Halfway. An interesting yet overlooked state. Many have and will pass it by without contemplation and reflection, like a mere right of way onto a better stage. Like everything in life, it is part of all the necessary steps to achieve;  from start to finish to beginning and end, and between it all lies halfway. Overlooked and undervalued, it’s a time for me to see how far I have come since the start of this internship, and a time for me to reflect on how far I still have yet to go.

From the last six weeks, I really started understanding who Ellery is as a search fund, and the processes each team needed to complete in order to help one another. Like an interwoven unit, each completed task builds on the next. For example, this week my group was tasked with performing some proprietary outreach in the cleaning and medical waste space. Another group was tasked with a similar concept; perform secondary research and write a report on the industry as a whole, identifying growth drivers, growth margins, large players, and much more. As I had a phone call with an individual within the space, the information I was asking directly benefited the other team’s research, providing them the necessary information they could not have otherwise found. Using that info, they continued expanding upon their research, and so the cycle continued.

As we finally start to feel comfortable in our roles, it is now time to ramp up the process and get things moving faster. The first half was a nice settling stage to learn about the role we had and how each group would work together, but now things are getting further in the process. Our company pipeline teasers are now moving along faster. Calls to brokers are being extended on certain companies, while some companies are beginning to reach a stage for owner outreach.

While projects ramp up in the last half of the internship, we are fast approaching our modeling week. In prior sessions, we have learned the three statement forward looking model. This contains the normal three statements, but in a forward looking aspect to determine how profitable a company could be. Additionally, we have been reviewing the Debt and Working Capital Schedule, two models that must be built in order to get a clearer understanding of the company and their efficiency. Looking forward, the modeling week will be built on these statements as we begin to build a Discounted Cash Flow analysis and Comparables analysis. Reflecting upon where I am today, I am glad to see how far I have come and how much I still have yet to learn.