Thoughts on Investor Relations? A good or bad move?

I'll recycle and repost this from another response I gave.

Pros: generally better hours and less need to deal with the deal minutae.
Cons:

• far less respect than deal professionals, both internally and externally;

• less control over your career and process

• highly repetitive and logistics oriented

There is a huge amount of variance in terms of comp. I do see some former IBD people, but it's generally more equity sales folks or former placement agents. I also do see some deal people who switch over, but that's more rare.

You do see far more women in IR than men. The job is very EQ-heavy and involves relationship building, and many women outperform the men in that department.

I'll paint you some pictures and you make the call as to whether it suits you:

• You will get to repeat the same presentation 300 times on the phone and in person with LPs

• You will try to pull LPs thru a process, which takes a lot of logistics and handholding and this is not mentally interesting, but you have to make sure that a million logistical things go right and they sign the dotted line

• You will go to conferences and schedule a ton of meetings and juggle calendars. If you're at KKR people will want to meet you. If you are at a MM firm, you're going to be like a cheap hooker walking the streets (via email) shilling your smaller fund. You'll get to send out 300 individual and personalized emails to all LPs at a conference saying "Hi, I'm at RRK, a mid-market fund that has had stellar 20% returns. We focus on oil & gas. Care to meet? I give great handjobs." Well ok maybe no HJs, but there's a lot of begging for meetings and phone calls, 80%+ are ignored.

• You have to track a lot of minutae in the CRM. You have to follow-up. You are judged by how much you close.

• You will spend countless hours in Preqin and Pitchbook researching out LPs and their preferences, only to be ignored or told what you're selling is not what they like to invest in. You will get angry responses back ("Did you even check out our website first???!!" Yes I did. My bad. Sorry.)

• All deal MDs/CIOs think their fund is awesome. So if your fund doesn't attract money, you will be blamed. If your fund raises money, you probably will not get credit. When I raised $1,5bn at a high returning fund, I was given no credit and only a standard 2 month bonus, because the fund returns made IR look easy. When I joined a smaller fund that then struggled with returns, I got reamed daily. It was beyond toxic. The CIO was yelling "What do you do all day??? You've raised FUCKING ZERO!!!" As if it's my fault no one wants to invest in a fund that has major strategy drift, a CIO that belittles LPs to their face, has little focus, and a negative 25% annualized return.

The degree to which an IR role is fun to do depends greatly on the firm / product, the degree to which you're respected and compensated, and your own disposition.

I'll give you some case studies:

• My former analyst didn't want to touch deals, didn't feel she could really do finance, but liked people. She organized family office gatherings for fun on weekends. She has now been hired to a megafund. Good for her.

• Another friend was a FoF LP that went to a mid-sized fund which he has helped to grow to >$1 or 2 bn. He told me he gets paid a nice base and a very significant % of the capital raised. I think he might clear $500k / year during a fundraising year. Plus he gets carried interest.

• My last IR gig I took a 40% pay cut (went down from $275k+ to $150k) because I was desperate to work on the deal side in healthcare. Punchline? I got slotted permanently in IR and didn't work on deals. Bitter? You bet. I worked 80+ hour weeks, 7-days per week, only took a few days vacation in year 2 because it was mandatory, and I still had to spend much of the time on a laptop.

• The person junior to me at that shop came from equity sales. She worked at the role for a year then went back to the ibank to make more money. She found the hours in IR to be longer than equity sales, and not well compensated.

The degree to which IR has better lifestyle depends also heavily on the shop. IR has to make a lot of calls and be on emails constantly. You're always on the hunt. You have to generate your own leads (unless I suppose, it's KKR). You may be traveling a lot. I know some IR people that are >50% of the time on the road. Others travel maybe a couple of weeks a quarter.

And the degree of ease and fun in raising is dictated by the product. When I was raising for an ultra-high returning PE fund, the calls came to us. I got to meet Fouad Said (Oxford's business school is named after him), got to meet Henry Kravis who headlined an investor conference we put on, met the named founders of more LPs than I could remember. When I worked at smaller startup PE funds it was like I had an infectious disease - no one want to even shake my hand at a conference, much less have a sit-down.

Maybe that's for you. Maybe it isn't. Just go in with a clear understanding of what you're walking into and what you're giving up.