3 top Evercore execs share the exact career tips that made them dealmaking legends on Wall Street

Over the past decade, Evercore has risen to from plucky boutique to fourth-ranked advisory investment bank behind heavyweights Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley. Patiently poaching rainmakers, like executive chairman John Weinberg and senior managing director Paul Stefanick, has been key to Evercore's ascension under CEO Ralph Schlosstein.Schlosstein, Weinberg, and Stefanick recently shared the best career advice they got early in their careers that helped launch them to stardom.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.Evercore has become one of the top advisory investment banks in the business over the past decade, soaring from $180 million in advisory deal fees in 2008 to nearly $1.75 billion in 2018 — now fourth behind heavyweights Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley. Poaching star bankers, shrewdly and patiently, has been key to Evercore's ascension. Since taking the helm as CEO a decade ago, Ralph Schlosstein has assembled a murderers' row of dealmakers who have helped the firm land increasingly prominent and lucrative roles on megadeals.Among the rainmakers Schlosstein has brought aboard in recent years: John Weinberg, the Goldman Sachs exec who co-headed the firm's global investment bank for more than a decade, joined in 2016 as executive chairman, and Paul Stefanick, a longtime Merrill Lynch mergers-and-acquisitions star who ran Deutsche Bank's US investment bank for several years, joined the following year as a senior managing director.Business Insider recently spoke with Schlosstein, Weinberg, and Stefanick for a profile of Evercore's ascension from plucky boutique to leading independent investment bank, and common thread was the importance of investing in up-and-coming junior bankers at the firm. It's not a surprise they put such a premium on developing young talent. Apart from the firm's sustainability and future depending on it, senior mentorship played a pivotal role in each of their early careers. When asked about the best career advice they'd ever gotten over the course of their long careers on Wall Street, each of the three bankers credited a sage piece of wisdom doled out at the beginning stages of their careers for helping launch them to where they are today. In the case of Schlosstein, it came on the first day of his first job.