Secondaries Admin / Legal Work
Currently a PE associate and the amount of administrative work we do for portcos is annoying.
Is secondaries any better?
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Depends on the fund and strategy. Can be considerably less. Which fund are you at?
Well yes there is no portco work.
I'd say calculating marketing statistics is infinitely more annoying (allocating purchase price by company is not always straight forward, backing into the implied NAV you bought when you do a GP-led, etc.), but that's only quarterly, lol.
secondaries is basically PE-lite in my opinion. In GP-leds, the amount of diligence is similar to co-investing, whereby you are piggy-backing off of the GP (so you'll read the QofE or industry report commissioned by the GP, but rarely commission one yourself then plus standard review of internal company documents, plus 3rd party calls) but maybe even a little bit more (you get to meet mgmt teams, do site visits, basically get whatever company info that you want) since it's not as compressed and the GP is controlling the process.
No portco work, and that's both a positive and negative, depending on how you look at it. On one hand, reading posts here, it seems like people really don't like portco work. On the other hand, secondaries is a much more specialized skill set. If I was to ever recruit for a corp fin / dev. job, since i don't have the exposure of what it takes to actually grow the company, i'd feel like i'd be at a disadvantage. luckily, i plan on staying in secondaries, so this isn't an issue but something to flag since there is definitely less optionality in my opinion.
Pay in most cases should be a discount to normal PE (holding fund sizes and performance constant), but still pretty similar overall.
This is pretty accurate. Secondaries is very set it and forget it, once a deal is done you move on to the next one. As a secondary investor you don't really have any control post investment, so aside from monitoring there isn't really anything to do, the main sponsor takes care of that. Its what makes secondaries such a scalable business model.
Well said. Secondaries is pure investing and almost zero operating. Id compare to it long only for private assets.
Wow, what a really a nice read/thread. I've spent all my UG summers interning in secondaries and definitely can echo everything above. If you want to stay in it, there is a really great evolving landscape that can make it worthwhile for the long run. But you for sure have to be conscious of the work you're getting into. Thankfully, I feel really good about wanting to carve out my little corner in this space. Very excited for the future of it.
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