Career Progression Stories: Thomas Wu

We caught up with Thomas Wu, M&A Associate at CORA, to talk about his career progression, his role at Jonas, our ABCs, and more!

Thank you, Thomas, for sharing your story with us. Looking for a successful career like Thomas’s? Learn how you can join the Jonas Software family by clicking the button below.

Career Progession Stories Transcript:

My name is Thomas Wu. I am part of the M&A execution team as an associate in M&A, I work with the CORA team under the Jonas portfolio.

Sure. I’ll give a quick highlight about my background. I came from IBM, I worked in a corporate finance setting doing financial analysis, planning and forecasting.

What does a typical day for me as an associate in M&A look like? I spend most of my time doing financial modeling and trying to understand the qualities of a company to see if they are a fit within our portfolio. If they are a fit, then we do in-depth analysis of their financials and we look for questions that we need to ask the bankers or the individual owners to understand the company a little bit further.

What I enjoy the most about my role is the interactions I have with the broader team, and the amount of critical thinking that I do outside of just looking at the numbers. I would describe my role as a combination of both the quantitative aspect of finance as well as the qualitative aspect of understanding how a business is run. Balancing the two of those makes a very interesting role.

The one thing I really love about Jonas in respect to helping someone develop their career path, and myself in particular, is the focus on sharing best practices and knowledge across all functions. So recently we’ve attended CORA University, which is held annually. We bring together business leaders from all over, I guess, all over the world, to share everything they know about running and operating a business. We also dive into some other aspects of M&A, looking at the quality of a business, looking at P&L, the finance functions, how you really integrate a company and then run those ratios that we talk about internally to get the companies up to speed.

What really gets me excited is the acquisitions that are yet to come. As we complete more acquisitions, that just means we’re adding more valuable members to our family. Through adding those members, we then get to share more expertise and listen to their side of the story. As we grow larger, that just means our reputation grows and we get exposure to larger deals, which again brings in more talent and more opportunities to the existing portfolio.

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