Lizzie Wintle

Director at GTCR

Background

Lizzie Wintle is a Director at GTCR within the Strategic Growth Fund. Lizzie focuses on investments in the firm’s Financial Services & Technology sector. Prior to joining GTCR in 2022, Lizzie was a Vice President at Siris Capital where Lizzie focused on technology take private investments. Lizzie started her career in the Industrials Group at Credit Suisse before transitioning to an associate role at a middle market PE fund focused on aerospace, defense and maritime investments, JF Lehman. Lizzie earned a BA in Economics from Vanderbilt and an MBA from The Wharton School.  Lizzie and her husband Tom live in New York City.

What inspired you to start your career in banking then transition to private equity?

I started my career in investment banking partially because I had done an internship in private equity between my sophomore and junior year of college. Through this internship, I learned more about PE and found the investor role incredibly interesting, so, I chatted with them about how they began a career in private equity. These investors explained to me that they all came from investment banking, and that investment banking would give me a skill set that I didn't get in my arts and science education at Vanderbilt. They viewed banking as the training ground to get the analytical rigor that they would expect in a private equity associate. So the following summer, I pursued a role at Credit Suisse where I then spent two years in the analyst program. Following the analyst program, I began working at a mid-market PE Fund, JF Lehman, which primarily invests in the aerospace, defense and maritime industries.

How did you think about your decision to go to business school and to come back to PE post-MBA?

While I loved the investing aspect of my associate job and the people I was working with, I began contemplating the kinds of companies and industries I would want to focus on for the duration of my career. At that point, I decided to go to business school for two reasons: 1) to transition industries and 2) step off of the set path of investment banking to private equity in order to make sure that I was actually making decisions that made sense for me long term based on my experiences to date.
 
In business school, I decided to do an internship at a consumer based start-up. From that internship, I realized that if you are going work at a start-up, you have to be so passionate and confident in the company’s mission, its CEO, and its long term potential that you are willing to devote your career and time to that single business. The more I looked around,  the more I felt like I just didn’t find any of these start-up options as exciting as the experience that I had in private equity. In private equity, you get to interact with different management teams, make an impact day one regardless of your role, and consistently be exposed to different business models in different types of companies. I loved that this exposure to various models and management teams meant that I was constantly learning and stimulated. The internship confirmed for me that I wanted to go back into private equity. I then started at Siris Capital following the completion of my MBA.

What do you find most rewarding and most challenging about your current role? 

I think there are two most rewarding pieces actually. The first is the people that we work with in private equity. Everybody from the partners, the associates and the management teams that we work with is often really extraordinary in their field and incredibly intelligent.  I really value that I'm surrounded by people that constantly challenge me and that push me to think about things in different and more creative ways. The second piece that I find highly rewarding is I love looking at industries that I didn't know that much about before looking at a company or before doing a proactive project. I think its amazing that in private equity part of my job is connecting the dots between how macro trend X impacts subsector Y – it can be very fun!
 
The most challenging aspect, is that this job is one that requires a ton of commitment both professionally and personally – you are always going to need to be available to do work and there are times where that can be really hard to explain to your friends, family or significant other. That is certainly one of the more challenging pieces but I think that I'm really lucky because my significant other understands it and is supportive of it.

What have been some different skills needed between the Associate and VP role and then the VP and Director role?

I think that as an associate, a lot of your job is mastery of the analytics.  As an associate, a big part of the skill set is learning to have attention to detail and how to be really thoughtful in the assumptions that you're making behind your analytics. As opposed to banking, where it's a lot of churning out work, when you're an associate it's about knowing why you did something in your analysis. As you mature as an associate, the job then becomes about being able to be more proactive in the analyses that you're doing.

When you take on a VP role, the first thing you notice is that there's a lot of project management to that role. As a VP, you are starting to learn how to not only manage your own workflows, but how to manage people below you and how to manage people above you. The VP ends up being the nucleus of a project, you have to be extremely organized and think of all the different constituents that are involved in every task. It becomes on you, the VP, to make sure that you're connecting the dots for everybody involved across the deal team.

At the Director level you start to become a lot more proactive and intentional in which transaction to pursue, how to differentiate that transaction and set the team up for success. So it's not just about how do I keep pushing this forward but it becomes more about making it clear how this transaction fits within the firm strategy, why we are the right buyer for it and setting the team up to succeed to convince others of that. That element is a slightly different skill set – going forward, as a director, you really hone in there and eventually master this skill as a principal at GTCR.

What is the best piece of career advice you have received?

This actually wasn’t advice given to me per se, a contemporary of mine said this and I thought it was very spot on. In any role you take, you should step back and think how do the long term requirements of this job utilize / accentuate my strengths. In order to answer this question you need to first do a self evaluation and think what are my strengths and are they differentiated from my peers. Then you need to think through the long term role and determine if the needed strengths align with yours. If they do not, then there is a mismatch and you should think if you are on the best path for you to succeed. If you aren’t then its ok to use your current role as a learning opportunity and then re-assess where you want to be long term.

Thank you for your time, Lizzie! To learn more about GTCR, click here.