Monkey Business

by John Rolfe

  A road show is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a show that the bankers and the company take on the road to the investors. The show is well rehearsed. There are directors, producers, costumes, and props. Sometimes there are videos or product demonstrations. The road shows are a lot like the infomercials on late-night TV that tell you how to get rich and be your own boss. A slide show is created to make the presentation more user friendly. A finely scripted monologue is written for the company executives who are doing the presentation. The monologue is synchronized with the slide presentation.

  The whole show is rehearsed, over and over again. The bankers ask the company executives mock questions to make sure that the company executives will be ready with any and all the answers. No stone is left unturned. Every detail is covered. Each of the potential investors will get no more than an hour with the management team, so the bankers have to make sure that the song and dance will go off flawlessly.

  Meanwhile, as the show is being rehearsed, a whole cast of salespeople and professional travel planners in the investment bank are scheduling the meetings with potential investors. The associate is their ringleader. The associate has to book plane flights, hotel rooms, limousine pickup times, and dinner reservations. The associate is the pack mule. The associate has to carry extra prospectuses, the slide-show presentation, and all the audiovisual equipment. The investment banking travel department will help set up some of the details, but if there’s a fuckup it’s the associate’s fault and the associate’s responsibility to fix it. Sometimes, if the road show schedule gets tight, a private jet gets chartered. That can take a major burden off the associate’s back. A good associate, however, will have a backup jet available, ready and waiting just in case the first one has a mechanical problem. Every base must be covered—once, twice, three times. At times, associates feel not like they’re going on a road show to sell a deal to investors but like they’re astronauts planning man’s first mission to Uranus. Meals are planned, backup meals are planned. Hotel rooms, backup hotel rooms. Limousines and backup limousines.

  The problems with travel, especially road show travel, get even worse when you have to go overseas. It’s not easy to be a mule when you can’t understand the language. But that’s not the only problem. The time zones are all messed up, everybody who’s French hates everything American, and the Germans eat sausage for every meal. Talk about your harrowing experiences: try having a bratwurst at 7:30 A.M.

  Rolfe did a lot of international travel. Instead of spending time in California, the way he thought he was going to, he ended up making a whole lot of random trips to Europe. He didn’t like them much. There was good reason why.

  My first experience with international travel at DLJ was just a primer. It was a harbinger of much worse, and much uglier, things to come. I popped my cherry on the European leg of a road show for a junk bond offering. A storm trooper in managing director’s clothing called me up and barked into the phone: “Rolfe, you’re gonna cover Europe on this road show. Pack your fuckin’ bags!” I was thrilled. I was going to Europe. I was the big man, heading over to the Continent to sell alternative investment products to Europe’s landed aristocracy. It seemed sexy. I was an international playboy. It was the ‘80s all over again.

  It didn’t take long to shatter the illusion. I was midway through my first foray to the Old Country when I realized how much international travel sucked. The time changes completely fucked me up. The institutional accounts in Europe were all grade B—the bastard stepsons of their U.S. counterparts. Europe was just a backup in case we couldn’t rustle up enough demand back home. I was a pitiful schmuck, baby-sitting a management team and peddling junk bonds to marginal European accounts. It was exactly the kind of assignment that was custom made for an associate.

  The European institutional investors were all based out of either London or Paris, so just about every road show DLJ did made a stop in both cities. Typically, we’d take the management team on a red-eye out of New York that would get us into London just as the day was starting. A limo would pick us up at the airport and we’d spend the morning visiting British asset managers, all badly in need of dental work, who spent more time worrying about getting their tea “just so” than they did listening to us make our pitch for the crap we were trying to sell. We’d then jump an early-afternoon plane to Paris, where we’d spend the next few hours trying to sell the deal to small groups of gamey Frogs who made their Brit counterparts look like rocket scientists.

  After we’d finished up with our meetings in Paris, we’d jump a plane back to New York, which would get us back home just a little over twenty-four hours after we’d left. That usually meant that we would arrive just in time for me to put in another eight hours at work before I finally made it home to get some sleep. That was how the international leg of the road shows usually worked. Same bullshit as back home, but with even less sleep and funkier breath.

  As it came to pass, though, the Paris-London road shows were just scrimmages in my international travelogue. They were warm-ups for the big game, the game where I’d get my butt reamed out like a sclerotic vein undergoing balloon angioplasty.

  The Big Kahuna turned out to be a due diligence trip I had to take for a co-managed IPO. It was for a company called Global Wireless Assets (GWA). The deal looked soft and pretty from afar, and I wanted to take it to the dance. The closer I got, though, the nastier it started to look. I turned to run, I tried to scream, but it was too late. I couldn’t turn back. I was obligated to boogie.

  GWA was a “story” stock. That meant that there were no fundamentals to support valuation. It was the kind of investment opportunity that would have made Ben Graham, the father of value investing, turn over in his grave. The company had no earnings. It didn’t have any cash flow. It’s assets consisted primarily of equity stakes in a bunch of wireless communications properties all over the world. Its cash was heading out the door quicker than a greased pig in a Kansas City slaughterhouse, and it needed to get to market fast before it went broke.

  GWA’s business development director was running the capital-raising effort for the company. He was an ex-Goldman banker, which automatically meant that Goldman was leading the deal. SBC Warburg had been added to the underwriting lineup as a co-manager due to its significant European presence, and CIBC Wood Gundy was on board as the Canadian representative. That left DLJ, the final leg of the underwriting stool. DLJ didn’t really belong, but GWA management was worried that the money from the IPO might not be enough to tide them over. If that happened, they figured that they’d need to issue some junk bonds. And if that happened, they wanted the DLJ franchise around so that they could jam some of those junk bonds down the throats of the hungry DLJ customers.

  GWA’s ownership interests were far-flung. The company had interests in telecommunications operations in Canada, Ireland, France, Austria, Poland, Mexico, Pakistan, and Hong Kong. In order to underwrite the deal, tradition had it that the bankers needed to see the company’s operations. That was so that we could represent to the potential investors that the deal wasn’t a complete scam. The ironic thing was that they could have put any of us bankers in any room, anywhere, full of beeping metal boxes with blinking lights and we would have given the thumbs up. We didn’t know any better. It was like asking Ray Charles to opine on the authenticity of a Rembrandt.

  Since the company was so hard up for money the deal was on a fast track. That meant that we were going to have to do our diligence on the operations in record time. It was decided that we’d visit all the regions, with the exception of Pakistan and Hong Kong, in the course of a one-week diligence marathon. We were going to have to pass up the curry and the chop suey for the sake of expediency.

  Monday, 8 A.M.—We all met in Toronto on a Monday morning at GWA’s world headquarters. The one-hour, 350-mile trip from New York to Toronto was the first small step in our diligence marathon. I was the sole DLJ representative. Co-managed deals generally didn’t merit the presence of anybody over the ra
nk of associate on diligence trips and this one was no different. I alone would bear full responsibility for DLJ’s potential legal exposure. I wasn’t sweating the details. I viewed it as a boondoggle.

  The day in Toronto had been planned as an overview of all the company’s operations. It was supposed to set the stage for the coming week’s activities. We sat in a room with no windows, eating finger sandwiches and listening to the company’s business development director run through his descriptive analysis of the various properties. He talked for six hours straight without taking a break. I don’t even think that he took a sip of water. He had a glassy-eyed manservant who circled the room nonstop handing out reams of paper that were covered with details and numerical analyses. By lunchtime of that first day I was already thoroughly confused. I couldn’t get straight whether the paging operations were in Austria or Paris. By late afternoon I’d completely given up. There was just too much stuff to remember.

  At 5 P.M. we got into some limos and headed out to the airport. We were short one seat, and I somehow managed to get elbowed up front to sit with the driver. It was my first clue that the other underwriters viewed my presence as an annoyance. They viewed DLJ as the unclean freak, and as the sole DLJ representative they looked upon me as the freak incarnate who was responsible for taking fee dollars out of their pockets. That didn’t bother me so much. The limo driver was a good guy, and on the way to the airport we talked about his new Lincoln Continental while the other bankers sucked up to the company guys in the back. I could have sworn that I heard some slurping noises.

  Monday, 7 P.M.—Our British Airways flight departed Toronto International Airport bound for Dublin. The lady banker from Goldman was sitting next to me. She wouldn’t even talk to me. She answered every question I asked her with a one-word reply. What a bitch. I took the pair of earplugs out of the travel packet that the stewardess had given me, stuffed them up my nose, and pretended to go to sleep. I knew that would bother her. Thirty-five hundred miles and six hours later, we touched down in Dublin.

  Tuesday, 6 A.M.—We lost five hours on the trip over, so we arrived as the sun was coming up. We were scheduled to stay at the St. Rugala hotel and our meetings for the day had been scheduled in one of the hotel’s conference rooms. The St. Rugala hotel was a fancy one. In Europe, that meant that it was in a really old building with small rooms and crappy plumbing, and that it cost a boatload to stay there. Once we were checked in, we had a half hour to blow before our meetings with the management team from GWA’s Irish operations were set to begin. That was just enough time for me to figure out that the hotel’s cable system had a free soft-porn channel. Maybe that was what made it a luxury hotel, no extra charge for porno. I called my voice mail back at the office. I had fourteen messages.

  The meeting was a farce. We had traveled 3,500 miles to do diligence on the operations, and all we did was sit in a hotel conference room and listen to a bunch of suits tell us about what a great business they were going to build. We could have done it over the phone and saved the airfare. Company management viewed the Irish business as a major piece of the overall value, but the operations hadn’t yet been built and the plans were for implementation of an untested technology. They didn’t even have an antenna to show us. They had nothing.

  By late afternoon I was dragging hard. I’d been up all night and my body couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. For lunch we’d been served cucumber sandwiches and flat orange drink that just hadn’t done the trick.

  I figured that I could slip upstairs to my room for just a couple of minutes to lie down. I wouldn’t be gone long, and I wouldn’t miss anything important in the diligence meeting. I’d pretend that I was leaving to make a phone call. I could close my eyes for just thirty minutes. Nobody would even notice.

  I left the conference room and made my way upstairs. The bed felt so good. I was so tired. I’ll just relax for a minute, I told myself.

  I woke up, rolled over, and looked at the clock. Fuck. My thirty-minute snooze had turned into a two-hour nap. I ran down the stairs and back into the conference room where the diligence meeting was taking place. The other bankers were taking a quick recess, working the phones to their offices back in New York and Toronto. The SBC Warburg banker spotted me as I entered and made an exaggerated stage whisper, loud enough for everybody present to hear. “Oh, and where have you been?”

  “My apologies,” I replied, “one of my other deals blew up. I’ve been trying to salvage it.”

  I didn’t realize that my hair was standing straight up in the air, my shirt was untucked, and that everybody in the room knew I was lying.

  I took a seat. The useless diligence dance continued, on into the night.

  Wednesday, 5 A.M.—After four hours of sleep, we got on the earliest possible flight headed to Paris. Another 190 miles. Another hour time change. GWA operated a dispatch radio business in Paris. They owned a few big antennae that sat up on top of hills around the city. Truckers and cab drivers bought radios from the company and used them to talk to each other through the antennae. GWA had given up trying to convince the bankers that the business was a sexy one. Instead, they told us it would be a “solid business.” In banker language that meant that it wasn’t a hot prospect and that it didn’t have any good marketing potential.

  Once again, we sat in a room and listened to one of the general managers tell us about the business. Like most French people, he hated us for being American. That was OK with me. To amuse myself, while the other bankers were asking legitimate questions about the operations I asked him stupid questions like, “If one of the cab drivers spills a cup of coffee into the radio, will it stop working?” When the meeting ended, the Goldman and SBC Warburg bankers got into a fight over whether we should spend the night in Paris and head out for Innsbruck in the morning or whether we should go to Innsbruck that night. The Goldman vice president wanted to go shopping in Paris and get Hermès scarves. I told everybody that they could do whatever the hell they wanted but I was going to Innsbruck. I called my voice mail back at the office. I had seven more messages.

  Wednesday, 7 P.M.—We got on the puddle jumper from Paris to Innsbruck, Austria. Another 190 miles. By this point, I’d only had six hours of sleep in the prior sixty hours. I fell asleep before the stewardess even got to me with the cocktail peanuts.

  Wednesday, 11 P.M.—Innsbruck was a welcome change from France. Then again, a kick in the head would have been a welcome change. Everybody spoke English. Our cab driver was named Max Van Weezel. GWA, who had been responsible for booking all the travel arrangements, had booked us into the Innsbruck Holiday Inn. The Goldman bankers weren’t too hip on that. They didn’t think that “Goldman Sachs” and “Holiday Inn” belonged together. Four Seasons, definitely. Hilton, maybe. Holiday Inn, no way. It didn’t seem to matter that the rooms were twice as big as they would have been at one of the classy hotels. It didn’t seem to matter that there was a swimming pool, which the classy hotels never had. It was still a Holiday Inn and that didn’t cut the mustard with Goldman bankers.

  I called my voice mail back at the office. I had four more messages. I accidentally erased three of those before listening to them.

  Thursday, 8 A.M.—We began our meetings with the operating managers of the Austrian paging operation. The Austrians served us fish for lunch. I fell asleep during the meeting and drooled on my tie. I learned nothing about the paging operations that day.

  Thursday, 6:30 P.M.—We got on a plane bound for Warsaw, Poland. Another 1,100 miles. We lost another hour in the time change. I had a banking dream on the plane. I dreamed that one of my managing directors, dressed in a black leather dominatrix outfit, was flagellating me with a whip made of Twizzlers. I may have been delirious.

  Four hours later we landed at the Warsaw International Airport. The airport had no lights, the runway was covered with snow, and there were wild dogs running alongside the plane as it landed. None of it fazed me. All I wanted was a hot shower and a warm bed.


  Thursday, Midnight—It was midnight by the time we got to our hotel. I was now 5,000 miles away, and seven time zones removed, from DLJ’s headquarters back in New York. I was in snowy Warsaw inside the former Eastern Bloc. I actually started to feel as if I’d left it all behind. I could disappear into the Polish countryside and become a potato farmer. I was tired and disoriented but felt better than I’d felt in months because I knew that nobody could touch me. No managing directors. No vice presidents. I was flying solo.

  As it turned out the only place I was flying was right into the eye of the storm. I was a pitiful fool to think that I was beyond the iron clutches of my superiors. There was no escape.

  I was standing at the check-in counter when the phone behind the desk rang. The clerk picked it up. Somebody on the other end was speaking. The clerk appeared puzzled. He looked up.

  “Is there a Mr. Rolfe here?”

  I couldn’t believe it. It had to be a coincidence. There had to be another Mr. Rolfe. There was no way that I’d come this far to be tracked down in the lobby of the hotel. I spoke up: “I’m Mr. Rolfe.”

  “You have a phone call.” The clerk handed me the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey Johnny, it’s Melba.” Melba was one of my BAs.

  “How the fuck did you find me here? I’m standing at the check-in counter.”

  “I called GWA in Toronto. They told me where you were staying. I figured that you’d be in your room.”

  “Unbelievable. Why are you calling?”

  “It’s Bubbles. He’s going nuts. He’s been down here all afternoon screaming at everybody. He needs to talk to you about the Woodpecker deal. He said that he’s been leaving you voice mails for the last two days and that you haven’t returned any of them. He said that he left you one last night telling you that it was urgent, that you needed to call him.”