Basic, lesson 1 of 4
What corp dev does
Corporate development is the small team inside a company that finds, prices, negotiates, and closes its deals. Bankers advise on a deal; corp dev lives with it.
7 min, 2 checks
1The in-house deal team
Most large companies have a corporate development team, usually reporting to the CFO or the CEO. At a big tech or healthcare company it can be dozens of people; at a mid-size industrial it might be four. The work covers every way the company changes its shape: acquisitions, divestitures, joint ventures, partnerships, and minority investments.
- Keep a pipeline: a running list of companies the business might buy, with notes from every conversation.
- Work with business unit leaders on what they need and whether buying it makes sense.
- Value targets, build the model, and run the accretion and synergy math.
- Run diligence: coordinate finance, legal, tax, HR, IT, and the business unit.
- Negotiate price and terms, often alongside an investment bank on large deals.
- Hand the deal to integration, and on many teams, stay accountable for the synergies.
Check 1
After a deal closes, who is still answerable for whether it worked?
2How it differs from banking
| Investment banker | Corp dev | |
|---|---|---|
| Client | Many companies | One company: your own |
| Paid when | The deal closes | Every year, deal or not |
| Main question | Can we get this deal done? | Should we do this deal at all? |
| Deals | Many, across an industry | Fewer, all in one strategy |
| After closing | On to the next one | Integration, synergies, and the next board update |
| Hours | Long and unpredictable | Long during a live deal, closer to normal otherwise |
The best answer to why corp dev is the second row of that table read backwards: you want to be the person who decides whether a deal is good, and who is still there to find out if you were right.
Check 2
Which is the strongest answer to: why corp dev and not banking?
Terms in this lesson: Synergies.
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