Free Monkey Business by John Rolfe, Peter Troob

a reputation as one of the most fearsome pitch book generators in DLJ history. He’d come to DLJ from Lehman Brothers, receiving
     a bump from senior vice president to managing director in the process. Legend had it that among the junior bankers at Lehman
     he’d been the most reviled man on staff, and upon his departure the entire analyst class had thrown a party where the collective
     level of joy approached that at Christ’s resurrection. Bubbles was as short as they came—somewhere between a dwarf and a midget,
     and collective conjecture was that his tyrannical behavior was as much a result of a Napoleon complex as anything else. He’d
     been hired into DLJ’s mergers and acquisitions (M&A) group as part of an initiative to increase the bank’s presence in the
     advisory business.
    There’s an important tenet of investment banking: It’s not the work you have to do but who you have to do it for. Pitch books
     aren’t always all-night affairs, but working for Bubbles was virtually guaranteed to be a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week
     job. The job included lots of humiliation, and a willingness to take it up the rear without Vaseline.
    Bubble’s focus was on the universe of financial buyers, those groups whose charge was to use borrowed moneyto buy businesses from their existing owners, make subsequent operational and strategic changes, and then sell the businesses
     several years later at a healthy profit. As a group, the financial buyers had enjoyed several years of enormous historical
     returns on their invested capital and, as a result, had received a large influx of money from other investors looking to join
     the party. All this money was out looking for new companies to buy, and Bubbles had made it his mission to bring as many acquisition
     ideas to the financial buyers as he could churn out. In concept, the idea was a simple one. In reality, it was another matter
     entirely.
    Bubbles’s pitch books could contain anywhere from five to twenty potential acquisition candidates for the lucky recipient.
     For each potential candidate, the pitch book contained a summary of the company’s product lines, a listing of current news
     events on the company, detail on the company’s historical financial performance, a build-up of the company’s current capital
     structure, current valuation parameters, a listing of the current ownership profile, and short biographies on each of the
     company’s senior management and board of directors. It was a lot of information. It filled up a lot of pages. That made the
     pitch books heavy, which was what Bubbles liked. Given the high degree of likelihood that none of the material would ever
     be given more than the briefest consideration by the recipients, the compilation of the necessary components should have been
     a relatively mechanized event for the associates and analysts involved. The associates and analysts, though, had been trained
     through negative reinforcement to develop an attention to detail that turned the compilation process intoan event of major import. Creation of a pitch book for Bubbles was approached by analysts and associates alike as an activity
     akin to the illumination of a holy manuscript by medieval monks.
    As Bubbles became aware of the wealth of productive pitch-making capacity that the summer associate pool provided, he began
     directly staffing summer associates on his weighty pitches. He bypassed the usual staffing channels, preferring to corral
     the fresh meat himself. As the weeks passed, moreover, his ambitions grew grander and grander. As his ambitions increased
     so, too, did the number of companies included in each pitch. Bubbles’s pitches, in fact, began to expand to such generous
     proportions that they became living, breathing creatures that were incapable of being tamed by a single associate. Development
     of the pitches began to require the input of multiple associates.
    The granddaddy of all of Bubbles’s pitches was