Ares Management Reviews

Ares Management's cons are as follows: 1) Month-end process is TERRIBLE. There is no coherent and standardized process for the whole company. The monthly close process goes through numerous estimates. Once before close, once when management company needs estimates, and then another when final valuations are complete. The month-end process takes about 1.5-2 months to complete! 2) Managers have no idea of materiality and will give a review comment on a variance of less than a $100. 3) There is no standardized reports or process. This goes back to #1. They act like they're a big shop, but operate as a small shop. Their accounting system (Geneva) is "industry standard" but they don't have a standardized process across all accounting departments. 4) Work papers are crap. Every work paper I opened at Ares had hard-coded numbers, circular references, and no form of automation. There is useless information in the work papers and some of the tabs are in other work papers. It's redundant. 5) No idea of efficiency or automation. This goes back to #1 & 4. Ares Management employees are horribly trained when it comes to evaluating processes and improving efficiency. They have no idea on how to eliminate redundant processes. 6) Investor Relations group is terrible. Investor Relations would sit on Investor's request for weeks and send it to other departments to complete a day before it's due. 7) Loan Servicing group is a joke. The Loan Servicing group has no idea what they're doing and how their data entry into Geneva effects other departments downstream. They would update loan terms and it would effect other funds who sold the asset. When asked about it, they can't give a solid answer and the typical answer would be "Oh this is the way it was originally done and how it has always been done." In addition, you have to send them an example of prior entries to make sure they get it correct. 8) Long hours. The management team have no idea of "industry standard" when it comes to work life balance and working long hours. However, this goes back to point #1, 2, and 5. They expect employees to work long hours and even holidays. What investment company or bank work holidays? Anyone? No one! 10) They had an "innovation" contest. One of the innovations that won were In N Out truck Friday. Really? Guess who chose the winners? Go to #14. 11) The company culture is to throw some one under the bus when things goes wrong. Most of the meetings are made up of defensive back and forth and finger pointing. They have no idea of working together as a cohesive team to be productive. 12) Inflated job titles. Ares Management have different line of business/products and this leads to inflated job titles. They have like 7 to 8 CAO/CFOs and like 10-12 Controllers. In addition, each department/product line would have like 5 employees. They are nothing more than managers with over-hyped job titles, so they can go home and stroke their egos. 13) The review process is a disaster. Ares Management has a tendency to demand deliverables early and once received they would sit on the deliverables for weeks. They would send back review comments a few days before the deadline and demand it be turnaround the next day. 14) The Executive team are a bunch of amateurs. When they did the lift out, they had this meeting and announced it in front of the whole company. In addition, they even announced the names of individuals who were apart of the lift out in front of the whole company during the meeting. What high level Management team does that? They not only did it in an unprofessional matter, but they also got the rest of the company paranoid about losing their jobs. Decisions like these are done in close door meetings. Terrible business move. Furthermore, the CFO can't even speak English clearly and puts up a terrible acting job when it comes to being genuine.

I am not disgruntled. This is real. IT is and has been totally dysfunctional for last 2-3 years. The CIO and CTO have driven out the ALL the great people, most of the good people, and promoted the marginal people into positions - not because they are that good or trained for the job, but because they can be controlled like puppets. Here are some examples. We had a great CISO a couple years ago that took us from literally nothing to a leading security organization that could compete against any one of our peers (Blackstone, Apollo, etc.). Everything is going great then new CTO comes in - decides he wants to do a coup and take over security (even though he has no experience being a CISO) - and boom, a Fortune 500 caliber CISO and really nice guy is gone with six months. After he leaves, a member of the CISO's staff takes over to try to keep things going, and boom, now he's gone a year or so later. Now the best IT engineer hands down is leaving. No matter what anyone says, it was all due to CTO undermining and screwing with the security team. Now the entire team the original guy built is pretty much decimated and being run by non-security professionals in IT infrastructure - all controlled by the CTO. Coup successful but now the company I loved is just a breach waiting to happen. Same thing happens to our IT CFO. Great guy (hired by the CISO actually). He actually get's promoted up to work for the CIO/CRO. Doing great - everyone loves him - probably the nicest guy you ever would meet - then suddenly CIO and CTO needed a scapegoat for a colossal failure put in a finance system and they turn on him and drive him out. Same thing with the app-dev management team. Three of the original team driven out by bad, uncaring management that are unable to recognize the value of the team. The went from "the next leaders" to "out the door" -- in fact, if you get promoted, that's probably a sign you are heading out the door. I can't tell you how many people have gotten promoted and driven out 6 months later. I could go on and on with examples. People go from Gold to Dirt on the whim of the management team. CIO/CRO is now leaving (justice?) but CTO remains. If I'm an tech or security person, I'm staying far away from Ares until someone above them all figures out what's wrong and actually fixes it.