Restructuring Exits 2021?

Honestly the “why PE” isn’t going to be as hard to explain as the “why did you lateral to restructuring, and then now to private equity?” 
 

Your best bet will be places with a loan to own strategy or something similar (distressed private equity, at shops like Apollo). I’d probably craft a SHORT story on how you were fascinated with the restructuring/bankruptcy process after some exposure in your job, and now that you’re well-versed in the legal proceedings and technical skills that you’d like to take a more hands-on approach by identifying companies and helping them to turn around to achieve superior risk-adjusted returns. 
 

Something along the lines of that. Does that make sense? It’s mostly about making each step in your career look like a natural process (I was interested in XYZ, so I followed it through, but now I know that I positively want to do this because I am excited about XYZ), rather than a “hard stop” because you realized you hated your job. 

Doing normal buyout PE will be harder to spin (because RX flows into shops with distressed PE strategies), but I’d probably spin it still along the lines of finding the work fascinating, hoping to work closely with post-close companies to help improve operations, analyzing the capital structures of companies and figuring out how you can best change their capital structure to increase returns, etc. Except you’d be focusing less on the “on the brink of death” scenarios and more on the “what can we change about the way this company operates to help it grow and increase returns?” 

If I were in your shoes, I’d first land the RX gig and totally crush it so that people in your team/people who went through your team will be willing to mentor you. Reach out to former analysts who made the transition to the kind of PE you want to make it into and ask them how they pitched these things + how they got headhunters to see them less as a “distressed” guy/girl.