Mergers & Acquisitions
This course covers everything you need to succeed in an investment banking role, whether you’re preparing to hit the desk as an M&A specialist or looking to land the job in the first place. It’s also essential for investors seeking to understand how M&A activity impacts their portfolios, and for corporate finance professionals navigating mergers or acquisitions in-house. Gain a competitive edge and walk in with confidence.
Peek Inside the Course
No Boring Powerpoint Slides
14 hours of dynamic, visually engaging videos that will walk you through everything you need to know – without your eyes glazing over.
The Basics...and Beyond
Build full-blown financial models in Excel, including a DCF and LBO with cash flow waterfalls, multiple debt tranches, and free cash flow sweeps.
Hands-on Learning
Apply what you’ve learned along the way and practice your skills with knowledge checks and exercises, including: spreading actual comps, running analyses, and building models in Excel.
Finance x Pop Culture
Fun case study based on Waystar Royco from Succession, along with analyses of actual companies and deals using real filings, including Fox Corp and Disney’s acquisition of Twentieth Century Fox
Interview Prep
Build intuition and get reps in with a paper LBO that will help you crush a Investment Banking and Private Equity interview like an experienced practitioner.
Learn More with Your Besties
Access to additional video learning modules: “IPOs 101: The PE Exit” and “Private Equity vs. Hedge Funds” — plus our full library of Masterclasses.
Part I
M&A Basics
6 hrs
Total Content
Module 1
M&A Overview
We break down the fundamentals of Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) from the perspective of a strategic buyer.
Module 2
Defining a Merger vs. an Acquisition
We set the stage for our M&A analysis by breaking down the evolving deal drama between GoJo and Waystar in Succession Seasons 3 and 4. Using this storyline, we clarify key terms like merger vs. acquisition, merger of equals, and what happens when the target becomes the buyer. This narrative gives us the context we’ll need to think like GoJo’s bankers as we move into modeling post-deal EPS, debt capacity, and ownership dilution.
Module 3
Accretion / Dilution and Equity Multiples
We define accretion and dilution, and discuss how companies use pro forma EPS to determine if a transaction creates shareholder value. We also explore WHY EPS is the main financial projection public companies focus on and how it ties directly to stock price via multiples like P/E and PEG. This sets the stage for building our M&A model and calculating the all-important post-deal EPS.
Module 4
Calculating Pro Forma EPS
We walk through how to calculate pro forma EPS in an M&A deal and explore the key drivers that impact it from financing decisions (cash vs. stock), to synergies, to accounting adjustments like D&A. You’ll see how bankers weigh tradeoffs between income statement accretion, balance sheet constraints, and shareholder dilution to structure the optimal deal.
Module 5
Key Players in M&A Deals
We zoom out to explore the full cast of players involved in a merger or acquisition from buy-side and sell-side bankers running financial models and fairness opinions, to consultants, accountants, and lawyers shaping deal structure, tax outcomes, and synergies. You’ll learn how these teams collaborate behind the scenes to inform pricing, financing, and negotiation strategy.
Module 6
The Inputs
We kick off our M&A model by walking through the key inputs needed to run a bottoms-up model. You’ll learn where to find real-world data like share prices, share counts, projected earnings, and balance sheet items and how to adjust for complexities like cross-border FX and break down the various types of shares (actual vs. average, basic vs. diluted). This sets the groundwork for building our M&A model pen and paper before we later build it in Excel.
Module 7
Sources & Uses: Uses
We walk through the transaction assumptions and build out the Uses side of the Sources & Uses table, calculating how much GoJo needs to fund the acquisition of Waystar.