgery, this advice doesn’t quite apply. However, if life or death isn’t on the line, this advice really does transcend most industries — entrepreneurship, especially.
Case in point: Professionals executing multi-hundred-million-dollar mergers still Google. And it isn’t just the newbies either; I saw everyone from fresh college graduates to 30-year-banking veteran managing directors utilize free online resources with no shame.
The most self-defeating false belief that hinders or derails so many would-be entrepreneurs is the idea that they simply aren’t smart, experienced, or competent enough to do you-name-it. In reality, nobody knows a thing until they’ve learned it themselves. Don’t self-disqualify under the false assumption you’re missing the secret weapon; it’s probably at your fingertips, and you just don’t know you’re allowed to use it.
There are countless memes and jokes about bankers being “excel monkeys” whose greatest skills are spreadsheet manipulation; to be honest, they aren’t necessarily wrong. What is wrong is the idea that being an excel whiz won’t help you anywhere outside of the finance industry.
In contrast, I’d say one of the most underrated (but necessary) skills from Wall Street has given me a massive leg up over entrepreneurs who lack that competency. Here are three novel ways spreadsheet expertise (and basic financial competency) has given me an edge in my businesses — and could do the same for you:
Marketing:
Didn’t see that coming, did you? I’ve easily saved myself tens of thousands of dollars with the ability to slice, splice, and re-swizzle marketing data and customer analytics to improve my companies’ business decisions. This skill has helped me slash thousands of dollars (per month) in unnecessary marketing spend, significantly boost email open, click-through, and purchase rates, and construct and execute extraordinarily targeted funnels. Being a master of data keeps you — as the business owner — in control, rather than blindly trusting an outsourced marketing team.
Pipeline:
Most entrepreneurs fall into one of two camps: They’ll either spontaneously dive into new ideas when inspiration strikes or spend months ruminating on a new opportunity, researching every detail, and seeking counsel ad nauseum before making a decision. I’m able to take a simplified route: I model it out. While I don’t let spreadsheets rule my life, they definitely have aided many of my decisions. Whether I’m looking at a cost-benefit analysis, the degradation (or improvement) of my hourly rate factoring in a new project, or the strategies to lower my burn rate while increasing my sales and profit margin, financial mechanics at the tips of my fingers are nothing to sneeze at.
Everything else:
You may not know this now, but financial and spreadsheet adeptness is a skill that can carry you ranks ahead in areas from fundraising to job-hunting to consulting. Whether you’re a current, future, hopeful, or even sometimes-entrepreneur, I believe mastering basic spreadsheet skills (the kind bankers use) is well worth the 30- or 60-minute investment in learning them.
If you’re wondering how to acquire these skills without an MBA or a Wall Street job, look no further than a free tutorial on YouTube. Search “spreadsheet training for investment bankers” or “Wall Street spreadsheet shortcuts” and you’re bound to find a host of tutorials, many by bankers and for bankers — but there’s no reason entrepreneurs can’t partake, too.
Being a rather black-and-white person (and lower on the emotional spectrum than most), I assumed concrete skills and completed deliverables were the most important part of excelling in finance. It turns out that in both finance and entrepreneurship, there’s one soft skill just as important as any project or product you might deliver: Confidence.
Whether it’s customers or bosses, they can smell your fear, and the bad apples may even prey on it. By approaching a boss or a prospective customer or investor shakily, apologetically, and reeking of insecurity, you have prematurely disqualified yourself from the race by betraying your own credibility. If a boss doesn’t trust that you know what you’re doing, how can they feel good about your work product?
Customers are no different; if they sense that you feel unsure about the quality or effectiveness of your product, service, or business as a whole, they may not stick around to see if your insecurity gets proven right and warranted.
I have a good friend and aspiring entrepreneur (a side hustler hoping to turn his new second gig into his full-time career) who has a rigid belief about schedules. Thanks to his indoctrination by one highly-opinionated entrepreneur and life coach, this friend believes the only way to be successful is to get up incredibly early. I’m talking 4 am. 5 at the latest. By 6, you’ve already lost the game. That’s his philosophy.
Thus, he gets up at the crack of dawn and forces his brain and body into action mode; however, that action mode often morphs into 6 am nap time. And arguably subpar or inefficient progress that’s turned two-week projects into two-months projects. That said, if that works for him, that’s all that matters.
Personally, I’m a morning workout person, but not a morning work person. If you get me on the phone for anything business-related before 11 am, you’re among the very lucky few. There are days when I don’t start work until after 1 pm — today being one of them. Part of that is due to the fact that I’ve built businesses that don’t require me to work traditional hours or a set schedule; though part of this is also my own self-awareness that I work better later.
As an investment banking analyst, late nights were the standard; it wasn’t rare for bankers (even junior ones) to roll into the office after 10 am, but stay past 2 am. Most of the real work didn’t even begin until the late afternoon or evening in the M&A (Mergers & Acquisitions) groups. Why? That’s simply the culture and structure of that division at most banks.
On the flip side, I have friends who’ve worked and some still work in S&T (Sales and Trading). These guys follow quite the opposite schedules, getting into work often before 5:30 am and sometimes leaving by 6 pm. Did one group get paid far more than the other? Not really. There are bankers making 6 and 7 figures who don’t open their computers before 9 am, and there are traders making the same who unapologetically log off at 5 pm.
The point is simple: When it comes to hours, routines, and schedules for success, there really is no one-size-fits all magic bullet answer. Some people are more creative and productive in the morning; others prefer the vampire lifestyle. As an entrepreneur, simply following someone else’s prescribed schedule will not make you successful. In fact, forcing yourself into a schedule or lifestyle that conflicts with your natural strengths is likely to hurt you more than it helps. The key here is to know yourself and lean into how you work best, regardless of what others might model or suggest.
When most people think about finance, they don’t really think about sales or marketing; usually it’s more number-crunching that comes to mind. Nonetheless, one of the most surprising uses of Wall Street resources was actually attributed to prospective client pitches and marketing materials.
I spent hundreds — maybe (probably) thousands — of hours pouring over the tiny details of potential client pitch decks, polishing them and reviewing (and reviewing) them until they were “done”. The merciless gold standard to which live multi-billion-dollar deals and IPOs were held was no different than that of marketing pitches — and I believe that’s by design.
If investment bankers can nearly lose a job over a formatting inconsistency for a pitch for a not-yet-paying client, perhaps we entrepreneurs can take a page from their playbook and attribute a similar level of detail and care to our own marketing and sales activities. I’m not saying we have to be quite as militant in our entrepreneurial endeavors as regulated financial institutions, but treating marketing content with just as much reverence and attention as product-related activities will only behoove our business-building efforts.
If I had to use one word to describe my Wall Street experience, it could be crisis. Or drama. Or apocalypse. Or fire-drill. Funnily enough, some of those same words can be applied to many aspects of the entrepreneurial journey, as well.
So much of keeping your job on Wall Street is simply coping calmly with the high-pressure fire drills and somehow performing high-quality, efficient work amidst them, without further rattling everyone around you (especially the client). At first, I thought these apocalyptic crises were unique to me or something that would subside after I’d conquered the finance learning curve. Turns out, I was wrong: They weren’t specific to me, and they never did subside entirely.
Entrepreneurship is no different. While the crises may lessen in frequency, they’ll probably never disappear entirely. A new technical glitch will come up at just the wrong time. A customer will send an unexpected angry email, which requires immediate attention, action, and placation. The crises vary, but your job as an entrepreneur remains the same: Stay calm, level-headed, and seek out the most direct, effective solution to the problem and the affected party. Soon enough, apocalypse-survivor will be your middle name.
While I’d contend that most startup-related legal necessities can be handled fairly cheaply online, without dishing out thousands to a high-priced lawyer, you still have to know what those “necessities” are.
Either you can hire a lawyer to hopefully tell you (or just run up a high hourly bill, depending on their integrity…), or you can heed my own experience below and at least have a head start on what legalities to consider:
Rights:
Working for strict Wall Street institutions prepared me to keep a keen eye out for the nuances of contracts, employment agreements, and compliance departments’ authority. I knew any company I started while working for my employer could be claimed as their property if I didn’t follow specific guidelines. Further, if I incorporated in certain states or during certain periods, I could jeopardize my job and bonus. This led me to incorporate my first startup in a different state, using a registered agent to mask the owners’ identity. You may want to ensure you’ll retain full rights to the venture you’re working on, despite any current employment contracts you’re under.
Secrets:
When you’re working on private acquisition deals or so-far-unannounced public company mergers, you’re handling a lot of sensitive (confidential) information, and all parties involved are rightfully paranoid. That paranoia can lead to nosy compliance departments checking your personal trading activity, as well as iron-clad NDAs you may be required to sign along the way.
You may also come across merger synergies, in which you’re watching as a CEO gets handed a multi-million-dollar golden parachute deal, with a strict non-compete attached. That’s a fancy way for saying, sometimes they’d pay a CEO to go away, but they’d ensure he wouldn’t subsequently compete in the same industry.
Witnessing this secrecy-obsessed paranoia made me realize that perhaps if I’m starting my own company, I should take similar precautions — especially if I’m outsourcing key aspects of the business to non-equity-holding employees. Thus, I did just that. My tech team signed NDAs and non-competes, along with the designer, a consultant, and every other hired contract worker who obtained access to proprietary information.
You can find user-friendly versions of most of these types of agreements (from formation documents to NDAs) for free or cheaply online, and while some might feel like overkill, peace of mind is priceless. The skill on display here isn’t finding free legal forms online, but rather exercising foresight over potential risks or pitfalls and attempting to abate them with preemptive action; the legal use case is just one small example.
