Hey everyone, I wanted to know which pe shops are considered to be sweat shops and why? I.E. I keep hearing that Apollo pays 400k but they’re the pinnacle of sweatshops and cause some to quit within the year.
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In GENERAL Mega Funds and Upper Middle Market late stage funds will lean towards being sweatshops since the deals are bigger and have bigger parties (tax, accounting, legal, consulting, management, etc.) involved in the process. Overall more time and money are thrown towards these bigger deals and there is a lot at stake if each platform deal is one of 10-15 total investments. Additionally, some of the MFs are public and so they have to try and deploy that capital quickly so they can go out and raise additional AUM, which causes a ton of work and stress.
Although the Middle Market and Lower Middle Market seem to be less sweaty, there are situations where due to a lack of resources, you actually end up getting crushed being responsible for the entire deal process.
In terms of pay, you can use latest fund size to approximate in most cases. Definitely do your diligence on any fund you are interested in.
Thanks!! This color is extremely helpful.
There is definitely a pain premium at a place like Apollo and associate turnover is incredibly high. Disagree with the below poster that the hours are because of deal sizes. A lot of time is spent generating pages / output to satiate Senior Partners and create the guise of "doing things" (long facetime and content, short diligence). There's enough money at stake for the mid-levels that they're happy to crush / ASAP the junior guys on mindless tasks even if it has a marginal impact on the deal partners' perception of their value-add.
I'm hard pressed to find an associate who left Apollo that wholly regrets their decision.
You kind of just proved my point though:
"There's enough money at stake for the mid-levels that they're happy to crush the junior guys on mindless tasks even if it has a marginal impact on the deal partners' perception of their value-add."
That's the point. These deals are so big, there are so many people on the team, that there is an incredible amount of work just "done" to justify the entire process. That's why MFs are called banking 2.0.
I think you'd also be hard pressed to find an associate who left Apollo and says that it in no way helped their careers/exit opps.
I hear you. Unfortunately most of an associate's time isn't even deal related. It's random portfolio company decks and firm overviews for prospecting.
Not arguing about what kind of work they do, just about the amount. Agree
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