For Active PE Professionals: Day-to-Day Questions on Execution

All - I'm currently a Senior Associate at a UMM PE shop and taking some downtime in the holidays in between plans to reflect on what I do / don't feel comfortable on with respect to the job, especially as I look towards advancing to a managerial level.

For the random gaps that I've identified, I figured it might be helpful to see how other individuals / firms handle them. I don't expect any one person to answer all of these, but would definitely appreciate responses where people more senior than me might have guidance on how I should think about these things. 

To the extent the thread is successful, I hope other PE associates / analysts add in their own questions to the thread. As much as I enjoy and benefit from "which group has the best culture" / "what was your 2023 comp" threads, I know I definitely would benefit from more specific discussions on job execution itself 

1. Modeling G&A: I've really struggled with this recently and am curious how people think about this one. Obviously, this varies by business and fund norms but curious how people think about modeling fixed elements of G&A over time? Variable costs obviously grow in line with revenue, but how do you think about miscellaneous things like executive team / office space / 3rd party service expenses? One simple approach is grow at inflation (whatever rate that may be nowadays), but that would often understate expense growth over a projection period, assuming you're expecting >10% topline growth 
   1. Personally, I've been through the ringer on a few add-ons where we're modeling how the corporate team would shape up over five years with great detail, while slapping a 5-7% grower on other expense items (despite anticipated 25-30% revenue growth) which has me struggling on best practices here
2. Tracking Public Comps
   1. How detailed are your firms with setting up a page or few on public comps? Obviously, it's easy to just pull EV / EBITDA multiples from a CapIQ / Factset which can make the exercise a quick one. However, I've often dealt with a midlevel that wants to scrub one particular comp because of something they know is misrepresented by CapIQ (e.g., share counts, capital lease treatment, debt balance, etc.) While I appreciate the need to do that, I always get tripped up on why it makes sense to do it for 1 company in the comp set, when it's more than likely other companies also have skeletons lurking in their numbers that we're not privy to. 
   2. For areas where your portfolio companies / new opportunities have public comps (e.g., car wash, pest control, enterprise SaaS), how much / often are you staying informed on the publics? Partners / midlevels at my firm subscribe to earnings releases / newsletters from banks for comps of interest, but I'm curious on what else you might do (e.g., quarterly call with knowledgeable ER analysts, joining quarterly earnings conference calls, etc.) to stay in the know 
3. Providing Guidance as a Manager: Curious how midlevels have become comfortable managing associates / analysts on topics that they hadn't been exposed to in their associate years (e.g., new transaction structure, new business model, unique MIP build, etc.) I've listed the obvious solutions below, along with the reasons I struggle with them: 
   1. Solution #1: Reference examples from others to then share with your associates -- this feels like what I see my midlevels do most often, however I imagine it involves a lot of time for the midlevel to find appropriate examples and then understand them themselves, which results in the midlevel effectively doing the job for the associate and losing leverage on their junior employees, which can be a death sentence given the typical workload in PE 
   2. Solution #2: Consulting with other midlevels -- Can be so much more efficient than the above, however can be challenging when everybody is back-to-back during the day in calls, leaving you with several burnt hours during the daytime when your associates could be productive 
4. Reviewing Work Efficiently: I generally understand the premise that midlevels are more efficient than junior associates and reviewing is faster than creating work. However, whenever a midlevel of mine has reviewed a model, they're definitely spending hours by cell-checking, verifying each assumption with data points from the CIM / data room, playing with different cases that make sense. This all obviously comes after a deluge of calls during the day, which leads to the real work in Excel / PPT starting in the evening. It strikes me as a necessary but challenging endeavor as I'm not sure how you actually gain leverage on your associates when you're going into such detail in the review of any work product. Is the simple answer (that I've seen in practice) that you just accept that you'll be sleeping significantly less once you hit VP, or am I potentially dealing with micro-managers?