How to get a job as an operating partner in private equity

Marc Bielitza works in private equity, but not in an investment role. Bielitza is not valuing target companies or financing, structuring and executing M&A deals. Bielitza is an operating partner at Deutsche Private Equity in Germany. As private equity jobs go, it's a wholly different experience.

Get Morning Coffee ☕ in your inbox. Sign up here.

“As an operating partner, I am responsible for a proportion of the companies in the portfolio,” says Bielitza. “I don’t have a managerial role in those companies, but I sit on their boards.”

Ex-bankers who go into private equity typically take investment roles.  These roles often pay more, but are “very desk heavy with a lot of Excel modelling.” They’re also less important than they used to be: with interest rates and purchase prices high, the route to returns has become operational improvements rather than juicy leverage.

Not all operational roles are equal, though. Bielitza says private equity firms employ operating professionals who “work with management teams on a day-to-day basis.” These operating professionals are embedded in companies the private equity firm has invested in, where they personally pull the levers to create value. Operating partners are a different sort of operating professional: they are internal to the private equity firms themselves and work across multiple companies in the portfolio. “My role is about coaching and sparring with the management teams as a member of the board,” says Bielitza. “It’s about developing strategic targets and suggesting consultants to bring in." Bielitza says he's a generalist. - "But I tend to gravitate towards companies with physical value creation.”

While investment professionals in private equity come from banking backgrounds, operating partners typically come from industry or consulting. Bielitza spent nearly 12 years at consulting firm McKinsey & Co. before taking an operating role at a Munich-based wood pellet manufacturers which was backed by a private equity company. Only after that experience, was he equipped to become an operating partner. 

“We don’t hire consultants directly into in-house roles,” Bielitza says of the path to his job. “We believe you need to have gained a certain amount of operating experience first and to have seen what it’s like to transform a company in a hands-on way.” 

If you’re moving from consulting to private equity, and you want to be an operating partner, it's therefore easier to start as the sort of operating professional who works with management teams day to day.

“Working for McKinsey & Co. definitely prepared me for this role,” says Bielitza. “I got a toolkit of skills I use, from structured thinking to problem-solving, building relationships with C-level managers and people on the shop floor and influencing people to create desired outcomes.”

In the current climate, Bielitza says the role of an operating partner is increasingly about digital transformation and AI. However, this isn’t something that he manages directly – he brings in consultants to help work on solutions. “It’s a facilitation role,” he says. “I’m driving the performance of the companies that we’ve invested in.”

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, WhatsApp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. Signal also available.

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libellous (in which case it won’t.)

Photo by Todd Quackenbush on Unsplash