Moving to the LP Side (REPE)
Hi everyone,
My apologies in advance if the post is repetitive, but I wanted to see if anyone had any advice as to how to transition to the LP/fund side of REPE. I currently work at a small owner operator (around $500M AUM) as an analyst (have worked there for 1.5 years). I graduated in 2020 from a liberal arts college (top 10) with a liberal arts major (I wanted to become a lawyer at the time I chose my major) with a 3.6 GPA. As I don't feel as though the training is the strongest on the numbers side, I have been taking the ACRE courses in modeling and REFM to try to bolster my skills. Would it help me get over to the LP/fund side if I got an MBA after a few more years at my current firm? Or is that not as helpful, and should I focus on networking into a role? Any networking tips?
Hi jfong_1, no, I never sleep and so I can respond to any lonely threads (like this one) at all hours of the night. Impressive, I know ;-)
More suggestions...
You're welcome.
Are you an acquisitions analyst or more on the asset management side, or both? If you do acquisitions work now it would be easy to highlight those modeling skills on a resume that LPs would like to see when hiring new analysts. As an analyst your job would be predominantly modeling and help coordinating Due Diligence, so not feeling overly confident on numbers could be an issue making that jump. I would say an MBA would be helpful only if you don't believe you could pass a modeling test for an interview or if you're going to try to make the jump from a lower middle market firm to a top 50-10 REPE and need that name brand school on an application.
In general, networking is always your best friend in getting new jobs, and reaching out to alumni or other colleagues at other companies is a good way to gauge where you could land. Overall, I would say stay at your current company and really nail down your modeling skills as best you can and network while you do that. Once you feel more comfortable with modeling, you could reach out to recruiters or LPs and if you aren't getting much feedback on your applications then you could go back to school. Given that you've only been out of school for about 2 years, you have plenty of time to go back to school should you need to.
Thanks for the feedback! Do you have any recommendations on recruiters/where to find recruiters that I should reach out to? And I do want to end up at a top 50-10 REPE firm; is the MBA really necessary to get there? or just recommended?
Just to provide more context, my official title is acquisitions analyst, but due to the small size of our shop, I do a mix of acquisitions and asset management type work. I should be able to pass a modeling test that requires building one from scratch with more studying/effort (usually I just input the deal level data into the form model that we have and then adjust model if necessary to specific deal conditions).
The above covers most, I'd reiterate that you should spend another ~2 years before hopping to an MBA ... Like I mentioned in the other MBA thread - test the waters with your current profile and see what hits. No harm in doing so.
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