BDT 2021

Wondering if any monkeys could shed light on the associate life at Byron Trott's infamous merchant banking shop. There haven’t been many related recent threads and their fund size has been growing really nicely. Major respect for oldhead Byron still refusing to have a firm website.

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WLB is pretty top notch and they care about the experience that their people have. To that end they do a few things:

  • Overhire so teams aren't too lean and you can spend time not working and shit still gets done
  • Lots of perks - they have a massive gym in the office with personal trainers just for their employees
  • Staffed on a mix of deals and advisory work - if you get on an absolute burner of a live deal, they might let you spend some time doing some slightly more relaxed advisory work so you can recover
 

I recruited on-cycle two years ago, so my experience may be a bit dated - generally they only pull from BB/EBs through HSP. They grew quickly so I'm not sure whether they still have that small firm feel. From what I gathered through the process, the advisory isn't traditional buyside/sellside but rather retainer clients, so the work is similar to working with a portco. On the investing side, they do half minority and half majority buyout so you do get that breadth of experience. Culture seems great - the associates work very hard but everyone I talked to seemed to love it and were super technical. Pay is street or more bc you get a COL bump. They also emphasized that they wanted to invest in their employees and for them stay for the long haul. Only a handful of people have left the firm before, which speaks to its culture but also means not a lot of data points to go off of. HSW placement top notch if that's what you choose but they're not 2 and out. I think one or two went to Booth but that's because they wanted to stay in Chicago.  

 

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