Investor Relations - Blackstone - Good Prep for Front Office?
Hello Hello -- seeking advice!
I have an offer from Blackstone as an analyst with their Investor Relations and Reporting team for one of their Private Equity Funds and am wondering whether or not this is a good move.
I am currently in consulting at a big 4 firm for financial services orgs and am looking for something more rigorous with better exit ops. I'm not sure exactly what my end goal is but would like to be front office as I'm highly personable and want to be revenue-generating. I understand that this team is a support team for the Marketing team (who are the ones going out to meet with LPs to fundraise) but wonder if this would be a good stepping stone for fundraising or corp dev.
Any additional thoughts on Blackstone's culture in general or with respect to internal promotion is welcome as well.
Thanks!
Analyst 1 in Consulting, bummer your thread hasn't had a response yet. Sometimes bots are smarter than humans anyways:
More suggestions...
I hope those threads give you a bit more insight.
Bump
Unless you want to stay in IRBD then do not take the offer. Too many firms are using the brand name of their true investing businesses to lure people into roles that they would not take for a firm without the brand name. Your assessment for doing a role in an industry that is not your primary focus should not be only due to the brand name.
Thoughts on choosing this path if you see yourself in Investor Relations?
IMO would be a great place to learn the ropes about IR. Platform is huge, raising funds all the time, and has a variety of products.
OP - if by front office you mean "investing/trading" then no this is not the role you want.
If by front office you mean "revenue generating" then yes that's fine. Truly good IR/BD people are rare and if you are, you get PAID. Like a lot. Although a founder, think about David Rubenstein. He is NOT an investor. He's a sales guy. And is worth, well, a lot of money.
Someone with his own firm once told me: "There are three real jobs in this business. You can raise money, make money or keep the trains running on time"
Two of those three generate revenues and so have the scope to be very very well paid.
Hope this helps.
Good Luck
What was the comp like?
Mate, it is Blackstone... You should go for it. Give it a try, and then if you don t like the type of work just network outside the firm (great brand should facilitate that)
From what you say, it's not clear what the job description is. You mention it's IR, but your team is supporting the team that actually goes fundraising. So is this actually a reporting team role? If so, it's pretty far from an investment role. It may help you get into fundraising down the line, but still not an ideal role even for that. I've had friends join these types of teams from an audit role in big4, not consulting.
I think it would help to reframe the nomenclature.
Generally speaking front office relates to the reason a firm exists, and the back office is all the support and administrative functions. Revenue generating vs. non-revenue generating is a framework more appropriate for a traditional investment banking or consulting role.
At a place like Blackstone, the ‘front office’ is the investment staff, the back office is everyone else. If you said you wanted to go work at Blackstone with the intent of being in the ‘front office’, that would suggest you want to be an investment professional, in which case you absolutely SHOULD NOT go into investor relations at Blackstone.
It sounds more like you want to be in investor relations / business development (i.e., fundraising). In that case, sure it’s probably a fine place to go. It’s Blackstone, you’re pretty junior and if you are a top performer you can be pretty mobile within the IR/BD functionalities. I would just be keyed into the teams that do fundraising vs. reporting and how the teams are structured/who they report into. For example, if fundraising is a completely separate team with different bosses than reporting, it’s usually harder to move into that side of the business. If however your bosses boss oversees both fundraising and reporting, then over time you should be able to position yourself to do more of the former. Broadly speaking, with these large organizations, its tough to tell your boss their baby is ugly and you’d rather switch teams to work for one of their peers.
A few other things to keep in mind, at a place like Blackstone (i.e., a public asset manager) there is investor relations that deals with LPs and investor relations that deals with shareholders. They are very different animals.
If you want to be “meeting with LPs and trying to get them to give you money” the place to be frankly is probably not Blackstone (because it is Blackstone, it basically sells itself, if they turn the lights on and come into the office they raise $75-100bn a year). It’s probably more like a cap intro team at a place like GS or MS. Or maybe in the IR department of a smaller but emerging PE firm, or possibly at some of the allocators/consultants like Cambridge etc. It is Blackstone and so its not a bad place to go, but in terms of direct experience for what you want to do something to think about.
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