What do I do during downtime, PE workload is a joke
Working at a ~2bn PE fund and maybe work 1-2 hours a day and sit around the rest of the day / sit in meetings. Pretty much just crank through deals, collect deal toys, and add some investment thoughts to random portco management teams/our investment platform decisions.
What can I do to pass the time? It legitimately feels like I’m being paid exorbitant amounts of money to pretend to do work on my computer and raid the break room every 30 minutes.
At this point a 1-2 week assignment such as cranking out a model will take me MAYBE a few hours given how many I’ve built in the past.
There was a point where I was concerned I was getting understaffed but apparently I’m taking on the largest workload of everyone here. Are my fellow associates just incompetent? I’m from a biochem background and am starting to think the “extreme PE workload” is just a bunch of frat bros grossly exaggerating what they do. I’ve also been here almost a year, so it’s definitely not the honeymoon starting period where I’m trying to learn the ropes or anything.
Everyone in the industry is incompetent except you. (They don't even have a biochem background).
(1) The claimed work load is largely a “frat bro exaggeration.” Sure. One may be working 80 hours a week but everyone knows a big chunk of that time isn’t spent actually doing work. People who say otherwise are either just uninformed or lying.
(2) If you come from a biochem degree/profession you probably are used to far more… rigorous work. Finance isn’t a particularly difficult job to do. It is mostly basic algebra (just using a computer to do the math for you so really it is just setting up basic algebra, not even doing it), throwing around meeting invites, and editing already existing material.
I used to live with a roommate a year ago in MM PE who claimed to do 110+ hours a week/always “logged in” at home, but I always heard him just scrolling through TikTok for hours. One time I came home early at 1 pm on a Tuesday and his alarm was just going off to wake up.
I assumed he was just an aberration, but maybe not?
That specific situation sounds rare but that general concept is very much how it is
Approaching the year mark as well, and my experience has been quite the opposite lol. Probably average 2-3 indicative/first round model exercises a month, which I agree are pretty easy to churn out at this point, but then have steadily been on deep round 2 diligence processes of some sort at any given point which are very heavy lifts and akin to the "deal sprints" people refer to on here. Most of my 9-5 is mostly spent on calls for portco updates, add-on type work, or active diligence stuff then only after that am I usually able to crank and get my actual work done. My shop is pretty operationally hands on and look at a lot of distressed stuff in our sector so that probably lends to the increased workloads. Curious, are you closing deals? I'm yet to see one cross the finish line lol.
The "extreme PE workload" is way better than banking lol, prob average 70 hours a week, just not getting that much down time in those, but weekends are usually chill.
Closed two this year, bunch of diligence on random companies we passed after running quick models. The deal close and getting company swag is the most fun part haha.
Workload ebbs and flows a bit depending on travel, but my experience has been pretty similar. Closed a couple deals in LTM and mainly support portco stuff right now and have tons of free time. Have gotten top bucket reviews and promotion at the end of the year and spend half my time surfing reddit, reading e-books and working on learning second language... Probably "work" ~50-60 hours per week and real work is much less.
Maybe you're just lucky that you don't have the typical paranoid hyper-anxious PE MD staffed on your deals. The type that tell you to waste hours building 100+ page "info packs" to show IC and participating lenders and co-investors that you're "running hard on diligence". Or a hyper-competitive VP that combs through your work to "invent" mistakes that you have to spend hours going back and forth with them to explain that it was right all along.
I'm being tongue in cheek, but in all seriousness your workload will depend a lot on your seniors and the type of deals you're on.
Some seniors are chill and don't create unnecessary work. Others like to reinvent the wheel for no reason and will keep you pumping out slides and analyses all night.
Some deals are simple, straightforward, and relatively light hours. Other deals are combinations of 3 companies where all 3 are carve-outs of different public companies and there's a shit ton of PF adjustments you have to finesse in the QoE, and you're also syndicating co-investment to a dozen parties with a 2 week timeline, and your calendar is full of diligence sessions that you have to conduct every day, and your PE partner REALLY wants to make a name for themself so they make you waste time on useless analyses and also the seller wants to sell ASAP so every day feels like a sprint.
yeah this is the norm lol. OP found a jackpot shop.
Yea guess I’m lucky there - partner already has a name for himself and is really now just coasting off decades of successful funds / lots of deals are now just slam dunks coming in from his connections.
Plan is to chill out here for as long as it makes sense and then start my own fund down the road.
You're going to fuck it up for all of us!
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