I have an opportunity for an interview sometime later this week or next with a fairly large PE firm for an associate level role their valuations team.
I have about 7-years of experience at a large consulting firm where I spent the first 4 years on their finance operations team doing redudant P&L analysis, forecasting, budgeting, invoice/revenue generation etc. Last few years i’ve been on their internal corporate transaction team working the valuation of new deals the firm is persuing.
Curious of how I should expect an interview to go? The recruiter told me it’ll be 1 day of intereviewing, approxmiately 5 hours. Sounds about the same as my experience when i interviewed for this transaction role. Brief introduction, case study, peer interview and possible lunch with a few co-workers? I’m worried i’m going to be unprepared to do some sort of PE valuation which isn’t where the bulk of my experience has been in the past. I can handle all of the other stuff pretty well as it’s mostly just social presentation.
Sounds like you’ll be part of their finance team. Is it a buyout firm? growth equity? Be prepared to talk about valuation using trading and transaction multiples with liquidity and size discounts, and DCF for substantiation. If using a multiples based-approached make sure you know how to work down from the total equity value (EV - net debt) to the investments value based on the type of security owned (participating or convertible preferred equity, common equity, etc), management incentive units, and other dilutive securities. Don’t know much about the firm so can’t comment more.
^ Thanks Ramos, yeah this is on their internal finance team supporting various groups across the firm. From what I can tell it looks like this firm’s focus is on growth equity.
The recruiter made it sound like my current corp finance skills (more corproate/client P&L, cash flow and balance sheet impacts) are more than enough for this role. Time to brush up on some of the level-II CFA valuation stuff…