We’ve been out of the conference room circuit for a few months now, and one thing we miss is listening to deal lingo. We used to copy down the most inane and profane bits of deal lingo we could hear on our notepads as a way of pretending we were taking notes. But it’s been a while and our memories are starting to fade. Some favorites—”value added” and “it is what it is” and “get granular” and “rationally irrational”—are getting a bit moldy.
In an effort to stay current (or at least feed our deal room nostalgia) we invite you to leave your favorite pieces of deal lingo in the comments below. Once we’ve assembled some, we’ll probably put together a page of some of our favorite phrases with examples and explanations of their meaning.
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- Use the Bloomberg command
NH BLG_DEALBREAKER <GO>
to access Dealbreaker
Low hanging fruit
block and tackle
tick and tie
heavy lifting
drill down
deep dive
firedrill
bandwith
we’ve got a lot of wood to chop
look under the kimono
don’t lose the forest for the trees
now we are cooking with grease
play nice in the sandbox
AND MY PERSONAL FAVORITE…
colorably black boxify it
“preserving optionality” = we have done nothing
I’ve been hearing movie character references lately:
“this company is the king kong of their industry” followed 5 minutes later by a reference to another company as “the Darth Vader of their business”
“one-time charges”
We’re getting traction
Throw a head-fake
Putting lipstick on a pig
Ramp it up
Best of breed
Get on the radar screen
Hit critical mass
Lay-up/Slam Dunk
‘Going like gangbusters’
A rapidly accelerating business or business unit
Etymology – Probably related to a radio program, Gang Busters, from the 1930′s which acted out closed FBI cases with lots of radio sound effects. The good old boys who used the term probably remember the damn thing.
“Ethically Infulence” – to get a client to buy something they don’t want to.
“take one for the team buddy – jump on the grenade”
“TFS” as in “that’s a tremendous f*ing short”
“Somebody knows something”
FUBAR: “f*cked up beyond all recognition”
Decorate the Mahogany
“chasing our tail”–looking at deals but getting none of them closed
“looking under a lot of rocks”–looking for deals in strange places
“keeping your powder dry”—saving capital to deploy via better opportunities
“running parallel” a disguised way of saying we are whoring it out to everyone and let the lowest/highest bidder win
“carry it across the goal line”–close a deal
“stick a fork in that puppy”–kill the deal
Subject: Some toughts
Alex,
I have a feeling someone might be doing some weekend work on this, so before we start this process, let’s make sure not to put all of our eggs in one basket – if there are too many roosters in the henhouse and too many cooks in the kitchen, we will be letting the wolf into the chicken coop and this will be a hard nut to crack. At the end of the day – looking at the product from 15,000 feet – it’s just a blackbox resting on a slippery slope. But from a bottoms-up perspective – we’re pretty smart guys and doing this from soup to nuts will leave us with bird in hand and create some serious value-added.
Provided we row downstream and don’t spin our wheels – there’s no need to be caught with our pants down.
Let’s take a top-down approach – focus on core competencies, think outside the box, keep it apples-to-apples, bake in your assumptions, and spread, dig into, play with, juice, goose, vet, run, flesh out, go through with a fine tooth comb, sanity check, scrub and flush the noise out of the numbers. I need you, right now, to sharpen your pencils, get cranking, take the lead, turn these comments, not tread water, bang this out, push it through, get it across the finish line and drop it on my chair. And before you send this to me, make sure to take a step back, get your arms around it, not miss the forest for the trees, and check under the hood – it better hold water. I’m not religious about this, but net-net I would guess there will be some layered switches, hockey sticks, sensitivities, color-coded sheets and zero gridlines. I know you want a rubberstamp – but there is a definite possibility that the director will want to get his hands dirty – I want us to stay on top of the ball, keep our coach’s whistle on, stay behind the wheel and keep ownership of the work.
After the heavy lifting, we just need to get the deliverables out the door and keep everything else under the kitchen sink – we’ll figure out its highest and best use later. Keep in mind I am in no way wed to this analysis, but this is a two-horse race, and we can’t afford to have our heads in the tent. There is no need to recreate the wheel here, but this will be a great learning experience. Let’s discuss when you get in.
Basically, you’re preaching to the choir here. To get a little more granular here before we press the print button, let’s touch base now.
(I’ll be out of pocket later, so swing by while I’m on the ground.) First of all, this is a good chance for you to step up. Right now, the two companies are feeling less than romantic, but remember, all girls talk. I think they’ll eventually give up more than a girl on prom night
- our job is to get them across the finish line. I want us to manage the process and keep the ball in our court. I appreciate that this may be a bit of a lick in the armpit, but I want us to work smart, not hard, and I don’t want to recreate the wheel – this doesn’t need to be gold-plated. Let’s divide and conquer. You do the blocking and tackling and I’ll socialize it with the board. I want us to run this to ground before we lob the missle over to the other side. My fear is that our client will land on a grenade or try to catch a falling piano. We don’t want to open up the kimono too soon, or we may bleed to death by a 1000 cuts. Just so we’re crystal, lets get on the same page – I don’t want us to trip a mine. I’ll focus on the care and feeding of the board and you bottom this out. For ease-of-motion and because of all the moving parts, I will appoint you scribe. Just blackberry me if you need more guidance; I need to be on a plane now.
Before you get sign off, let’s not lose sight of the big picture: What’s driving all of this is that we could put all the buyers in a Civic and still have spare seats. But, at the end of the day, it is what it is. We may have to kiss a lot of frogs to get there, but I think the other side has been leaving some breadcrumbs on the trail. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just to be sure we’re not drinking our own kool-aid, let’s stress-test this, just for our own back-pocket. I want 100% of your bandwidth. If someone calls, put them on the box and I’ll talk to them. With this kind of thing, the devil’s in the details. In the mean time, you keep your head down and I’ll keep my ears to the ground. I don’t want us to get all hot and heavy yet. Let us bat this around internally and send it over to our scientists in the lab. We need to kick the tires, or else we may find ourselves sitting in neutral. I want to be efficient with the team’s time and not spin our wheels – after all, we’re all wearing several hats here. The companies are doing the lover’s dance but we need to focus on putting this to bed. The industiral logic of the deal is sound, but the issue is the CFO is sitting in the CEOs lap, talking his book. We need some air cover here and if we don’t get it, we’re going to have to run an audible. For now, we should keep our cards close to our chest. Lets not reveal our fetishes on the first night.
T.
Subject: Some toughts
Alex,
I have a feeling someone might be doing some weekend work on this, so before we start this process, let’s make sure not to put all of our eggs in one basket – if there are too many roosters in the henhouse and too many cooks in the kitchen, we will be letting the wolf into the chicken coop and this will be a hard nut to crack. At the end of the day – looking at the product from 15,000 feet – it’s just a blackbox resting on a slippery slope. But from a bottoms-up perspective – we’re pretty smart guys and doing this from soup to nuts will leave us with bird in hand and create some serious value-added.
Provided we row downstream and don’t spin our wheels – there’s no need to be caught with our pants down.
Let’s take a top-down approach – focus on core competencies, think outside the box, keep it apples-to-apples, bake in your assumptions, and spread, dig into, play with, juice, goose, vet, run, flesh out, go through with a fine tooth comb, sanity check, scrub and flush the noise out of the numbers. I need you, right now, to sharpen your pencils, get cranking, take the lead, turn these comments, not tread water, bang this out, push it through, get it across the finish line and drop it on my chair. And before you send this to me, make sure to take a step back, get your arms around it, not miss the forest for the trees, and check under the hood – it better hold water. I’m not religious about this, but net-net I would guess there will be some layered switches, hockey sticks, sensitivities, color-coded sheets and zero gridlines. I know you want a rubberstamp – but there is a definite possibility that the director will want to get his hands dirty – I want us to stay on top of the ball, keep our coach’s whistle on, stay behind the wheel and keep ownership of the work.
After the heavy lifting, we just need to get the deliverables out the door and keep everything else under the kitchen sink – we’ll figure out its highest and best use later. Keep in mind I am in no way wed to this analysis, but this is a two-horse race, and we can’t afford to have our heads in the tent. There is no need to recreate the wheel here, but this will be a great learning experience. Let’s discuss when you get in.
Basically, you’re preaching to the choir here. To get a little more granular here before we press the print button, let’s touch base now.
(I’ll be out of pocket later, so swing by while I’m on the ground.) First of all, this is a good chance for you to step up. Right now, the two companies are feeling less than romantic, but remember, all girls talk. I think they’ll eventually give up more than a girl on prom night
- our job is to get them across the finish line. I want us to manage the process and keep the ball in our court. I appreciate that this may be a bit of a lick in the armpit, but I want us to work smart, not hard, and I don’t want to recreate the wheel – this doesn’t need to be gold-plated. Let’s divide and conquer. You do the blocking and tackling and I’ll socialize it with the board. I want us to run this to ground before we lob the missle over to the other side. My fear is that our client will land on a grenade or try to catch a falling piano. We don’t want to open up the kimono too soon, or we may bleed to death by a 1000 cuts. Just so we’re crystal, lets get on the same page – I don’t want us to trip a mine. I’ll focus on the care and feeding of the board and you bottom this out. For ease-of-motion and because of all the moving parts, I will appoint you scribe. Just blackberry me if you need more guidance; I need to be on a plane now.
Before you get sign off, let’s not lose sight of the big picture: What’s driving all of this is that we could put all the buyers in a Civic and still have spare seats. But, at the end of the day, it is what it is. We may have to kiss a lot of frogs to get there, but I think the other side has been leaving some breadcrumbs on the trail. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just to be sure we’re not drinking our own kool-aid, let’s stress-test this, just for our own back-pocket. I want 100% of your bandwidth. If someone calls, put them on the box and I’ll talk to them. With this kind of thing, the devil’s in the details. In the mean time, you keep your head down and I’ll keep my ears to the ground. I don’t want us to get all hot and heavy yet. Let us bat this around internally and send it over to our scientists in the lab. We need to kick the tires, or else we may find ourselves sitting in neutral. I want to be efficient with the team’s time and not spin our wheels – after all, we’re all wearing several hats here. The companies are doing the lover’s dance but we need to focus on putting this to bed. The industiral logic of the deal is sound, but the issue is the CFO is sitting in the CEOs lap, talking his book. We need some air cover here and if we don’t get it, we’re going to have to run an audible. For now, we should keep our cards close to our chest. Lets not reveal our fetishes on the first night.
T.
The worst I’ve heard is using Harry Potter references, like ‘muggle’ for an outsider or someone that doesn’t get it.
“net net” is my all-time favorite, because it just means “net”
Sports and military references seem to be gaining popularity
Getting out over your skis
Outkicking your coverage
Air cover
Hand-to-hand combat
Silos
Um…I think we have a winner.
Except you forgot the most annoying piece of banking/consulting vernacular ever: rockstar. I effin hate it when people use that.
well, “net net” meant trading below net working capital. thus, it was net of net, meaning something entirely different than simply trading at net.
it’s like we’re praying mantises… we want to mate, but we don’t want to get killed in the process.
sneakers-up
take him out back behind the woodshed
have a come-to-jesus discussion
etc.
bifurcate
“The company’s had some success, and they’ve had some non-success.”
So as I’m reading through the comments above and not doing my work…I receive this as part of an email, “Looks like ____ swung for the fences and so far the center fielder is at the warning track !”
Not the most creative one, but ironic, nonetheless.
Coming off like a prom dress
mice nuts
even a blind squirrel finds a nut
Someone posted “look under the kimono” – I’ve heard “Don’t Open The Kimono”, as in we don’t want to reveal our hedge fund investment process. Spoken in combination with a hand gesture of opening an invisible kimono, ostensibly concealing a naked 55-year old hedge fund manager body. Barf.
“Bench Strength” – reference to an experienced research team. Hard to say when you’re hung over.
“Sexy” as a synonym for interesting or relevant. Soo disturbing when it’s coming from your hideous, same sex boss telling you that you need to make the investment grade fixed income presentation sound Sssexxxxy.
“Resources” in reference to people. Me: “can you do this project for me?” marketing guy: “Nope. we don’t have the resources.” why don’t you just say “Nope. I fired Joe and Gina in graphics.”
but my legit new favorite is:
“Groundhog Day”, describing a problem that never gets solved because you keep meeting with the same four inept people, none of whom remember or care what was discussed at the previous meeting. No matter how much you prepare other participants by sending around the last meeting’s notes, reviewing the previous agreed-upon solution, etc, each meeting starts with the same exact hour long discussion of what the problem is, sending one into Phil Connors-like episodes of eating a dozen powdered donuts at the conference table or attempting suicide by pouring coffee on the space-ship shaped conference call phone while standing barefoot on the ground outlet.
More kimono-speak: A former higher-up at The Economist once said “it’s open kimono season” during a meeting. It was awkward.
what about “being in the penalty box”? – when a stock gets its multiple compressed. Usually for missing a quarter or disappointing results.
Or is that just a Canadian term?
“We hit singles and doubles, not home runs …”
If I received a dollar for every time I heard a HF manager say that when asked about his investment process, I’d be living in a 1-bedroom apartment in an UES high-rise, not a studio in East Village.
Kick it upstairs. (I’m not signing off on this!)
Hit the streets. (Go see if anybody will buy this thing.)
Lay it all out on the table. (Let me see what you have that I want.)
Crunch the numbers. (I need more time to make something up.)
Work out the kinks. (Uhhh, it won’t work.)
jamming and cranking…not to be confused with cranking and jamming
“Out of the box”
“SLD” (Shitty Little Deal)
“Bells & Whistles”
“In the Weeds”
“Pinch-hit”
“We can’t shit the bed on this one.” = we better get this closed
It’s funny how many of these expressions are so generically meaningless that the trascend industrial boundaries and crop up everywhere.
A personal fave:
“Chasing every rabbit” a derisory term when someone is wantonly slutting himself after every little deal, no matter how much of an SLD (“Shitty Little Deal”) it is.
Pressure test
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