Wanted to hear from other people in coverage groups…
Do any of you do any modeling? Or is it mostly powerpoint formatting, comp spreads, digging through filings for data points?
Feel like that’s all we do on my team. Wondering how this can be really marketed in an interview especially for PE roles?
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It’s all a function of what you’re working.
What projects have you done?
Coverage definitely does modeling but you’re not going to create something just for the hell of it.
Just an intern but I interned at an UMM PE firm last year and asked this same question to a few people.
The bottom line is that you shouldn’t try to downplay the “coverage tasks.” The execution skills are obviously important, but the industry and market analysis/MS Office skills are just as important. I also wouldn’t underestimate the value of being able to develop a coherent and insightful thesis around an industry/sector/sub-sector and then compellingly presenting said thesis. This is a large part of PE and coming from coverage IB you should have a leg-up here
When is an IB analyst presenting a thesis lol
To disagree with above reply, although sector knowledge is important, the KEY THING PE is looking for is not sector knowledge but raw technical and execution skills.
OK if you want to work in a tech growth fund and don’t know what SaaS mean you’re in a pretty bad shape, however if they ask you to do a market study of the communication infrastructure digital lending space in Vietnam you’re gonna have to do research anyway.
what PE firms want is for you to 1) have a baseline of technicals do they don’t have to teach you everything 2) for you to have seen some M&A executions so you have an idea of what’s going on and can coordinate with advisers / take some of the work from your Principal 3) general business sense, communication skills and client readiness
Now if you don’t do LBO modelling everyday that’s fine, you can focus on your sector specific execution expertise and talk about 1) specific verticals interesting for the firm and ideally pitch some ideas as well to prove you can source ideas 2) ability to ramp up on subsectors and maintain a decent conversation with founders /CEOs 3) deal execution experience make it sound like you’ve seen a shit ton of situations
Del
Depends on the subsectors. HC Services has a ton of LBO work. Biotech/medtech focuses a lot on growth financing like IPO/ECM/SPACs.
Del
The problem with coverage is that you don't get to do the real prestigious work like maintaining buyer logs and making process timelines that is reserved for only the genetically superior M&A team
If you don’t do process timelines you haven’t earned the right to recruit for buy side.
Dataroom reconciliation - highly differentiating
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