Feeling Super Unprepared for PE Gig
Candidly, I don’t feel like I had the most comprehensive banking experience. My group was relatively light on live deals, and I probably spent ~90% of my time in PowerPoint and ~10% in Excel. I’m heading into my next role and am worried I am very behind peers with more live deal, modeling, diligence, and process reps.
I’m not worried about work ethic or general execution, but I do want to close the technical/process gap as much as possible before starting. For people who came from a pitch-heavy banking experience, what would you actually recommend doing in the 1-3 months before starting?
Sorry bud you are so cooked.
Interested here too
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If you can do well in a 3 hour or 6 hour modeling test your technical knowledge is fine.
I do not have any advice but I come from a similiar banking group it seems like. I literally used excel to just output charts i did no actual work in excel somehow LOL. This was a BB coverage group too..
Nothing you did in banking is really relevant at all other than learning attention to detail and how to do basic ppt / xls work. If you want to prepare for PE:
1. Open up a 1 tab LBO and understand literally every single component of it, including all the financing instruments and balance sheet adjustments.
2. If you know the sector you’re going to be covering in PE, find some pitch decks from other groups in your bank and read them to learn bout general macro level trends
3. Read “The most important thing” by Howard Marks
4. Talk to the Levfin guys and ask them if they could walk you through a credit memo / how they underwrite financings
5. Sleep and work out as much as possible, your health will likely take a hit in PE
6. Spend lots of time with your friends, family, significant other and make sure you have a solid foundation of support
7. Honestly go to therapy and learn healthy ways of dealing with anxiety and stress
8. Ask your VPs / associates questions about your sector or deals
9. Read a 10K of a public co in your space and read some research reports
10. Learn AI tools and how to use them to automate work so you can do less menial work
11. Save money so you can quit if you hate PE and actually have something to show for your time working in finance that will benefit you for the rest of your life
12. Take the GMAT if you want to go to bschool
13. Golf / tennis / some rich people activity so you have something to talk to your partners about that isn’t work
14. Take a vacation between banking and PE and go somewhere cool - Australia, Nepal, Europe, South East Asia, Japan, etc.
Generally just focus on being a stable well rounded person and being intellectually curious and refreshed and ready to go. You are gonna get worked very very hard in PE, but you’ll also learn a lot. Don’t go into that job already burned out.
It’s banking 2.0, you figured out how to survive in banking 1.0 didn’t you? You’ll be alright. Just work hard, have a good attitude. The rest will ~generally~ fall into place
Spend as much time in excel as you can. Take a public company and build a simple LBO and think about the key assumptions-- what is driving the growth, what margins can you underwrite, what leverage would you get, and then look at IRRs and MOIC if you sensitise each of those assumptions. Then do same thing for a different company with different drivers. But LBOs will only be one part of it, i'd also try to think through broader excel skills-- how do you look at a huge database on information and sort it, what are the key cuts, etc. That one might be harder to find the data set to play with, but the more familiar you are with different look-up functions and how to cut data the better prepared you will be.
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