Company: St. Cloud Capital
Position: Analyst Intern
What were your overall responsibilities in your internship?
As St. Cloud was (and currently is) deploying capital from its third fund, I was primarily tasked with researching potential investments in the pipeline to help with the deal screening process. That meant starting off with initial research on pitch decks and pro forma financials we received from management teams to decide which of those deals matched up with St. Cloud’s investment strategy. I then did much more in-depth research on the few deals we signed up with letters of intent (LOIs) – building out cases and stress-testing the sensitivity of our debt to important assumptions like customer churn, mapping out competitors, and looking at precedent transactions to try to determine how we should price our warrants. Since I was the only intern in the office, I also did all sorts of odd jobs to help out the partners and free up their time to go out and source more deals.
What is unique about the company and culture of St. Cloud Capital?
St. Cloud was, in my opinion, the perfect company environment. The team was made up of people from a variety of different prestigious backgrounds – investment banking, distressed credit and special situations, fundamental equity, etc. They were also all friendly and had an open-door policy, and would take time during the day to answer whatever questions I had. Some of my questions pertained to the projects I was working on, but there were plenty of times where the professionals there were more than happy to give me their high-level thoughts on the markets, discuss stock picks, and help me out with recruiting advice.
What is your biggest takeaway from this internship?
Getting to tap into the experience of people who’ve been investing in public and private markets for many years was the best part of my time at St. Cloud. Excel-monkey stuff is important, but it’s also fairly easily self-taught and/or drilled into you when you start working. The important stuff is the perspective you get from working with people who know how to look at deals, from sitting in on meetings with management teams and learning what questions to ask, and from learning the “why” behind what you’re working on and how it supports the investment process.
Did the internship meet or supersede your expectations? How?
St. Cloud invests in lower middle market companies (annual revenue generally between $10 million and $150 million) across all sectors, typically with a combination of debt and equity. The breadth of this generalist strategy allowed me to pivot across multiple industries every few days and learn about business models I never knew existed. It also gave me insights on how to assess a wide variety of transaction structures. I was included on all of the management meetings and diligence calls for deals I worked on, and even got to meet with teams on site. The whole experience was highly collaborative, and I always had interesting work to do. I couldn’t have asked for a better summer internship.
What advice would you give to anyone wanting to work in a similar industry?
You should always understand why you’re working on something and how it relates to the big picture. You should choose a firm where the learning curve is steep, where the people who work above you care about your development, and where you enjoy talking to the people you work with about things other than work. And you should always ask questions.