Staffed on underperforming portco - what to do?

Think of it as a positive. You'll probably learn twice as much about generating value turning it around than a hands-off well performing one.

Roll up your sleeves and look for ways to enhance value.

I could have written this post lol. Got staffed in a very similar situation - the 'dog' of the fund at my MF. Just remember that at the end of the day you didn't make the investment so no one will hold it against you - but you will need to get ramped up on the biz (all aspects - from every line of the op model / company FP&A team generated finance statements, to public comps and how they trade) asap so you can jump into whatever capital raising / restructuring exercises await...

On the bright side, when you get to work on new deals it'll seem like a fun breeze compared to this work (trust me) 

Walk in Glengarry Glen Ross style and inspire them. A always B be C Closing

Sorry to hear. It won’t be fun and will be quite thankless. I’ve had a similar situation previously. There is light at the end of the tunnel and you can be totally fine but it’ll require patience and some skill.

Subject to how much of a shitshow it is it could be a major time sink (blocking you from new deals) or pretty chilled because no one cares about it anymore. Given it is 5 years in someone has been staffed on it before. Find out asap who and where they are now. It’s not uncommon that an unfortunate associate gets the shit staffing and someone else gets to pass the baton after 2 years. Or they’ve left the fund - which is a less good sign for obvious reasons. In any case they can tell you a lot about do’s and don’t’s, personalities and history. If you aren’t doing lots of random stuff like equity injections, refinancings etc. and the partner otherwise has a good track record they might just let it slowly die and not pay much attention to it.

On the plus side, considering probably no one wants to be staffed on it you might not have anyone above you. It’ll be sink or swim but if you’re good you can play up quite a bit as part of your role - which if all goes well eventually will get recognised. 

You can help by selling it for 5x to an UMM value buyer with a big operations team. Let me know if you go that route!

Have the same story except my MM fund... associate left as I joined, so naturally picked up his PortCo coverage. I've been here for 1.25 years and I have yet to be staffed on a new deal because 2 of my 3 PortCos are constantly eating dog shit and tripping covenants. As someone pointed out, it's a thankless job, my time is trapped, and I have had an atrocious PE experience. 

The way to get around this (from experience) is to know everything cold. Your first month should just be spent memorizing everything - legit, make a study sheet / Excel. If you can prove you can deal with the BS and get beyond it quick, that'll be your saving grace.

I am sorry to hear you got the dog... just hope it doesn't have fleas.

Outside of what is mentioned, you should work to become trusted by wherever you interact with at the portco, so likely CFO/finance and maybe some of the Ops/sales execs — other than covenants / forecast, people always asking about operating initiatives and sales outlook. These guys are probably feeling immense pressure from the partners and mid-level, and you’re the one who’s gonna be hounding them for data requests. 
 

if you develop a good rapport it can really help you out. Say the partner wants some piece of data that you know just doesn’t exist at the company, you hop on with head of finance and someone else to problem solve how to get to the root ask without blowing them up, and you can sort of help them out by working it up the chain on your end (“Hey know you asked for this bc you’re concerned about xyz, they can do it this way which should get a decent idea about it…etc).

Good practice managing, will make ur life just slightly easier, portco not gonna hate you