Re: Private Equity
[#permalink]
06 Oct 2009, 16:56
I can only speak to my own experience, but I worked at a bulge bracket bank as an analyst for 3 years then went to a large buyout fund (KKR/Blackstone/TPG).
As a more junior analyst my role was to put together various analysis such as equity comps, precedent transactions, debt comps, DCF, SoTP, LBO, financing, etc. Also responsible for a ton of presentation work, recoloring charts, aligning bar graphs and writing memos both external and internal... But 80% of the work I did was reviewed by an Associate who is responsible for "signing off on my work" before giving it to someone else who may also provide comments, etc. I was also responsible for carrying books to meetings, organizing stuff with administrative assistants, ordering dinner, etc.
As a third year analyst, I reaped the benefits of being a level in between a two year program analyst and an associate... got to leverage work of junior analysts, review it and pass it off as my own!
I have friends who went to quite a broad range of private funds, like the Megas down to small ones like GTCR, so the role varies quite a bit between funds, expertise and size.
Take for instance a mega fund, you (and I) are just a cog in a large wheel and are responsible for running diligence meetings with PwC (EY, KPMG, Deloitte) who are your accounting support guys, running legal docs with your internal and external counsel, running operating diligence meetings with Bain and Co (who are hired to dig super deep into a subset of questions that can break a deal) and working with the banks/mezz funds who will provide financing to make the deal happen. Next you are responsible for building massive financial model so detailed you have a line item for window cleaning expense (up to 100 tabs, down to row 25,000 through column HH) and you're accountable for every darn number in the spreadsheet. You are also responsible for digging deep in the dataroom which has tons of information (but thank God you have all your deal support guys to help out).
At some funds as someone mentioned are very much operational (BainCap, Golden Gate, Berkshire) who love consultants as their junior squad due to their operational expertise and often rely on those guys to help improve operations. The rest is rinse and repeat (unless you're at a distressed shop, VC, growth equity, etc)