Most people in the industry know that a good chunk of funds blow up when they scale up from $100 million to $500 million AUM. I was wondering if there are any studies out there that actually break down historical private equity returns by AUM. Most studies I've seen on historical returns simply break it down as stocks, bonds, PE, HF, etc. From my limited experience, I'd say a PE fund with billions under management is almost a completely different asset class than one with <$100 million AUM. Does anyone know where I can find a more detailed study?
The fund I'm at did a pretty big scale up within the last 6 months and our investment process has changed quite a bit. When we were at the ~$100-150 million AUM level, it almost seemed like we were printing money. I was pretty amazed at how simple it was to produce abnormal returns. (E.g. buy a founder owned business with shitty operating procedures, put professional procedures in place, plow in cash to accelerate growth, and sell for a higher multiple). ~85% of our deals were sourced without using a banker or broker. Now that we've scaled up everything is much more institutionalized. We're looking at companies being represented by ibankers, that are owned by serious investors, who know what the fuck they are doing. It remains to be determined if we can continue producing abnormal returns, but it definitely feels like the easy money is gone.