Many finance professionals have a clear mental image of what success looks like. Often, it’s a prestigious firm on their resume, a landmark deal under their belt and a seat at the table where the biggest decisions get made. It’s a reasonable aspiration, and also an incomplete picture.
Peyton Bowman, M&A director at SAX LLP, works in the mid-market. His argument is that it’s not a consolation prize for people who weren’t chosen to lead top-tier deals. It’s a completely different environment that teaches professionals things the megadeal world doesn’t.
And right now, it’s busier than most people realize.
The first thing Peyton points to is that there’s more to work with in the mid-market than most people assume.
In a conversation following a recent IENYC Finance Club panel, he said:
“The first thing that comes to mind is deal volume and the amount of opportunity there is. There are so many deals to choose from and opportunities to find value in smaller deals.”
Volume matters, especially for those just starting out. In a large-cap transaction, each advisor touches a relatively narrow slice of the work. The deal is bigger, but so is the team, and early-career professionals often spend months on a single deal.
In the mid-market, deals move faster and teams skew leaner. That means more contact with each part of the process, and earlier. For someone trying to build their advisory instincts, that experience compounds quickly.
The scope of the work itself tends to be broader. There isn’t always a layer of senior staff between junior team members and clients. The same advisor running financial modeling is likely also on calls, helping to frame the deal narrative and working through due diligence findings.
That range shows up in the day-to-day. A junior advisor may spend the morning building a valuation model, then join an afternoon meeting where a client is asking direct questions about that same analysis. You don’t just hand off a model and move on. You’re explaining it and adjusting it in real time.
It also means seeing more of how a deal comes together. Financing structure, regulatory considerations, operational risk and valuation aren’t separate workstreams handled by different teams. On a smaller deal, the same group is often tracking all of it at once. Junior advisors get exposure to the full shape of a transaction far earlier than they would on a larger deal.
Peyton is candid about where early-career professionals tend to slip up. “One of the mistakes that I see is saying no too soon to a deal without having the facts.”
“There’s always risk involved with any deal, but it’s important to quantify those risks, think about ways around them, and look at the overall deal, structure, valuation, operational risk and opportunity and figure out ways to integrate it all.”
That discipline applies regardless of deal size, but the mid-market makes it harder to ignore. Without the institutional infrastructure of a large firm behind every call, advisors learn to work through uncertainty rather than defer to hierarchy.
Jake Jake Foley, a VP at Tungsten Advisors and former Managing Director at Houlihan Lokey, agreed. The real value an advisor brings, he argued, doesn’t come from well-trodden territory.
“The greatest insight and value add any of us can provide happens not in familiar environments, but in unknown environments that we have to sort out and recreate what business looks and feels like.”
The mid-market, with its range of industries, deal structures and company profiles, supplies those environments consistently.
This isn’t an argument that mid-market M&A is a better path than large-scale work. They teach different things. Megadeals offer depth and knowledge of institutional processes. Mid-market deals offer breadth and a higher likelihood of direct client exposure.
The most useful move for anyone starting out in finance isn’t to find the most prestigious environment. It’s to find the one that builds the skills you actually want. If you’re looking to work across more deals faster, get close to clients earlier, and make more decisions, the mid-market has a lot to offer.
If you’re thinking about a career in finance, the MS in Finance at IENYC puts you in direct conversation with professionals like Peyton and Jake, in the classroom and in one of the world’s most active deal markets.
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Originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, Ashleigh now calls Madrid, Spain home, where she has built a career shaped by curiosity, creativity, and a lifelong love of languages. Her work grows out of a passion for learning, storytelling, and meaningful cross-cultural connection, with language as the thread that ties it all together.
Her academic journey took her from studying Spanish and French and Secondary Education at the University of Southern Mississippi to graduate studies in Spain, where she completed a Master’s in Spanish at the University of Salamanca and a Master’s in Translation and Interpretation at the University of Alcalá. Along the way, she has worked across classrooms, research projects, and creative spaces, contributing to academic, multilingual, and editorial initiatives that connect language, knowledge, and culture.
