Summer Private Equity Operational Intern
Private Equity Operations Intern Summer 2020
Broadtree is looking for interns to work with us 'virtually' for credit throughout the summer to help analyze our deal-flow and intermediary sourcing. This entails market research, sourcing and communicating with business owners, due diligence research, reviewing information from a variety of intermediaries, and confirming details from our internal pipeline. As this is an unpaid internship you will also gain exposure to additional responsibilities you wouldn't receive elsewhere and work with experienced entrepreneurs and high finance professionals who will provide regular discussions and lessons, letters of recommendation, and introduce you to a vast network in the industry.
We are a start-up private equity firm founded in 2016 and based in the Southeast. Our team members have MBAs from University of Virginia, Darden School of Business, Harvard Business School, Columbia Business School, Booth at Chicago, Haas at Berkeley, Sloan at MIT, and Kellogg at Northwestern. They have experience in start-ups, turn-arounds, engineering, government, military, consulting, IB, M&A, operating companies as CEO or CTO, and successful exits from their companies (selling to bigger investors).
Our strategy is to acquire a group of small and established companies and help a new generation of operators transition into these acquisitions as CEO's. This initial process is identical to that of a traditional PE firm but with higher involvement in running companies post-acquisition with a longer-term focus, similar to family offices.
Primary Responsibilities
Confirming contact information - There are hundreds of thousands of small businesses in the United States. As the firm builds lists of these companies it requires assistance verifying contact information as well as industry and company information.
Company research -- Small and private businesses have limited public information. You will have to dig deep to find information on the operations and market of many companies. What do they do? Where do they do it? Who do they work with and who do they compete with? Is there anything different about them? Should we invest more time or money into the company? Is there someone who has worked with this or a similar company who can provide details about the work? You will be able to draft proposals on a company describing these details and more.
Drafting letters to business owners -- use industry and company research to draft letters of approach to business owners.
Financial modeling and benchmarking -- We will teach you how to build LBO models, review P&Ls and Balance Sheets among other skills. This is very valuable to leading financial firms and essential to any boutique or business school if you want an MBA. This is not a necessity for the internship, though depending on the projects available it could become a task to assist with.
Drafting offer letters -- writing non-binding and binding letters of interest, gaining familiarity with legal terminology and deal structuring.
Preparing deal summaries for investors -- Combining everything above you will help write 4-5 page documents to describe potential acquisitions to lenders and equity investors. If it gets further along in the process you may be able to help develop much larger packets of information. You will get to take part in the financing and see firsthand how companies raise money for acquisitions to close deals, from lenders to investors.
Communicating with intermediaries -- Some business owners hire representatives to help sell their companies. We try to keep in touch with these representatives to learn about and potentially acquire their client business owners.
Less Regular Responsibilities - while not a focus of the internship there will be some side-projects which include the following:
Sourcing Intermediaries – With thousands of intermediaries in the industry, from business brokers through mid-market investment bankers, we need to find and keep track of representatives who can help send business our way.
Industry research - finding and reading industry reports, news articles, etc. to understand how firms make money in an industry and what the most important trends are. You will, through practice, be able to rapidly sift through the information out there to identify essential factors of success in an industry.
Requirements:
No related prior experience is necessary. This is an opportunity for those without family connections or experience in the industry to gain new knowledge and meet the right people. Those who have 'gone to the right school' aren't necessarily ideal for this type of work and those who studied traditional finance are often less prepared to speak with small business owners. We are more interested in your willingness to grit through the tough stuff and do real work.
There is no experience requirement. Hard work and cultural fit are what matter most.
Credit IS required: If your school offers course credit we will work with you and them to try to get you credit for this internship.
We work out of offices in TX, SC, MA, FL, NC, NY, CA, GA, KY, and DC, but many of these roles can be done 'virtually' so location does not matter, Though there is no set schedule from the start we expect to plan one with you individually with a goal of 20 hours and a minimum of 15 hours each week.
We cannot respond to all emails but will do our best to respond and provide feedback to those who take initiative. Reading this far through the job posting is a good sign of that. Clicking the 'submit' button through handshake isn't enough and is not likely to get a response. Reading the Stanford 2018 Primer and submitting your initial thoughts along with your resume is the most likely way to move to the next round: