15 Comments
 

that's just life. you're most likely achieving what your heart desired a few years ago and that's ok. He landed at a LMM PE shop, which has a lot more opportunities for an asymmetric upside vs going to a BB, which is still good in terms of comp, but has less room for the 1% opportunities like your friend has captured .

The economy has long moved on from the days of hard work (compared to others) = top 1% outcomes. Although it's a small amount of people, people in their 20s and 30s have more opportunities than ever to earn as much, or more than your avg IB analyst - VP via being a content creator (even without many followers, if they have strong engagement), starting a business in a niche area, good looking women doing OF or your friend who chose a traditional path, but has captured the asymmetric upside which comes from working in a non institutionalised firm).

 

Research Associate in CorpFin

They do add-ons at 4x and exit at 8x, using roughly 80% leverage (debt, seller notes, and earnouts). For a $30M EBITDA platform, entry EV would be $120M, with only ~$24M of equity required. At exit, the platform would be worth ~$240M EV. The firm is extremely lean—one investment professional across two platforms, reporting directly to the partner with no analysts or VPs—and receives equity in the deals.

What even is this math what 30m EBITDA companies are going for 4x that aren’t total shitcos 

 
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lol just my two cents brother

-- you posted the same reply 4 different times, so not sure if you are human or bot or something else

-- i have never heard of an institutional LMM PE firm hiring analysts out of undergrad who are reporting DIRECTLY to the partner/MD, given immediate carry, running deals across multiple platforms, making millions of dollars PER EXIT all within their first couple years out of undergrad (which also implies these deals were executed right when this analyst joined and have also already been realized all within a couple years, during a pretty bad macro environment 2023-2025)

-- Not sure what definitions you are using for "LMM" and "PE Firm", but this sounds more like micro-cap independent sponsor / fundless sponsor where a smart senior dude branched out and hired an analyst out of undergrad and this happened to be a lotto ticket and they are crushing it doing some essential service roll-up (this happens). But I don't think there is anything representative or systematic about this for what you should expect to experience as a typical analyst/associate at a standard LMM PE firm

-- Also $30M EBITDA platform is not LMM. if they're starting much smaller and rolling up to $30M then makes more sense. Also add-ons buying 4x and selling 8x. welcome to the same strategy as every other LMM PE firm in the world... 

-- If you do some simple carry math. Let's say you're SVP/Principal at a $500M LMM Fund. Have 200 bps (pretty significant). If that firm returns 3x MOIC (very strong) at 20% fee. That's $4M DAW. And that would be split across [5-10] deals including add-on equity, so each platform would yield [$0.4-0.8M]. And this would be AFTER you've worked many years to get the 200bps, and then executed those deals at 200bps, and then operated and exited them. So certainly wouldn't happen in your first couple years as an analyst...  

 

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