Investment Banking interview preparation
Every question below is either traced to a named firm from a public candidate report, or tagged at desk level when we could not trace it. Answers are written the way you would actually say them out loud — answer first, then the mechanism, then the limitation.
100 questions, mapped to the firms that asked them
- Questions
- 100
- Traced to a firm
- 100
- Firms
- 46
- Updated
- September 2026
052How do you drive returns in an LBO?Centerview PartnersInvestment Banking · Menlo Park · 2025TPGInvestment Banking · New York · 2024
Say this
Three levers: pay down debt with the company's cash flow, grow EBITDA through revenue and margin, and exit at a higher multiple than you paid. The first two you control, the third you mostly do not.
Then walk it
- Deleveraging: every dollar of debt repaid transfers a dollar of enterprise value to the equity. At five times leverage this alone can double equity over five years with no growth at all.
- EBITDA growth: organic revenue growth, pricing, cost programmes, and bolt-on acquisitions. Bolt-ons are especially powerful because a small target bought at six times inside a platform valued at twelve times creates value on day one through multiple arbitrage.
- Multiple expansion: selling at a higher multiple, either because the market re-rated or because you made the asset more valuable, bigger, more diversified, faster-growing.
- A fourth, less discussed: the dividend recap. Refinancing to pull cash out early shortens the duration of the return and lifts IRR without any exit.
- The discipline point: a sponsor's investment committee wants to see the return work on deleveraging and EBITDA alone, with flat or lower exit multiples. Anything that only works on multiple expansion does not get approved.
Where candidates lose it
Naming only leverage. Leverage amplifies returns; it does not create them. And forgetting that IRR is time-sensitive, so the speed of the return matters as much as the size.
Expect next
- Which lever matters most?
- What would you do in the first hundred days?
- How does a dividend recap change the IRR?
Reported by candidates at Centerview Partners (Investment Banking, Menlo Park, 2025); TPG (Investment Banking, New York, 2024). Source: Wall Street Oasis.
Firm tags come from public, anonymous candidate reports on Wall Street Oasis: strong signal, not sworn testimony. Firms are named as the places a question was reported, not as partners of Fin Maverick. Answers are written for this page to show how to think out loud; they are not scripts to recite.