How to Measure Associate Hours per Mandate Before and After AI

Why banks do not already have this number

Boutique investment banks are not law firms. Nobody bills by the hour, so nobody tracks hours. The managing director knows roughly how long a mandate takes end to end and roughly how many an associate can carry, but neither number is written down, and neither is broken out by phase. When a partner asks whether a new tool is worth it, the answer is an impression.

This is a problem beyond AI. Without a baseline, the bank cannot say which phase is slowest, which associate is most efficient, or whether the last mandate's delay was the owner's fault or the team's. The measurement described here is useful on its own. AI adoption is simply the occasion that makes it worth doing.

The good news is that the measurement is light. It does not need timesheets in six-minute increments. It needs an associate to write down, at the end of each day on one mandate, how many hours went to which phase and whether the work was producing something or deciding something. A two-minute end-of-day entry is a practical target. Shorter recall periods generally reduce recall error compared with asking someone to reconstruct a week at once. [1] [2]

The categories to use

Use the six phases of the sell-side process as the first axis: discovery and readiness, valuation, marketing materials, buyer matching and outreach, offers (NDA, IOI, data room), and negotiation through close (LOI, exclusivity, diligence). These are stable across mandates and map to how everyone at the bank already thinks about a deal.

Use production versus judgment as the second axis. Production is building, assembling, researching, tracking, and reconciling: the valuation workbook, the CIM draft, the buyer list, the NDA log, the IOI table, the owner update. Judgment is deciding, advising, and persuading: the multiple, the narrative, the short list, the buyer call, the IOI recommendation. An associate can sort her own day into these two columns without much trouble, and the split is the number the bank actually wants, because production is what software may change.

A third, optional axis is rework: hours spent redoing something because the first version was wrong or because the inputs changed. Rework is where errors from manual processes hide, and it is worth separating if the associate is willing.

Running the baseline

Pick a mandate that is about to begin preparation, so the log covers the whole process. Pick an associate who will be honest about the hours and who will not round down to look efficient. Tell her the purpose is to measure the process, not her.

The log itself is a simple table: date, phase, production hours, judgment hours, rework hours, and a one-line note on what was done. Keep it in a shared place so the managing director can see it, and have the associate fill it in daily rather than weekly. The BLS American Time Use Survey also uses a prior-day diary approach, with interviewers trained to help respondents report activities and durations for that day. [1]

At the end of the mandate, total the hours by phase and by type. A boutique running on spreadsheets and email may find production hours concentrated in valuation, marketing materials, buyer matching, or offers, while judgment hours may concentrate in discovery and negotiation. That is a hypothesis to test with the bank's own log, not a benchmark or a universal pattern.

Also record the calendar: kickoff date, materials complete, launch, IOI deadline, LOI signed, close. Elapsed time matters to the owner as much as hours matter to the bank.

Running the comparison

The second log goes on the next mandate of comparable size and complexity, run on the new workflow. Comparable matters. A measurement that compares a clean $40 million manufacturer against a messy $8 million services business will show whatever the deals' differences show, not what the tool changed. If the bank cannot find a close match, run the comparison on two mandates and average, or wait for a better match. The numbers in any staffing scenario are illustrative, not measured Acquivo results.

Keep the categories identical. Have the same associate keep the log if possible, because her sorting of production versus judgment will be consistent with the baseline. If a different associate keeps it, have the two of them agree on the categories before starting.

Then compare phase by phase. A reasonable hypothesis is that software-assisted production could reduce hours more in repeatable work such as marketing materials and buyer research than in discovery or negotiation, while judgment hours stay flat or rise as the associate spends more time reviewing and deciding. Rework may fall, and elapsed time from kickoff to launch may shorten, but the bank has to test each outcome. Evidence from controlled writing-task research also shows why results should stay task-specific: a benefit in bounded writing assignments does not establish the same result for a live sell-side mandate, where context and fact-checking matter. [3]

If the pattern is different, that is useful too. If production hours in marketing materials did not fall, either the tool is not producing a usable draft or the associate is rebuilding rather than editing, and both are fixable once identified.

Reading the results with care

Two cautions on interpretation. First, the second mandate carries a learning cost. The associate is using a new workflow for the first time, and some of her hours are spent figuring it out rather than doing the work. Note those hours separately if possible, and treat the third mandate as a useful additional check rather than assuming it will be faster.

Second, do not let the comparison become a referendum on one person. The log measures a process. If the managing director uses it to conclude that an associate is slow, the next associate asked to keep a log may round down, and the bank will have no reliable data again.

The output the bank wants is a sentence like: "On comparable mandates, associate production hours fell from roughly X to roughly Y, concentrated in materials and buyer research, and time from kickoff to launch shortened by about Z weeks." That sentence, with the bank's own numbers in it, gives a skeptical partner evidence to review and tells the bank whether its current team may be able to carry more work.

What to do with the number

Once the bank has the per-mandate figure, three decisions become easier. The first is capacity planning: if production hours per mandate fell by a known amount, the bank can estimate how many concurrent mandates each associate can carry and decide whether to hire. The second is pricing: a bank that knows its cost to run a mandate in hours can take smaller engagements with confidence, or offer preparation-only work at a fee it can justify. The third is the next tool decision: the phase where production hours remain highest is the next place to look.

None of this is available to a bank that adopts AI without measuring. It will have an impression that things are faster, a partner who is not convinced, and no way to settle the question.

How Acquivo Pro fits

Acquivo Pro organizes every mandate around the same six phases used in this measurement, which makes the log easy to keep: discovery and readiness, valuation, marketing materials, buyer matching and outreach, offers, and negotiation through close. On one login the bank runs deterministic valuations across 21 industry verticals, generates teasers and CIMs from the client questionnaire and data room, supports buyer matching, and tracks NDA, IOI, and LOI flow in a single pipeline. To see it on a live mandate, request a demo through the Contact page.