Week in the Life of a Private Equity Associate: Stage 2 of a Deal
A Look at the High Stakes Environment of Private Equity Deals
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, Last Updated :
Mar 23, 2025
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Welcome to Stage 2 of the private equity deal process, where the pace is fast, the workload is intense, and due diligence is in full swing. This hypothetical scenario continues from Stage 1, where we identified a luxury home goods company as a potential acquisition target. Now, we’re in the trenches of Stage 2, trying to evaluate if this deal is worth pursuing. Here’s how the week looks:
7 a.m. You’re on a flight to Dallas for a critical management meeting. You’ve read through key questions your team wants to ask, focusing on customer trends, operational efficiency, and potential margin improvement opportunities.
9:30 a.m. Land in Dallas and head straight to the company headquarters. You’re greeted by the CEO, CFO, and COO, who give a company overview presentation. You ask clarifying questions on customer churn, pricing strategy, and supply chain challenges.
2 p.m. A factory tour begins. You note inefficiencies that could be improved post-acquisition and ask questions about production bottlenecks.
5 p.m. After a full day of meetings and tours, you grab a quick dinner with your team and head back to your hotel. You quickly get ready to head back to the airport for your 8 p.m. flight.
12:30 a.m. Finally, you arrive home exhausted. You check emails, respond to messages from your deal team, compile notes on the day’s meetings and draft follow-up questions for the CFO before you fall asleep.
Tuesday: Deepening the Diligence
9 a.m. You’re back at your desk in New York, and the next stage begins: deep-dive analysis of the company’s financials. You log into the virtual data room (VDR) and start reviewing key documents, including financial statements, customer data, and contracts.
11 a.m. For the entire day, you are tasked with building data books which are summaries of key metrics like customer concentration and revenue by segment. You also create PowerPoint exhibits that will be added to your investment memo and analyze customer data to understand metrics like churn rate. All of these filings will go on to help you in building your LBO model.
1 a.m. You finish working on the data book and send out the summaries to your Associate before logging off for the day.
Wednesday: Diving into the Numbers
9 a.m. You start your day by diving into a much more complex LBO model. This time, it’s far more detailed than the simple template from stage 1, with hundreds of lines and over 30 tabs as you incorporate financials from the data room.
12 p.m. By midday, you are still analyzing the company’s financials. There are missing figures, inconsistencies, and numbers that don’t add up, so you take detailed notes on issues to discuss with your deal team and management later.
3 p.m. You start building an operating model, projecting revenue, costs, and margins based on the diligence findings. You’re constantly checking the data room to ensure your assumptions are justified.
6 p.m. You continue refining the model, collaborating with your Senior Associate and Principal to make sure everything aligns. The model is coming together, but there’s still plenty of work to do.
1 a.m. You send the updated model to your team with key questions and findings for review, preparing for a busy morning ahead. After a long day of work, you finally call it a night, ready to tackle more tomorrow.
Thursday: Sharpening the Insights
9 a.m. Another day begins, and you’re back at it in Excel, reviewing your deal team’s feedback on revenue growth and margin assumptions. By noon, the operating model is in a solid place.
12:30 p.m. After a quick desk lunch, you jump into a 2-hour call with the CFO and VP of Finance. You go through a list of questions regarding their revenue segments, cost structure, margins, taxes, and capex spend to gather insights for refining your model.
2:30 p.m. You and your Senior Associate meet with your Principal to discuss how the call’s findings should influence your financial model.
3 p.m. You spend the next hour adjusting the operating model to reflect these insights.
4 p.m. You move on to building the LBO, using rough assumptions for debt financing and purchase price. While building the LBO doesn’t take too long, it’s the detailed work on the operating model that’s more time-consuming.
7 p.m. After making significant progress, you order dinner and take a breather before diving back in.
8 p.m. The next few hours are spent finalizing the first draft of the LBO, running trading comps, and doing a high-level DCF to validate your entry multiple. You also create sensitivity tables to see how key assumptions impact the IRR.
12 a.m. You send the updated model to your Senior Associate and call it a night after another intense day.
Friday: Expert Calls and Exit Analysis
9 a.m. You start the day with a 1-hour expert call with a luxury home goods industry specialist to deepen your market understanding, followed by another call with a former employee for insights into the company’s culture and management. These calls are high-stakes and require careful preparation to maximize value.
11 a.m. You review the feedback from your Senior Associate and begin preparing key findings for the 1:00 p.m. meeting with your Partner.
12:30 p.m. After a quick lunch, you meet with your Partner to discuss qualitative findings from the dataroom, insights from your research, and preliminary LBO returns. He suggests revising growth rates and margins, and you’ll need to have another call with management to clarify fixed vs. variable costs, customer concentration, and future capex plans.
2 p.m. You dive back into the LBO, making adjustments, and start working on two new tabs for the Exit DCF and Exit LBO. These analyses project the years following the exit and help determine what a future private equity sponsor might pay, which informs your exit multiple assumptions.
⚡Important: These two analyses are specific to the PE world and gives us justification on the exit multiple we should be assuming in our LBO.
8 p.m. After another call with management to finalize details, you send the updated model to your deal team for review. You grab a late dinner, take it easy with Netflix, and mentally prepare for a busy weekend ahead.
Weekend: Investment Memo and Model Refinements
Saturday
11 a.m. You get a later start today, working from home. Your first task is updating the model based on feedback from your deal team, followed by drafting the investment memo. This version is far more detailed than what you worked on in Stage 1.
1 p.m. The memo now includes key findings from management meetings, data room analysis, and multiple exhibits like the company’s historical financials, financial projections based on management assumptions, a more conservative case, identified risks, and market sizing and customer trend analyses.
4 p.m. You continue refining both the memo and the model, iterating with your Senior Associate and Principal to make sure everything aligns. You take some breaks in between, since you're working from home today.
8 p.m. You finish up for the day and log off, ready to relax for the evening.
Sunday
12 p.m. You start at noon today, continuing to fine-tune the model and revise the investment memo. You keep adding to it, making sure everything looks in line with the latest insights.
4 p.m. You start to wind down the work for the week, grabbing a more leisurely dinner with friends.
10 p.m. After prepping for the upcoming week, you log off and relax, ready for the new challenges that Monday will bring.
The Bottom Line
Stage 2 diligence is a mix of rewarding and exhausting work, involving deep modeling, analysis, and constant communication with stakeholders. The week is intense, filled with long hours of Excel work and meetings, but it’s satisfying to see everything come together. By the end of the week, the total hours worked amount to 95, a reflection of how demanding private equity deal-making can be. Despite the pressure, the experience provides invaluable learning and sharpens technical skills.
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