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
085Given a B2B SaaS company with this EBITDA and this P/E, what would you do to improve its operations and financials?Houlihan LokeyInvestment Banking · New York · 2026
Say this
Work the SaaS levers in order of value: pricing, then retention, then sales efficiency, then cost. In software, a point of net revenue retention is worth more than a point of cost saving, because it compounds.
Then walk it
- Pricing first. Most B2B software is underpriced relative to the value it delivers. Move to value-based or usage-based pricing, introduce tiers, and raise prices on renewal for the existing base. This is near-pure margin.
- Retention second. Net revenue retention above 110 percent means the installed base grows without new sales. Reduce churn in the weakest cohort and upsell modules into the strongest. This changes the growth rate and therefore the multiple.
- Sales efficiency third. Look at customer acquisition cost payback and the magic number. If payback is over 24 months, the problem is targeting or pricing, not effort. Reallocate spend to the segments with the fastest payback.
- Cost fourth, and deliberately last. Consolidate the cloud bill, rationalise the product portfolio, offshore support engineering. Real money, but it does not change the growth story.
- Then the bolt-on question: in a fragmented software vertical, acquiring adjacent modules at a lower multiple and cross-selling them into your base is usually the single largest value-creation lever available.
- One flag on the question itself: P/E is an odd metric for a software company, since GAAP earnings are suppressed by growth spend and stock compensation. I would work off EV/ARR and EV/EBITDA instead, and I would say so.
Where candidates lose it
Jumping to cost cutting. In software, growth and retention drive the multiple, and the multiple drives the value far more than a margin point does. Also worth noticing that P/E is the wrong lens here; naming that is a real signal.
Expect next
- What is the formula for net revenue retention, gross retention and churn?
- Which of those levers moves the multiple?
- How would you verify the pipeline to forecast revenue?
Reported by candidates at Houlihan Lokey (Investment Banking, New York, 2026). 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.