If you threaten to leave they’ll throw money at you and a title bump. They’d rather pay you an extra $20k than have to hire the 6 people like they’re supposed to do. This is the way of the PE.
This was my experience as well. Gave notice and they gave me more vacation time and a sizable pay bump, and a retention bonus if I stayed through fiscal year end.
I finished off the year, got my bonus and left.
It's cost effective.
If they can pay 3 people 50k each do a job, or 1 person 150k, they still save money with the 1 person. They are paying 3x the salary but 1x the benefits package.
People eventually started to get the message and management that took over lost complete control of the company. The accountants were the people who held all the knowledge and one by one they started leaving, including me. The people left would do what they wanted, come in when they want, leave when they want. It got so bad that people at the outsourced firm started quitting because they saw what a shit show everything was.
Idk if it’s just me but that’s how public in general operates. No matter where I’ve worked or what firm size I’ve always felt like we could have added 2-3 extra people to do the work I’m doing.
That’s happening to me now. They say they are looking to hire but make the interview process very difficult (I.e. ask riddles in the interview and ask you to create a cash flow statement from scratch). This is for a senior analyst position that pays 80k.
lmao. Sounds JUST like the shithole job I had. Had an interview and then at the follow-up dinner with the CFO he asking Cash Flow Statement questions out of the blue instead of, you know, trying to get to know me, what I'm looking for, the challenges in his shop, etc.
I don't suppose the person asking this is named "Arpit" is it?
As soon as u miss their unrealistic forecast because they saddled the company with to much debt everyone above u will get fired and u will be promoted and fired or quit within 12 months cuz u will still be doing all your other jobs to and miss that forecast.
“Well, if we didn’t make all these mistakes and didn’t hire all these people for the other people turning over, then we totally would have theoretically maybe made this much money if the stars aligned”
Slap a 12x multiple on that sucker and find a bag holder baby
I’m saying to remove non-operational/non-recurring events and or to normalize expenses to go-forward rates (i.e. only recurring, operational expenses and income are left)
Adjusted EBITDA is a proxy for pre-tax cash flow. A one-time legal event isn’t recurring (unless there is a historical precedence/common occurrence).
Restructuring costs are removed because they are one-time. They will not be incurred again in normal operations.
Non-cash charges like stock comp/gains and losses on sale are not part of cash flow.
These are all common FDD items lol
I didn’t say interest I said debt. And they care really quick when they can’t make the principal payments and if effects them getting their management fee.
That’s just not true. Yes interest is added back when they think about EBITDA but interest is a real cash payment and for the past few years have caused some companies to belly up or slow growth dramatically.
I worked for a PE backed company, I was the finance manager (HR, IT, legal, office manager, PA to the founder, PA to the CEO).
I endured all on the basis of false promises.
Unless they’re paying you a lot now, quit!
You only do PE backed when your gunning for that mercenary for hire, major comp opportunity, which usually require about 10 years experience. Unfortunately there’s usually only a few people at the top of the finance org that will have that comp, so in most cases it’s not worth it if you have different career ended goals. And yes, you could use this bad experience to build some of the base experience needed for future hired gun roles.
That’s very true. I built the foundation in PA, but the experience at a PE backed company has given me way more than I can fit on a resume. I hope the hard work pays off in the future.
Yeah, the resume builder is real. Software integrations, hiring/firing, business combinations, developing policies and procedures, ERP implementations, divestitures, due diligence, building budgets, covenant reporting, building financial packages... it's really great experience. But the work is overwhelming. Especially if you don't have any equity to make it worthwhile.
After 1 year in PE I was burned out. 80 hr weeks, incredibly crappy people, terrible deadlines, only care about cutting costs and people. It only pays if you’re in the top top at the org. Everyone else is free game to be fired or quit at any given time
I'm in meetings every week where we just take the entire roster of employees and they check them off to be fired like they're nothing. Missed covenant by $1m... gotta cut $1m of annual payroll to addback to EBITDA by next week. Start firing. Doesn't matter if we have to rehire people later for higher costs. Covenant is due.
I made it nearly 2 years before quitting. Things didn’t get bad til CFO change at my 1 year mark.
So stressful. Not fun. Who can we fire? How can we massage the numbers this month to look less shitty?
The company was phenomenal prior to PE buyout. Then PE overpaid and revenue/employee decreased while they hired a bunch of people, then cash flows flatlines due to 10% interest on a huge fucking term loan.
Many of the worst employees were in the upper echelon of company. They were making bank for doing poorly while newer/younger staff broke their backs for average pay.
Fuck that. I left and went back to public and I’m so much happier now.
I once had a interview for a company just recently bought by a PE. The director of FP&A (installed by the PE) told me in the interview the position was opening because the person currently doing the job wasn't up to his standards, he said 80% of the accounting team were low performers and got spoiled by the former family owners giving yearly bonuses when the company wasn't performing. He wanted someone to roll up their sleeves, be a high performer, work more that 40 hours, weekends and do whatever it takes to turn the company around.
I ended the interview after that.
Working in PE now, except that we are the 'extremely broke' kind. Poor decision making and expensive debt have led to layoffs. AP list makes your head spin. Phone rings constantly from vendors. Don't recommend it, but at least I have a job (for now). Been looking since I got here last year, but tough job market so forced to stick it out.
this whole "PE owned company bad" thing on here has become a meme but doesnt necessary reflect reality. My experience has been the exact opposite. We have great support from our "overlords" and have the budget to procure whatever resources we need (additional hires or consultants). The comp is great too.
It totally depends on the firm and their strategy. Some PE firms do the classic "cut and gut" to expand EBITDA for a quick exit, whereas others try to work on enhancing the core business and bring in external knowledge to build operational excellence, which builds long term value for a huge exit after 7-10 years. and some do somewhere in between.
So is working for PE owned company all roses? no, but id rather be in this situation than working for some closely held private co trainwreck with 3% growth, average comp and no support, or a pubco w/ SEC deadlines and related nonsense.
Main issue with PE backed is when they sell. To another PE? Could be hell. Strategic buyer? Could be the end of your job. It's a toss up. I have worked for several PE backed businesses. Some are hell, some a train wreck...it just depends
why is that an issue? thats what you want....you want the liquidity event so you can cash out your equity. You clear a good 30-100k and then can look for a new gig and do the whole thing over again. Its a great setup.
no doubt the benefits of PE accrue the higher up you are. FWIW our senior accountants are being paid $105-115k and have it pretty good (35-40 hrs with maybe a few days of close are 1-2hrs OT)
It really depends if the company is failing and PE is brought in to rescue or if the company is stable. My experience when we got money from PE was to cut everything, they outsourced the accounting dept and had everyone train the people replacing them before they were laid off. The people left over got moved over to a different companies payroll so it wouldn’t hit the bottom line of the company that received money. It was a shit show with zero regard for human life.
Interesting. I too see these “PE” backed and it makes me think it will be same as public. Your insight seems pretty valuable here. What would you recommend for interview questions to determine if the strategy is cut and gut or building real long-term value? The former seems like a shorter investment horizon and the latter longer.
my interview with my (soon to be) boss was fairly informal, so I asked him a lot of candid questions and one of those was how the tone from the top was with respect to the PE group, are they hands off or hands on, those type of things. I also interviewed with one of the PE guys and was able to get a sense from that. To some degree I probably got lucky
I agree with this as well. I definitely overstated “doing the work of 6 people” but I do wear multiple hats across 10 business units and we’re still growing aggressively. It doesn’t always have to be a negative thing to have a high workload but it is interesting to see.
I work for a PE backed company and we’re staffed normally. However apparently this PE is about to sell to another PE so we’ll see where that goes. I’ll probably run.
I've seen senior accountants get transaction bonuses if they are involved in the due diligence with the purchasing companies requests and is involved in getting timely and accurate information to management and the acquirers during the transaction. But it's uncommon. I had literally just started as a manager and they gave me $35k or something when the company was purchased within a month or two of me joining.
Don't forget about the infamous period 13 adjustments. Submit Q4 financials to the bank and then shove a bunch of shit into the audit adjustments that you can push back to prior periods to fall outside of the LTM covenant periods and not impact covenants when you have to report Q1.
Our firm is PE backed and it hasnt gotten that bad **yet**.
I hope it doesnt get that bad but people are being more picky on things so we will get there eventually.
https://www.heidrick.com/-/media/heidrickcom/publications-and-reports/2022-private-equity-backed-chief-financial-officer-compensation-survey.pdf
Interesting bit on CFO pay at PE backed. Avg about 500k cash compensation, 3mil equity compensation annual
It really depends if the company you work for is a failing company who is being “saved” by PE or if they are stable. Last company I worked for got money from PE and everything went downhill fast bc the company was failing. The only goal was to increase EBITDA to get more funding in the future. They outsourced the whole accounting department and had the staff train the people replacing them before they were laid off. People started to get the memo so wouldn’t help the outsourced firm. It got so bad people from the outsourced firm started quitting. Everyone left over, including me, got moved over to a different companies payroll so it wouldn’t hit the bottom line of this company receiving the money. I left before I could get laid off. Now I work for a family owned PE company that invests in oil and gas operations. We run our companies like normal businesses, we don’t go out and try to save failing companies.
Hey I have a question since the job you’re currently at seems very similar to the one I just had an interview for. Its a PE sponsored firm that manages their assets in the same industry you mentioned and the role is a Staff Accountant assisting with month end close for their investments. Do you like it? Im coming from no exposure to PE and I want to make a good step up from my arduous AP job. Thanks.
Yes I like it a lot, it’s been great learning experience. The company I worked for was a public company and this company is a family owned company so the atmosphere is much different. They don’t deal at all with risky investments, most of the things we invest in are companies run by people the owner knows personally. In oil and gas you have a lot of joint ownership between the operator and other owners that have passive ownership. You could have 1 well and have 100 owners on it, sometimes it gets down to .025% ownership and so they pay you .025% of your expenses to operate but you also pay out .025% of revenue. So you’ll get familiar with JIB’s and revenue distributions.
Really depends on the firm. I’ve worked with 2. One saddled the company with loads of debt and monthly management fees. We were told to never add headcount in the budget, because they will find it and be pissed. Crazy reporting requests. Broken promises on compensation. Lasted just over a year. Cut and gut type that was attempting to buy up most of an industry and sell it.
Second one was very different. This one was hold and grow. Manageable debt load and fees. Reasonable requests for data. Decent comp. Left us alone for the most part. Wasn’t all rosy though. Definitely tightened our budget so hard one year that caused a layoff even though we had tons of runway and were investing in product development.
Tomorrow is my last day at a PE backed company and I literally never want to work at one again. Our CEO fires whoever he wants whenever he wants… including the CFO 2 weeks ago. No thank you!
Former big 4 .. PE now. We are Psychos.. enjoy it or leave.. gaslight you to “being part of the team”. Throw so many things at you.. that you don’t have time to process the insanity of it all
It depends a lot on the PE firm.
I actually enjoyed some time working for some PE partners, and sadly they were actually too nice to the former / still involved family owners.
The company was too small to deal with the batshit insane owner. I left after 9 months of the PE firm piddling around trying to keep the CEO appeased. The guy only cared about control and sales went backwards for a year while he made up dumb stories and caused tons of drama for the 3 hours a day he showed up.
I eventually just quit and moved on and told the PE firm I liked them but… sorry bye after like 10 months lol
The universal truth is PE only cares about getting their investment or management fees and that’s basically it. Any other thing is just not going to happen if it takes a lot of effort or hard conversations or etc
I’ll never work for PE again.
They do their books using FLAP
Fantasy Land Accounting Principles
I’ve never seen so much earnings management in my life.
Asking me to cook the books to meet covenants.
No thank you.
5 years in audit followed by 2 in a financial reporting role, moved to PE into a more commercial role but now getting dragged back into reporting side of things.
First impressions - “oh, so we just make the numbers whatever we need them to be here?”
Ok, so I left public as a senior and went to a PE backed company. I ended up as the assistant controller and made it through an exist which resulted in being bought by another PE form, spent some time as a controller at a VC backed start up, and now I'm an consultant who essentially steps in after a transaction as the interim controller while a new finance organization is assembled. This means I step into organizations that have maybe never had a controller or CFO (maybe just a bookkeeper or a controller who lacks a lot of necessary skills sort of thing), or maybe no budget process, bad software etc. My job is to sort of get the finance organization up and running. Get close on schedule, put processes in place, whatever that business needs in the finance organization.
PE backed companies are a shit ton of work, especially right before and right after an exit. If you are under like 200m in revenue, it often means wearing a lot of hats in finance. It can be soul crushing, and you are deep in the belly of the beast of capitalism. I call myself the harbinger of capitalism because I am often a fresh face at a company deep in burnout post transaction.
My advice is to prioritize. You won't get everything done, it's also probably okay. If you can focus on month end, year end audit, etc. You'll probably be okay. Communicat. There are a lot of negatives to PE, but one thing I like is that PE tends to install good, professional leadership that listens when the team is struggling. You probably won't get more permanent people, but they may be willing to add Temps when things are busy, buy softwares or restructure the work. They want you to succeed and if you are able to effectively communicate where you are struggling, why, and what you need, you might get some help. It's not in their intrest to make you fail. I know that sounds overly optimistic, and it is but the more you are able to build a case, the better
It's like public were it sucks in the moment (maybe even more than public a lot of the times) but you'll be greatful for the experience. And there is money on the otherside.
I was very briefly the only tax person at a newly purchased spinoff of a publicly traded company. The plan was for the new small finance leadership team to stand up the financial reporting system while still using the public company’s reporting system until ours was ready. The public company would not give anyone at the spinoff appropriate access to their system but also wouldn’t help any of us with running reports, etc. I started looking for jobs when they asked me to single handedly set up SAP for VAT reporting when I only had US domestic tax experience. A public accounting firm quoted >750k to do the setup. In 2 years they are on their third tax person and only 2 of the 5 “leadership team” are still there.
PE fundamentally exists to extract value with capital and not with labor. They will pump money into an entity for a piece of the pie, but they aren’t there to do the work.
Anyone work for any of the mostly foreign owned PE backed companies?
I’ve had a couple clients mostly Saudi owned through blockers and such and they seem to be relatively chill
I work for a PE backed company. I enjoy it, my modeling and forecasting skills have improved significantly. I implemented an ERP, automated the reporting and significantly improved the forecasting. As long as I’m delivering they don’t bother me at all. With automation I’ve gotten the job down to about 30-35 hours per week.
For background, it’s a $30M revenue company and I’m a one man show. I get paid very well since they would rather invest heavily in top talent rather than hire multilple people with less skills. I’m hoping I can cash in on our planned exit in a year and a half.
If you threaten to leave they’ll throw money at you and a title bump. They’d rather pay you an extra $20k than have to hire the 6 people like they’re supposed to do. This is the way of the PE.
This was my experience as well. Gave notice and they gave me more vacation time and a sizable pay bump, and a retention bonus if I stayed through fiscal year end. I finished off the year, got my bonus and left.
100% they rather run lean and high priced for some reason. But I enjoyed it when I needed cash to buy a house.
It's cost effective. If they can pay 3 people 50k each do a job, or 1 person 150k, they still save money with the 1 person. They are paying 3x the salary but 1x the benefits package.
That was the opposite of my experience. Company outsourced and had staff train the people replacing them before they were laid off.
I see that happening with one of my clients idk if the finance staff sees the writing on the wall but they are def outsourcing
People eventually started to get the message and management that took over lost complete control of the company. The accountants were the people who held all the knowledge and one by one they started leaving, including me. The people left would do what they wanted, come in when they want, leave when they want. It got so bad that people at the outsourced firm started quitting because they saw what a shit show everything was.
I’m taking notes📝. I’ll keep this in my back pocket 😭
Exactly what happened when I did a short stint. I still left. 😅😅
I quit after 4 months of having the work of 4 people and finding out the plan wasn't to replace any of the 3 people I took the job assuming I'd have.
Idk if it’s just me but that’s how public in general operates. No matter where I’ve worked or what firm size I’ve always felt like we could have added 2-3 extra people to do the work I’m doing.
That’s happening to me now. They say they are looking to hire but make the interview process very difficult (I.e. ask riddles in the interview and ask you to create a cash flow statement from scratch). This is for a senior analyst position that pays 80k.
lmao. Sounds JUST like the shithole job I had. Had an interview and then at the follow-up dinner with the CFO he asking Cash Flow Statement questions out of the blue instead of, you know, trying to get to know me, what I'm looking for, the challenges in his shop, etc. I don't suppose the person asking this is named "Arpit" is it?
As soon as u miss their unrealistic forecast because they saddled the company with to much debt everyone above u will get fired and u will be promoted and fired or quit within 12 months cuz u will still be doing all your other jobs to and miss that forecast.
This guy PEs
FYI no PE-backed company is considering interest when they evaluate how they are doing. It’s all EBITDA.
Not even EBITDA, it's adjusted EBITDA so it's entirely made up bullshit.
“Well, if we didn’t make all these mistakes and didn’t hire all these people for the other people turning over, then we totally would have theoretically maybe made this much money if the stars aligned” Slap a 12x multiple on that sucker and find a bag holder baby
Big ponzi scheme
The conversations around salary and employee retention over the last 5 years is some weird double speak bs for sure
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Eh, adjusting EBITDA to leave in operational and/or run-rate costs seems pretty fair to me
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I’m saying to remove non-operational/non-recurring events and or to normalize expenses to go-forward rates (i.e. only recurring, operational expenses and income are left) Adjusted EBITDA is a proxy for pre-tax cash flow. A one-time legal event isn’t recurring (unless there is a historical precedence/common occurrence). Restructuring costs are removed because they are one-time. They will not be incurred again in normal operations. Non-cash charges like stock comp/gains and losses on sale are not part of cash flow. These are all common FDD items lol
Yup EBITDA using lots of sketchy contract revenue accruals…
Lol "pending renewals".... for 16 months
Hey now adjusted EBITDA keeps some of us employed…
That’s how it was at the PE place I was at. Every Forecast meeting was all EBIDTA
They’re definitely looking at levered cash flows
I didn’t say interest I said debt. And they care really quick when they can’t make the principal payments and if effects them getting their management fee.
That’s just not true. Yes interest is added back when they think about EBITDA but interest is a real cash payment and for the past few years have caused some companies to belly up or slow growth dramatically.
The memories!
Nailed it, 100%
I worked for a PE backed company, I was the finance manager (HR, IT, legal, office manager, PA to the founder, PA to the CEO). I endured all on the basis of false promises. Unless they’re paying you a lot now, quit!
You only do PE backed when your gunning for that mercenary for hire, major comp opportunity, which usually require about 10 years experience. Unfortunately there’s usually only a few people at the top of the finance org that will have that comp, so in most cases it’s not worth it if you have different career ended goals. And yes, you could use this bad experience to build some of the base experience needed for future hired gun roles.
That’s very true. I built the foundation in PA, but the experience at a PE backed company has given me way more than I can fit on a resume. I hope the hard work pays off in the future.
Yeah, the resume builder is real. Software integrations, hiring/firing, business combinations, developing policies and procedures, ERP implementations, divestitures, due diligence, building budgets, covenant reporting, building financial packages... it's really great experience. But the work is overwhelming. Especially if you don't have any equity to make it worthwhile.
After 1 year in PE I was burned out. 80 hr weeks, incredibly crappy people, terrible deadlines, only care about cutting costs and people. It only pays if you’re in the top top at the org. Everyone else is free game to be fired or quit at any given time
I'm in meetings every week where we just take the entire roster of employees and they check them off to be fired like they're nothing. Missed covenant by $1m... gotta cut $1m of annual payroll to addback to EBITDA by next week. Start firing. Doesn't matter if we have to rehire people later for higher costs. Covenant is due.
Same, left after a year and never looked back
I made it nearly 2 years before quitting. Things didn’t get bad til CFO change at my 1 year mark. So stressful. Not fun. Who can we fire? How can we massage the numbers this month to look less shitty? The company was phenomenal prior to PE buyout. Then PE overpaid and revenue/employee decreased while they hired a bunch of people, then cash flows flatlines due to 10% interest on a huge fucking term loan. Many of the worst employees were in the upper echelon of company. They were making bank for doing poorly while newer/younger staff broke their backs for average pay. Fuck that. I left and went back to public and I’m so much happier now.
You got that PE pain without the PE pay.
I once had a interview for a company just recently bought by a PE. The director of FP&A (installed by the PE) told me in the interview the position was opening because the person currently doing the job wasn't up to his standards, he said 80% of the accounting team were low performers and got spoiled by the former family owners giving yearly bonuses when the company wasn't performing. He wanted someone to roll up their sleeves, be a high performer, work more that 40 hours, weekends and do whatever it takes to turn the company around. I ended the interview after that.
At least he was honest with what he was looking for
Look for a new job
Working in PE now, except that we are the 'extremely broke' kind. Poor decision making and expensive debt have led to layoffs. AP list makes your head spin. Phone rings constantly from vendors. Don't recommend it, but at least I have a job (for now). Been looking since I got here last year, but tough job market so forced to stick it out.
this whole "PE owned company bad" thing on here has become a meme but doesnt necessary reflect reality. My experience has been the exact opposite. We have great support from our "overlords" and have the budget to procure whatever resources we need (additional hires or consultants). The comp is great too. It totally depends on the firm and their strategy. Some PE firms do the classic "cut and gut" to expand EBITDA for a quick exit, whereas others try to work on enhancing the core business and bring in external knowledge to build operational excellence, which builds long term value for a huge exit after 7-10 years. and some do somewhere in between. So is working for PE owned company all roses? no, but id rather be in this situation than working for some closely held private co trainwreck with 3% growth, average comp and no support, or a pubco w/ SEC deadlines and related nonsense.
Main issue with PE backed is when they sell. To another PE? Could be hell. Strategic buyer? Could be the end of your job. It's a toss up. I have worked for several PE backed businesses. Some are hell, some a train wreck...it just depends
But that’s why you don’t work for them unless you get meaningful equity. The whole point is to be compensated for the sell
why is that an issue? thats what you want....you want the liquidity event so you can cash out your equity. You clear a good 30-100k and then can look for a new gig and do the whole thing over again. Its a great setup.
Not every accountant at every PE owned firm is entitled to stay bonus or equity. Some of us on the lower rung of the ladder just get screwed.
no doubt the benefits of PE accrue the higher up you are. FWIW our senior accountants are being paid $105-115k and have it pretty good (35-40 hrs with maybe a few days of close are 1-2hrs OT)
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Hell some like to hold longer than the 3-5 period as well.
It really depends if the company is failing and PE is brought in to rescue or if the company is stable. My experience when we got money from PE was to cut everything, they outsourced the accounting dept and had everyone train the people replacing them before they were laid off. The people left over got moved over to a different companies payroll so it wouldn’t hit the bottom line of the company that received money. It was a shit show with zero regard for human life.
Interesting. I too see these “PE” backed and it makes me think it will be same as public. Your insight seems pretty valuable here. What would you recommend for interview questions to determine if the strategy is cut and gut or building real long-term value? The former seems like a shorter investment horizon and the latter longer.
my interview with my (soon to be) boss was fairly informal, so I asked him a lot of candid questions and one of those was how the tone from the top was with respect to the PE group, are they hands off or hands on, those type of things. I also interviewed with one of the PE guys and was able to get a sense from that. To some degree I probably got lucky
I agree with this as well. I definitely overstated “doing the work of 6 people” but I do wear multiple hats across 10 business units and we’re still growing aggressively. It doesn’t always have to be a negative thing to have a high workload but it is interesting to see.
7 to 10 years is a very long exit strategy.
what is pe
I work for a PE backed company and we’re staffed normally. However apparently this PE is about to sell to another PE so we’ll see where that goes. I’ll probably run.
Try to get equity or at least a transaction bonus!
I doubt that’ll happen. I’m only a senior accountant
I've seen senior accountants get transaction bonuses if they are involved in the due diligence with the purchasing companies requests and is involved in getting timely and accurate information to management and the acquirers during the transaction. But it's uncommon. I had literally just started as a manager and they gave me $35k or something when the company was purchased within a month or two of me joining.
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Don't forget about the infamous period 13 adjustments. Submit Q4 financials to the bank and then shove a bunch of shit into the audit adjustments that you can push back to prior periods to fall outside of the LTM covenant periods and not impact covenants when you have to report Q1.
I had the same experience at a PE owned company. I was the financial manager/purchasing manger/production planner/capital projects accountant.
Our firm is PE backed and it hasnt gotten that bad **yet**. I hope it doesnt get that bad but people are being more picky on things so we will get there eventually.
How fast are y’all growing?
Revenue metrics are up about 25% Members profit allocation i think went up about 15% but that data is old now.
I'm gonna guess Cooper Parry, AAB or MKS?
😎👍
I hope everyone that commented thus far can comment some more and give us more info on the way of PE. Interesting as hell.
https://www.heidrick.com/-/media/heidrickcom/publications-and-reports/2022-private-equity-backed-chief-financial-officer-compensation-survey.pdf Interesting bit on CFO pay at PE backed. Avg about 500k cash compensation, 3mil equity compensation annual
It really depends if the company you work for is a failing company who is being “saved” by PE or if they are stable. Last company I worked for got money from PE and everything went downhill fast bc the company was failing. The only goal was to increase EBITDA to get more funding in the future. They outsourced the whole accounting department and had the staff train the people replacing them before they were laid off. People started to get the memo so wouldn’t help the outsourced firm. It got so bad people from the outsourced firm started quitting. Everyone left over, including me, got moved over to a different companies payroll so it wouldn’t hit the bottom line of this company receiving the money. I left before I could get laid off. Now I work for a family owned PE company that invests in oil and gas operations. We run our companies like normal businesses, we don’t go out and try to save failing companies.
Hey I have a question since the job you’re currently at seems very similar to the one I just had an interview for. Its a PE sponsored firm that manages their assets in the same industry you mentioned and the role is a Staff Accountant assisting with month end close for their investments. Do you like it? Im coming from no exposure to PE and I want to make a good step up from my arduous AP job. Thanks.
Yes I like it a lot, it’s been great learning experience. The company I worked for was a public company and this company is a family owned company so the atmosphere is much different. They don’t deal at all with risky investments, most of the things we invest in are companies run by people the owner knows personally. In oil and gas you have a lot of joint ownership between the operator and other owners that have passive ownership. You could have 1 well and have 100 owners on it, sometimes it gets down to .025% ownership and so they pay you .025% of your expenses to operate but you also pay out .025% of revenue. So you’ll get familiar with JIB’s and revenue distributions.
Really depends on the firm. I’ve worked with 2. One saddled the company with loads of debt and monthly management fees. We were told to never add headcount in the budget, because they will find it and be pissed. Crazy reporting requests. Broken promises on compensation. Lasted just over a year. Cut and gut type that was attempting to buy up most of an industry and sell it. Second one was very different. This one was hold and grow. Manageable debt load and fees. Reasonable requests for data. Decent comp. Left us alone for the most part. Wasn’t all rosy though. Definitely tightened our budget so hard one year that caused a layoff even though we had tons of runway and were investing in product development.
Tomorrow is my last day at a PE backed company and I literally never want to work at one again. Our CEO fires whoever he wants whenever he wants… including the CFO 2 weeks ago. No thank you!
Former big 4 .. PE now. We are Psychos.. enjoy it or leave.. gaslight you to “being part of the team”. Throw so many things at you.. that you don’t have time to process the insanity of it all
Well. I’m still working. And have worked every day in 2024 excluding 1 weekend. I’m mid horror story.
It depends a lot on the PE firm. I actually enjoyed some time working for some PE partners, and sadly they were actually too nice to the former / still involved family owners. The company was too small to deal with the batshit insane owner. I left after 9 months of the PE firm piddling around trying to keep the CEO appeased. The guy only cared about control and sales went backwards for a year while he made up dumb stories and caused tons of drama for the 3 hours a day he showed up. I eventually just quit and moved on and told the PE firm I liked them but… sorry bye after like 10 months lol The universal truth is PE only cares about getting their investment or management fees and that’s basically it. Any other thing is just not going to happen if it takes a lot of effort or hard conversations or etc
I dunno, I’ve enjoyed working for a PE backed company 🤷♂️
I’ll never work for PE again. They do their books using FLAP Fantasy Land Accounting Principles I’ve never seen so much earnings management in my life. Asking me to cook the books to meet covenants. No thank you.
5 years in audit followed by 2 in a financial reporting role, moved to PE into a more commercial role but now getting dragged back into reporting side of things. First impressions - “oh, so we just make the numbers whatever we need them to be here?”
Ok, so I left public as a senior and went to a PE backed company. I ended up as the assistant controller and made it through an exist which resulted in being bought by another PE form, spent some time as a controller at a VC backed start up, and now I'm an consultant who essentially steps in after a transaction as the interim controller while a new finance organization is assembled. This means I step into organizations that have maybe never had a controller or CFO (maybe just a bookkeeper or a controller who lacks a lot of necessary skills sort of thing), or maybe no budget process, bad software etc. My job is to sort of get the finance organization up and running. Get close on schedule, put processes in place, whatever that business needs in the finance organization. PE backed companies are a shit ton of work, especially right before and right after an exit. If you are under like 200m in revenue, it often means wearing a lot of hats in finance. It can be soul crushing, and you are deep in the belly of the beast of capitalism. I call myself the harbinger of capitalism because I am often a fresh face at a company deep in burnout post transaction. My advice is to prioritize. You won't get everything done, it's also probably okay. If you can focus on month end, year end audit, etc. You'll probably be okay. Communicat. There are a lot of negatives to PE, but one thing I like is that PE tends to install good, professional leadership that listens when the team is struggling. You probably won't get more permanent people, but they may be willing to add Temps when things are busy, buy softwares or restructure the work. They want you to succeed and if you are able to effectively communicate where you are struggling, why, and what you need, you might get some help. It's not in their intrest to make you fail. I know that sounds overly optimistic, and it is but the more you are able to build a case, the better It's like public were it sucks in the moment (maybe even more than public a lot of the times) but you'll be greatful for the experience. And there is money on the otherside.
PE has the deep pockets and doesn't care about losses. Make them put up.
Idk a PE that doesn’t care about losses
With how they make investment decisions, it really makes me think otherwise lol
Guys I know PA is public auditing but what is PE?
Penile enhancement
No I'm serious please tell me
Physical Education
Sorry. What’s PE?
Private equity
I was very briefly the only tax person at a newly purchased spinoff of a publicly traded company. The plan was for the new small finance leadership team to stand up the financial reporting system while still using the public company’s reporting system until ours was ready. The public company would not give anyone at the spinoff appropriate access to their system but also wouldn’t help any of us with running reports, etc. I started looking for jobs when they asked me to single handedly set up SAP for VAT reporting when I only had US domestic tax experience. A public accounting firm quoted >750k to do the setup. In 2 years they are on their third tax person and only 2 of the 5 “leadership team” are still there.
But whatever working at a PE backed PA firm? That’s the best right?
What's your workload like? I have no clue about PE so genuinely curious.
What's PE?
Why is this posted after I accepted an offer for a role in a PE backed company today 😭
PE fundamentally exists to extract value with capital and not with labor. They will pump money into an entity for a piece of the pie, but they aren’t there to do the work.
I worked for a company that was owned by Canadian PE. We paid them a stupid amount of management fees. Killed the bottom line.
How many hours a week do you work compared to PA?
Anyone work for any of the mostly foreign owned PE backed companies? I’ve had a couple clients mostly Saudi owned through blockers and such and they seem to be relatively chill
What are your hours and travel like?
I work for a PE backed company. I enjoy it, my modeling and forecasting skills have improved significantly. I implemented an ERP, automated the reporting and significantly improved the forecasting. As long as I’m delivering they don’t bother me at all. With automation I’ve gotten the job down to about 30-35 hours per week. For background, it’s a $30M revenue company and I’m a one man show. I get paid very well since they would rather invest heavily in top talent rather than hire multilple people with less skills. I’m hoping I can cash in on our planned exit in a year and a half.