how many hours do you work per week, honestly
I've been bouncing between 100-110 / week for quite a while now, not sure if it's a firm thing since not too many friends in industry. Need some comps. Thanks.
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you mean real work, where I use my brain? Maybe 5-10.
off deal means staff management and politics. not more than 55-60.
On deals 70-100 off deals 10-60 (40-55 usually)
LMM here. No live deals = 55-65. With live deals = 75-90.
Have multiple live deals going on right now.. 80-90 hours
On active deals (25% of time): 80-90
On early deals (50% of time): 55-65
Chilling (25% of time): 40
If both early and active were 110-110 / no weekends, would you stay at your firm?
Absolutely not. Might stay 'till the 1 year mark and look to lateral but you will not find me working 110 hour weeks consistently and staying at the place longer than a year
35-75
OP here. Thank you everyone for your responses so far. Please keep them coming. Also helpful to know size firm.
For the past 2 months I've been putting in ~100hrs per week on no live deals (EB). Our one MD is fucked... Time to gtfo according to this thread
What is different about this MD compared to others?
share that feeling of having a work-addicted MD without family/partner who is happy just being busy with whatever.
Most ridiculous part is this is in an allocator / LP role with semi-regular co-investing, where theoretically you shouldn't be working anywhere near this much.
That sucks. I am sorry man. You go to allocator / LP roles to be free of that BS.
Yeah that was my thinking initially. I turned down a direct PE offer w/ a $15k higher target comp package in year 1 + nominal carry + fee free co-invest for this :(
Not that the actual $ value especially post tax is that big of a difference, but just conceptually it's like fml.
People keep quitting and hiring isn't being prioritized at the junior level, so here we are. Don't even think my comp this year will be that good. Will have successfully underwritten 3x+ the # of approved deals this year compared to last year, while being more understaffed and taking much more responsibility in terms of workstreams, and while our firm is crushing it as a whole.
That truly sucks man. What exactly are you guys spending so much time on? Do you have external clients? Primary fund investing and some co-investing shouldn't be the most demanding of roles unless everyone's spinning their wheels creating thick IC memos in case in one of your LPs ask to see the deck for some random deal. I have never once heard of a LP work that kind of hours.
On the other hand if your comp package is only 15k lower than direct PE, you are definitely getting paid more than most LPs. So you do have that going for you.
Part of it is we were understaffed to begin with relative to our AUM per IP and then we had a bunch of people quit (cause the group head sucks) and then didn't backfill hiring anywhere close to make up for that attrition. Most endowments for example are in the $1-1.5B per IP range, while we are over $2.5B per IP.
Then our memos are also really in depth and juniors basically write the entirety of the memos with frequently only 2 person deal teams (seniors rarely contribute to memos themselves other than comments), so you often have 1 person pulling together 25+ pages of material for fund investments (in Word, not in PPT), while co-investments can be 40+ page docs. At best there will be 1 analyst provided to support the associate or sr. associate on a deal. Many of our fund investments aren't just vanilla commitments too - we'll work in rev shares, GP stakes, warehousing, seed new strategies, or create custom SMAs, so it's just more complex all around.
Other factors include our investment program being relatively immature (firm is young to begin with then the group came in and completely overhauled the program) and also we don't have a fixed client base and have new clients coming in regularly who have to ramp up w/in our program (and to your point, starting to bring on OCIO-esque clients). So we don't have an established book like most endowments or foundations and end up having to deploy a ton of new $ each year, instead of only having to deal w/ new commitments as old investments roll off. I'm currently on 5 live underwritings right now, 3 which need to close by year end.
Our firm isn't actually that institutionalized either and we have limited ops support, and we also work on a # of non-investing initiatives such as onboarding a new portfolio management system. Our group head also significantly increased the amount of client communications work once COVID hit (daily market update materials were a thing for months for instance) on top of whatever marketing materials we need to make and answering questions that come in from our clients and client teams. Also raised over $1B in 2 weeks to tackle COVID-related dislocation opportunities, so then that needed to be deployed too.
He's also constantly "revamping" shit and then changing his mind on things, or having people do work that ends up being ignored / not used. Both for random bullshit and also investments, like you'll ask this dude if he's on board for the deal team to bring an investment to briefing stage so we pull together an initial memo, he says yes, then you send it to him and he'll be like "eh actually I changed my mind" and it doesn't even get discussed at IC - like come on.
As you can tell I'm fucking done with this place.
Man this is way above typical LP/allocator hours. I am a junior analyst at an allocator and the busiest time I had is about 55, usually 40-50 hours a week
Do you work at Apollo?
1st year at a large fund, worked 100+ on a live deal for a couple months but outside of that has been more like 60-70.
I work at an UMM
What are you doing when you’re not on a later stage deal for 100+ hours a week?
H&F?
LMM: 50-60 hours when nothing live; up to ~80-90 when live (never pulled an all nighter and could count on one hand the number of times I was working past midnight)
Large Cap (current): 80-90 pretty consistently, can go a bit higher/lower depending on deal activity
IMO the hours are 75% driven by culture and 25% driven by firm strategy
.
LMM LBO here, 60-80 sounds about right. What kind of sweatshop requires 100+? Isn't 100-110 standard IB hour?
No lmao IB is 70-80 normally
Can I lateral?
As someone who went to a MF from banking, my MF hours were way worse. In banking I averaged around 90-95 hours with some weeks being heavier than other given the dynamics of the industry. However, PE exposed me to a much more toxic culture which made banking look like a cakewalk at times given the abundance of artificial deadlines / politics with IC (including pre-pre IC or pre-IC meetings) which drove my hours
Lately 70-90hrs of “screen time” but online literally every waking moment which is the worst part to me. Can’t ever unplug these days. Haven’t had a day off since mid Oct and burnout starting to affect work.
Slow weeks would be 40-50hrs I’d guess.
Career average at this shop is probably 55-60hrs but have done numerous 100 hr weeks. No all nighters but several 3/4am benders.
Strategy: hands-on growth equity type stuff mainly although we also will look at any structure that makes money Firm size: $10Bn ish Sector size: $2Bn ish Current $ that I look after across my PCs: $800m ish Trying to deploy another $3-500m atm across the portfolio I’m paid around 265k +/- 10% all in as a 3rd year.
Team runs pretty lean and we lost some bodies this year. Have been doing a lot of firefighting lately but was on several “live” deals earlier this year that all died for one reason or another.
Thank you. This level of detail is the comps I didn’t know I needed. Good perspective. Wish you some free time soon mate.
MM. first year was brutal but improved since then. Highly variable. Was much worse my first year but now:
If chasing a deal or prepping for investment committee, 80-90 hours on average. Otherwise, the median week is probably somewhere around 55-60. I’d say I’m chasing something serious about one-third of the year.
I've been working from home since the pandemic and noticed that I've been working longer hours when I'm at home. I used to work 40 hours a week, but no I work 50-60 hours a week
MD at a MM: 110-120 hours including weekends.
Never thought I would say this, but yes we do notice when you're first in and last out.
There's a certain fondness for those that share the same spirit for the grind.
You’re the worst
I know.
I even verbally berate and throw things at people, yet they still won't leave.
The things we do for preftige.
Started at an MM recently. Has been 90-110h the last month
5bn fund: 60-80 hours/wk
How old are you and how much do you make ??
26, ~$300k
THIS guy fuks
Live deal: 75-100h (maybe 3-5 of those per year)
Other than that: 55-65h, incl. usually 2-4h on the weekend
I am a 3rd year at $10bn+ fund
Did hours get better as you got more tenure or has it always been like this? Of the 75-100 hours, how many of those are during the weekend more or less?
OP here also interested
OP here. How do you define live deals, and how long does a "live deal" period usually look for you?
Do you define live deals as any of: Pre-IOI? Post-IOI? Post-LOI? Post-Exclusivity?
In live deal mode, hours haven‘t changed much, I pulled roughly comparable hours - might have improved a bit, but no fundamental change. The non-live deal times improved though and the c. 60h per week is roughly what guys above me do as well (12h Mon-Thu, 8h Fri, balance on w/e) so I don‘t expect this to improve materially.
I define a live deal for this purpose as a deal, where we regularly give IC updates, as the IC cycle adds the real pain in the process, i.e. drafting IC docs and preparing discussions while doing DD etc.
Hard to generalize as it is dependent on the process design, but these will usually last for a couple of weeks.
Depends on deal situation:
- Multiple deals blowing up: 100-110hrs of effective work
-deals in slow mode: 50h of effective work + some down time (still on between 9-1am)
-no deals on, only pitching: relaxed half the week, 3-4am nights before the pitch
-first 2 weeks as an analyst: 10-15h/week
Loved those first 2-3 weeks
LMM, 50-55 in an average week. 40 isn’t uncommon around this time of year when deals start getting put on hold for the new year. Typically around 1 week every month or two closer to 70, with live deals in crunch time pushing 100-110
Pre Covid/in office: 60-65 Covid/WFH: 45-50
Time spent on tasks that actually require brain power: maybe 10 hours a week. Big maybe....
Agree with the comments re that it is the culture and the way is staffed which set your working hours.
e.g. My MD and I were given a Investment MEMO to read and analyse in order to create a deal alert for Monday on Friday 4pm. Guess what happened that Sunday...
Havent had a day off since early September, and worked most Sundays.
I believe you can sustain the pace for 1-2 years unless you have more control about the deal (which means you can plan and pace yourself which I prefer).
My advice based on experience:
- Apart of researching the firm that you target or you receive the offer from, make sure to identify if your future boss is a workaholic (Does he has hobbies, family, partners?
Depends
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