Leaving PE at Mid-Level
Short background: Have 8-9 YOE, starting career in management consulting and moving to PE. Have now been in PE for 5+ years and don't see myself going up the ranks (not the right personality, not performing well under stress, looking for more work life balance).
For those that have left PE mid-career, how did you approach it? Helpful to understand motivation and how you found your next gig but more curious about how you made the decision on what to target for the next step. Feels like there are so many different routes (chiller finance like secondaries, co-invest, family office, FoF; value creation / portco support roles at investment firms; operator roles like chief of staff, strategic finance, corp dev / strategy).
PE provides a lot of optionality, which is great but its also hard to know I have to start making decisions and closing doors based on the next step
Bump
I took a few years off, figured out what I like doing & what I'm good at, and jumped back in It was great since I was able to decompress and travel and when I came back, I felt like I had a competitive advantage over everyone else who were burned out.
That's great! How did you figure out what you like doing / what you were good at when you had your time off? What are you doing now and why was it a good fit for you? How'd you find the opportunity?
How many YOE did you have before leaving? How easy was it to get back in the game?
I just followed my interests and curiosity...read a lot and talked to people. I had 7 years of experience when I left the industry. What I'm doing now is pretty niche but my takeaway is that there's no "path" and if you build skills and a network, there are plenty of opportunities for motivated people.
Are you back in investing or something else?
If you didn’t like it before then why now?
I went back to PE and liked the success as opposed to feeling average before. Invested two funds and doing something different now
Do you have any networking tips?
Nope I'm not great at networking but have made friends along the way and try to ping people at least once a year (I am usually the one reaching out). This has led to multiple opportunities
What do you say when you reach out
What’s Gucci my killa? What’s drugs my dealer?
Before thinking about what specific job you’ll be doing, take some time to think about what life you want to live beyond just not wanting to feel burned out. How consistent or inconsistent do you want your hours to be? How much do you want to work? What type of people do you want to work with? Do you want to manage people or be an individual contributor? Do you want to commute? Do you want to work from home? Where do you want to live? How much money do you need to cover your burn + save? How much stress are you willing to take and what kind of stress - executing work product stress or managing a process stress or managing people stress or communicating stress? How much time do you want to take off each year and are you okay with being plugged in while out of office?
Once you have an idea of what you want your life to look like, you can backsolve for the specific job.
For me, for instance, I wanted consistent hours (didn’t want the volatile of deals), remote, wanted to be able to go on PTO for 2 weeks at a time, didn’t mind the stress of managing people or communicating but didn’t want to be responsible for excel work, and wanted to work with family oriented people with lives outside of work. All that led me to a senior FP&A position as a team leader within a corporate that pays about $350K.
Took a very long time to find that and frankly some people taking a bet on me (because I had no prior FP&A experience) to get everything I wanted. But I had a very clear idea of what I was looking for and that has made it easier for me to be very happy with my decision.
Appreciate the post, this is really helpful. A lot of my priorities are aligning to yours.
Did you take time off to find out what you wanted? How did you go about looking for the roles you were targeting?
Let me know if you're open to discuss more in detail over DM / offline.
Sure post with a burner and I’ll dm you.
I didn’t take any time off but I negotiated a month off which I used to take an epic trip. If you do take some time off, I’d recommend putting some structure or plan around it. A lot of the people on this site who regret leaving PE are people who suddenly have more unstructured free time with no goals or ambitions or friends and don’t have anything to make them feel proud of themselves or keep themselves busy outside of work. When you’re outside of the industry, it’s easy to look back with rose tinted glasses and gaslight yourself about how it wasn’t that bad and you weren’t that miserable and find yourself wanting to go back to PE.
In terms of finding the job - you have to network aggressively almost like you’re back in undergrad trying to break into IB. Reach out to anyone who left IB / PE / mbb and is now at a corporate. Reach out to former IB / MBB colleagues who are senior and tell them you’re looking and see if they have any clients with openings. You have to approach this with the same intensity and competitiveness as you would looking for an elite HF or MF PE role but you can not rely only on headhunters to feed you leads. You are entitled to nothing and your skillset is not as directly transferable as youd think and, while PE experience is highly respected, people aren’t going to just give you a job. I would focus on finding roles where you have a warm connection from your network, those tend to be the jobs with the best culture, comp, and seniority. It you only apply blindly on LinkedIn (which you should do as well) you are going to have a very low conversion rate and likely not get what you’re looking for. These companies are hiring for the next 5-10 years not for a 2-3 year churn and burn associate program, so they place a huge amount of value on warm referrals and finding the right highly referenced person.
Wow. I am honestly shocked that you get $350k in FP&A. Is that entirely cash every year? If so kudos to you
Yeah cash not including stock that’s worth another $50-100K but vests over 5 years so idk if you want to count that.
There is a lot of money in FP&A and I think I’m actually relatively underpaid for my role (but probably also work a lot less and I love my team, so I’m pretty happy). The problem is most people get stuck at the junior ranks in FP&A and don’t get to see those big $ until they’re in their 40s or 50s. The benefit of a career in PE / IB is that it accelerates your career path and you can come in more senior and literally skip ahead a decade or more.
Coming out of PE as an associate or sr associate, your easiest transition is likely to corp dev but it’s not where you should stay long term. You already know how to do M&A, so if your goal is to become a CFO (who earn way more than head of Corp dev) you need to get a rotation of doing traditional FP&A (which actually is a really strategic and high influence role at a large company). Similarly if you want to be a CEO, you should probably try and do a rotation through ops or product. Corporates reward broad generalists who “know enough to be dangerous” at a variety of skills vs IB / PE which are pure specialist jobs. Your goal in either path is to own a P&L from either a GM or a business unit CFO perspective as quickly as possible.
Did you consider non operating options (eg, coinvest, secondaries, sovereign wealth)? Seems like great wlb and pay
Would you ever want to acquire a business and operate it yourself?
Honestly, not really. Don't believe I have the entrepreneurial personality or risk tolerance for this.
Bump
What is the "right personality" to progress the ranks in PE?
Each firm is different but generally work obsessed psychopath that will push people out of the way to succeed
Define "push people out of the way." Is there a lot of politics?
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