I recently accepted an offer at a MM firm. It seem like a place with a good culture that doesn’t try to crush their associates unnecessarily. My question is, specifically for those at middle market firms (and potentially ex-consultants), do you still find you have time for things like exercise, time with friends either during the week or weekends, travel/holidays if planned in advance, etc.?
I know the WLB will be worse than in consulting, but even in my worst weeks, I could generally still exercise in the mornings, and was able to see some friends on the weekends.
It's going to vary drastically from firm to firm and you really don't know until you're in the seat.
My last firm had a great work-life balance. Partners/VPs tried to avoid meaningless work and generally respected the weekend as personal time (although all bets are off during a live deal). I had time to workout most days and hang out with the girlfriend / other friends at least once during the week.
A good barometer are the VPs - are they a bunch of single work-aholics or guys/gals with families? Number of deals per fund is also a string measure for the pace of things.
That’s really helpful. Yeah I think absent live deals it seems like they’re pretty respectful of time but I’ll try to ask ex-associates.
What would you consider a reasonable number of deals? I think this firm does 3-5 per year, with a couple of deal teams working on them.
Former consultant here too. Sometimes yes sometimes no. However, I've been having luck with the "fuck it" mentality where even if things are heating up, I still get enough sleep every night and exercise.
If the tipping point in job performance is volume of work that can be achieved by the the marginal hours that I would otherwise spend working (as opposed to getting adequate sleep and exercise), then fire me lol it's not healthy to work there anyway.
As I see it, coming from consulting where you still have a conception of what it's like to see people who aren't in this myopic finance path, it's just a job after all. Our employers are lucky to have us, we could easily go work at literally any other fund, consulting firm, VC firm, you name it.
That’s helpful — do you think your firm has noticed / do you think it might hurt your progression or have you found you’re able to operate at the same level?
Is jumping to an equally good opportunity that common / easy? I keep hearing once you get into PE you can go anywhere but have you felt that in practice?
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