Graham Partners

I know them, am originally from the greater Philly area so many years ago I was thinking about making the move back closer to home, so I interviewed, networked into all of the big Philly shops, LLR, Susquehanna, etc. 

I don't think I'd call it a crazy sweatshop, but it's not a lifestyle fund. Juniors get worked fairly hard, but the training is solid and there's a strong track record of internal promotion. Analysts are basically doing Associate type of work from day one. A couple of the juniors left a few years ago and punched up in terms of fund class and were able to move upmarket, which is a testament to the training/quality.

Returns have been solid, not amazing, but the genesis of the firm is that it's basically born out of the Graham family office. The Graham Family are the founders of many key injection mold plastic technologies, so basically a lot of modern packaging was created by the original Graham patriarch. They sold that business to big PE decades ago for $1B+ and that's the basis of their money. They are now mostly outside capital, but a base is still always rooted in the family.

Steve is the son of the Graham plastics founder. So he's more of a Kendall Roy and not a Logan. That is probably too harsh of a comparison, but you get the idea. He is a quirky guy not in a bad way, but he's a silver spoon guy, so the fund is kind of just his past time. It's not his life mission to make this fund successful so he can be rich, he's already rich. The other partners are generally pretty nice, basically wealthy Philly suburb type of vibe. I didn't get asshole vibes from any of them.

All in all, solid shop, people are all generally nice, it's more casual given it's location, but it's not a lifestyle shop. You'll work pretty hard as a junior, but the Graham Partners name is solid and industrials is a pretty good general place to be. Comp is light, but you're in Philly, so cost-adjusted, you're likely way better than your NYC peers. 

If you have some ties to the Philly region, or jsut want to live in a nice suburb where you can make PE type of money, afford a house, send your kids to a good school (there are some great private day-schools in that area) I think it's about as good as you can do. You could easily live in Rittenhouse in a very nice apartment as a junior or have a place out in the main line area, which is also very nice. 

If you're assessing Graham against other NYC based MM shops and you're coming from a Bank/place where you have other strong brands on the table, it should probably be towards the bottom of your list. Kind of just depends on where you're coming from.