How bad has it been for you thus far this year? Work in MM growth buyout and have been working full days every single day across new deals and portfolio work since the start of the year…. Don’t think I can sustain at this clip and curious to know what it is like elsewhere right now
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Also doing growth buyouts - feels like, on average, am working until 12-3am+ 3/5 days a week, get lucky and work until 8pm 1 day per week, and until 7pm on Fridays. Generally light weekend work (have not gone deep on a deal).
70-80 hours / week without having done a deal sprint feels like a fair approximation. Lot of portco BS embedded in that.
There’s not a chance in hell ur averaging 3am buddy
you interpreting “12am-3am” as me claiming an average of 3am is very on brand for the industry
Also MM growth buyout and still working 80+ pretty consistently. We're doing advanced work much more often to gain a competitive edge and feels like every deal we are interested in we do a shit ton of work before the process even launches, and then subsequently find out their top customer is 50% of revenue or some other instant kill.
Yeah that sounds annoying. In private credit I have the opposite problem. We send term sheets to support a buyout quickly before doing the proper diligence in order to win the deal, and can be in some sticky situations later doing in-depth final diligence after signing.
this is interesting, what kind of advanced work do you do that bypasses something as rudimentary as customer concentration (ik it was moreso just as an example)
Bankers are notorious for hiding even something seemingly as simple as customer concentration until the process is fully underway. One example I can recall where the bankers gave us revenue by customer but refused to provide profitability by customer until the second round, only to find out that the top customer which was 20% of revenue was 55% of EBITDA. This kind of stuff happens all the time and is more common with middle market businesses. In terms of advanced work, it will be doing a phase 1 market study, dozens of expert calls, fully diligencing similar businesses to "get smart ahead of the launch", screening potential add-on M&A targets, etc.
80+; MM LBO. Closing a platform, a portco refi, portco add-on under LOI, bunch of FP&A work for one shitco. Going to be a long year.
Hang in there...
How many portco's you got?
Currently 4....
Omg these hours are awful. I wonder if it’s half bad if portco work is stripped out
lol the whole interest of PE is to have portco, if you only want to work on deals stay in IB
I’m sure building KPI dashboards and tweaking board decks are so sought after, Intern in PE. Obviously I’m asking about on a relative level, if a fund is less focused on fixing the shitcos, how much better is it from a wlb standpoint?
2nd year assoc at a MM, working probably 9-9 M-T, 9-6 Friday and then 3-4 hrs of work over the weekend. looking at deals but not sprinting at anything yet
How big of a fund? Where?
Please PM the name of your firm
Bumping this^
please PM name of the firm
is this considered good hours
LMM An3 working until about 7-8pm consistently. No weekend work. Pay is like half of street but I’m not complaining. It’s run like the founder / senior partner’s family office which helps culture immensely.
What like 225k?
An3 so half of street is generously like what 120k?
At a $5bn MM in NYC, working probably 9-12 M-T, 9-7 Friday, 3-4 hrs on Saturday and all day Sunday. Adds up to 80 - 90 hours a week which is more than IB.
This is cap. Ur done at 8pm
At a LMM fund doing maybe 45-50 hours a week. I’m in a LCOL city post-MBA. Comp is low tho so you get what you pay for
Would you mind specifying city (or region) and comp? Would be really helpful as I’m benchmarking for offers
Tier 3 city, $200k TC. 6 YOE
XXX
What are your ASOs hours like
Did an IB SA and am headed to a secondaries platform FT - was it worth it in your opinion? Any advice?
Not a shot. Secondaries groups are done at 6pm lol
Principal, LMM, wake up around 9am and usually done for the day around 5-7pm & manage email streams later in the night as I watch TV.
Deal sprints obviously cause late nights to 12ish on average, but rarely later.
Found a home with good people, good pay, and good hours - granted its not "prestigious" but ya'll will learn.
This gives a young man hope. Geography and fund size?
that sounds good but you're higher up in the chain after all, it's kind of expected for you to have it easier. What are the hrs for your associates on avg?
Most associates are done by 7-9pm on average I'd say - again, deal sprints are different, but I try to just let them lead process workflows with clear milestones in mind. So if my associates bail to workout midday or wrap up around 5-6 in the office, I could give two shits as long as diligence streams aren't sacrificed.
It's all a setting of expectation - If you tell me you need 3 days to wrap up the model, then I expect it to be done in 3 days. If it takes you 5, and I saw early nights every day - obviously that raises some question marks.
I don't mico-manage - as you grow in this world, try to find managers who are more hands off. Best advice I can give for the balance.
How many years of experience and what level of cash comp?
9 & a bit more variable than standard operating procedure - $350k base + unlimited bonus. Average is usually in the 80%-120% range of base. HBU?
This is really great. and a sustainable schedule.
5-7pm finishes are what i prefer (if able). Ofc, happy to work late if sprints, but not like 11pm every night in 'BAU'.
Is this because it's been enforced by top-down? Everyone adheres to this rule, and they aren't trying to be the next hardo group?
Sr Assoc MM Fund Tier 2 city
M-T 830-8pm, Friday is probably 830-5
then anywhere from 2-8 hours of weekend word that i do on my own accord to get ahead of the next week..
All in probably 60-65 hours (barring deal sprints) which is a great balance.
ASC2 at LMM buyout in Northern Europe. Work consistently 9am - 7pm, leave early fridays, no weekends. USD 100k base + 100k bonus first year
Would you say these hours are in line for most funds in Northern Europe?
ASC1 - was working 70 - 90 consistently for most of the year (but was managing two portcos going through huge changes at the time on top of deal work). Dropped those two portcos at the start of this year and im down to 60-70. Its amazing how much a shitty portco can ruin you (and no one else in the firm recognizes the work it takes)
MF Asso 2.
Start work anywhere from 7-9am on weekdays. Usually end up going home around 7pm-2am depending on how much work I have (I don't like working from home for context). I have definitely had outliers where I am back home at 5:30pm or sometimes at 4:30am, but these aren't very common. On weekends it is really dependent on how live my deals are. If it's a super live deal, I'm probably going to be in from close to 9am-9pm on Saturday and Sunday (if not more), if it's the other end of the spectrum it will probably be like just noon-6 or 7pm on Saturday. Obviously this is a range and most weekends fall somewhere between this depending on staffing. Hours per week usually can look like 65 hours when things are chill and 105 when things are rough.
I have PE partners breathing down my neck at night on the weekends, so clearly too much. For better or worse, the PE industry is in massive stress right now and the winners and losers of the industry are being determined right now with fundraising. DPI is becoming increasingly hard and even firms that have raised capital are struggling to deploy it with hundreds of billions left in dry powder. The portco I work for aggressively does roll-ups and it's a PE platform that actually has good returns, yet I have the partner on my deal and my PE team on my neck, I can't even imagine what the partners at struggling firms are doing to their operators right now. Will say, PE operating at a nice gig can be extremely lucrative and have been told it scales up drastically (left about a year ago from banking, and have found this role more fulfilling with overall less hours + potential for a lot of pathway for the future either within this company or post-exit with the PE firm as an operator).
Former MF PE associate. Hours typically are 9:30AM-7:30PM in office on weekdays, with ability to leave after the seniors / mid-levels depart. Our group culture was heavily skewed by most seniors leaving office for dinner and then logging back online, so very flexible WFH policy starting at night.
On a live deal sprint, hours are materially worse than IB. Expectation is that work is being done 24/7 around the clock. Partial rationale: often times another GP will try to preempt process with "kill-or-fill" bid. If BX finishes up their diligence ahead of us, we wouldn't be in spot to gain IC approval to put forward an accelerated final bid unless our diligence work was essentially completed. Therefore, firm DD mentality is to sprint as fast as you can on compelling deals and consequentially the backstop plug to achieve this is # of working hours in a day.
When not on live deal, hours are pretty variable. At times, you'll be inundated with PortCo work + early deal stage diligence - often implying nights to 11PM-1AM+. Othertimes, I'll knock out everything I need to do during the day and I'm offline as soon as I leave the office around 7PM with no weekend work and ability to start partially unplugging as early as Friday afternoon.
How associates fall into (1) live deal, (2) busy non-live deal, or (3) relaxed non-live deal will vary based on a multitude of idiosyncratic factors including: PE culture, number of associates per class, market activity, how PortCo asset is performing, if pursuing roll-up strategy with obligation to constantly screen new bolt-on M&A assets, working style of VP and their content creation bias (ex: 50PG vs. 120PG IC deck, 20 vs. 50+ primary calls)
Generally - there was consensus that PE hours were better than banking, given stretches of category #3 yielding a meaningful reduction in work demand. Conversely, the work is substantially harder in PE with much more thought required. The peaks (better) and troughs (worse) of PE typically place you in same "WLB" feeling as IB
I certainly can envision firms if associate is always put on live-deal sprint that PE is radically worse than IB with ability to burn-out even the most enthusiatic young finance professionals.
"Former MF PE associate. Hours typically are 9:30AM-7:30PM in office on weekdays, with ability to leave after the seniors / mid-levels depart."
wow that sounds miserable. So if they stay longer you also need to stay longer? What about WFH e.g., on Monday/Friday?
A few nuances: The ability to leave the office was contigent on critical mass of seniors / mid-levels leaving before the associates would head out. If all partners and mid-levels were still in office working, it wasn't a great look for the associate to leave ahead of them (for obvious reasons and what's taught to IB analysts during day #1 training)
On the other hand, there usually was a mass exodus from the office starting around ~6PM (partners) to ~7:30PM (mid-levels), so consistently enough critical mass would depart to provide aircover for leaving.
We comparatively felt this "night" WFH policy was much better than other MF associate peers who needed to stay in office for much longer time. Simply framed, if seniors were in the office, we were in the office, and when seniors left, we could leave (as most did pretty early in the night)
Friday WFH / Monday in office.
Additional note: WFH policy changed the physical work environment, but didn't impact the direct # of hours worked. As only caveat, WFH cut down on busy work "faking" in-office productivity during quiet stretches at night and gave time flexibility back to associates
Everyone here besides a MF is done at 9pm everyday stop lying
the things I would do to be done at 9 every day. I would do horrible things.
3 years as an associate at a MF before VP promote this year
I’d say 9:30am - 11:30pm was the norm (left the office typically around dinner time and worked at home). Friday was done by around 7pm. Probably a good 3-4 hours of work on Sunday. During live deals I would literally be pulling 100 hr work weeks for 2-3 weeks straight but this would realistically only happen twice a year… still miserable
As a VP I’m probably done by 9:30pm (2-3 hrs of weekend work) but honestly the stress factor feels 1.5x… not sure if this is really the move
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