We thought (maybe just me) that PE would have none or significantly less of the silly bullshit that banking had. Would love to hear some horror stories of pre-MBA associates being owned by their more senior colleagues.
The gorier the better.
Ill start it off:
Last Saturday all-nighter for a diligence pack, dismissed with a casual ( 5 minutes) flip-through. No sweat off their back. It was "urgent"
Portfolio company was in some real trouble, so of course the new Associate could help. I was asked to go through a list of 10,000+ companies, go to their website and determine if they would be a tier 1, 2 or 3 potential sales lead (based on company given criteria) for the sales guys to call since the company had downsized their BD and sales team (and of course they didn't want to do this either). For Tier 1 and 2, I had to find names and contact info for business development and any executive I could. Even at 30 seconds per company, assuming 100% efficiency and no breaks, that is 83 hours of work; I probably got to a minute per company at my best. It took me almost 3 weeks (including weekends) of nonstop work - I almost quit.
Wow that sounds terrible... at some point, I would just throw up a job posting for an unpaid internship. I'm sure there'd be plenty of eager college kids with time to spare in exchange for some experience.
Just had another weekend of mind-numbing diligence, that feels mainly worthless... yay!
Get used to it. This past weekend I spent most of my Saturday turning an internal deck (not even investment committee) that I doubt we get half way through flipping it in this upcoming BS meeting.
Not to worry - we do have a multipage overview of a highly fractured industry (READ: many companies), but these are essentially backpocket materials and may never see the light of day. BUT in case the senior partner is curious, we can pleasantly surprise him, like my Saturday!
And in case you were wondering, my industry overview has graphics and logos and formatting that would make a banker blush. No sweat off my principal's back of course.
"make a banker blush" - lmao this is gold.
I work at a relatively small shop ($500m AUM) and I have to be honest, I have never had to do some of the BS work mentioned here. The most difficult thing I've had to do in my (short) PE career so far is drag a CFO out of bed on a Saturday at 7 AM to give her comments on 2017 budget because the Partners and I wanted to get an early round of golf in at 8 AM.
Regular shitshow for me. That's why I'm 24/7 on WSO debating trivial shit.
From the other side, pitching / working for a PE client can suck.
1) 80 page book, every number and FN spot checked, everything perfect, during the introductions the Principal flipped through the book. When the introductions were done, said, "ok, this is all very interesting, let's start at page 34". We stopped and talked on FOUR other pages in the book. He expressed some small interest, so in the car back to the office, the MD started sketching out the follow-on presentation we needed ready for next week, which was going to really go into detail, not skim the idea like our first book.
2) PE shop calls on Tuesday to ask if our Lev Fin team can back them in an LBO for the majestic total of $150 million. The shop has AUM of c. $100 bn, but want us to provide $150 million for this deal, oh and it needs to be done by next week. Waves a carrot of "if we do this, we might get to pitch on a $3 bn sellside in a few months", so of course the MDs leap at the chance. On Wednesday we start the book / model for Lev. Fin, it's not worth their time, so they bump it down to Credit. Credit Committee ("CC") meets on the coming Tuesday, CC needs the book Friday, their analyst needs the model Thursday. We even got bashed on the fee because the firm didn't think we did enough work to earn it. Later, we wouldn't participate in an RBL the PE shop needed done, so we got bumped from the list that could pitch for the sellside.
3) >$5 bn deal that went through in Q1 / 2017, we pitched several PE shops for both a lending and advisory role. We blow our brains out building the valuation and lending model on the implied sense that if we impress, we'll get the role. Find out later they've already appointed GS as the adviser, and invite us to the lending facility, fuckers. We politely decline, take our talents to another buyer in the auction. Find out from my colleague at GS that the PE firm gave them MY fucking model for the debt capacity analysis, double fuckers. In the end, neither of our buyers won the auction.
For the kids that got stuck doing shitty work, I'm surprised you didn't just outsource to a bank, we often get requests from the buy side for random bits of analysis.
Saturday conference calls... unreal. I'm also assuming your shop is not a partner track shop? I find career track firms are more respectful to junior resources' time.
I do work on the weekends, don't get me wrong, but if the deal team needs to be together, we usually hit up the Partner's house and work over brunch and lots and lots of alcohol.
Saturday 8am team conference calls ... every Saturday
pls delete
LMM PE here. Babysitting incompetent management teams that make 3x what I make is essentially my fucking day job.
Common requests:
"Hey can you fix this Excel spreadsheet?"
"Do you have a formula for this?"
Proof reading documents for mistakes that a 6th grader would make (ie grammar and spelling)
hahaha
i can't believe i didn't post this since it happened yesterday: CFO calls me scrambling and wants to look at a projection model together because the partner asked him to add some line items and all of sudden the model doesn't balance anymore.
ok we're on the phone, i open the attachment and boom its the template i built for him, its fucking fool proof and now its out of balance. did the standard checks on why its not balancing and couldn't find it. i tell him lets hop off the phone and let me take a closer comb through. 30 seconds later i couldn't believe my eyes. he didn't add RSUs back as non-cash.
in all fairness this doesn't happen regularly and i actually enjoy doing some of these one-off "favors" for the mgmt team and its also a good thing that they feel at ease asking for help (think of this from an investment POV, as if its your own investment). also a plus when i know they sing my praises to the partners. :P
Not PE, but Lampert once sent a summer intern on a road trip to every AutoZone in the country.
Doing a diligence trip in India for 2 days with a Go Pro strapped to your chest to make sure the company's warehouse actually exists.
I say 2 days because it took 3/4 a day to fly there, walked around for half a day with a go pro, and then took 3/4 a day to fly back.