Key Skills for an M&A Investment Banking Associate at Houlihan Lokey

There are probably a handful of skills worth highlighting, perhaps four big ones. First, you need to be comfortable interpreting large amounts of numbers. You don't need to necessarily understand them intrinsically, but you need to be comfortable knowing that with enough time to ask questions and review, you can eventually become knowledgeable about whatever something means. This will allow you to discuss it with others.

Second, soft power is crucial in this role. You'll have a lot of responsibility as a young person, yet very little actual authority. Your coworkers and, more often than not, your clients will be older, independently impressive, wealthy business owners or CEOs. You'll need to ask a lot of them, so you'd better be good at asking nicely.

Third, I believe intellectual humility is actually huge in this role. My mentor advised me to always sound like the dumbest person in the room because of how simple my questions were. I found this valuable because as long as I was comfortable sounding unintelligent, I learned everything I needed to succeed in my job.

Finally, strangely, I think to be really successful in this job, you need a little bit of Buddhism. You need to simultaneously have immense pride in your ownership and the work you're doing, yet have no attachment to that work. You need to be prepared to work hard, late into the night, developing a presentation of the highest quality, similar to schoolwork. You might give it to your boss the next day at 9:00 AM, and after a meeting, they might inform you that the pitch was lost. All that work would be for nothing. Then, you'd have a new pitch to work on that same night, and you need to be prepared to accept that loss, walk away from it, and bring your same best self to the next project. There's a bit of a balance and dualism there; if you can be comfortable with that, you'll do incredibly well in this industry.