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Do you remember first learning how to drive?

When I took driver’s ed, the textbook was over 150 pages long. It covered:

• mirrors, seat belts, child safety harnesses, airbags, speed limits, signaling, horns, headlights, emergency lights, text messaging, cell phones

• u-turns, traffic lights, signs, right-of-way, lane control, line colors, passing / carpool / bicycle lanes, following distances, merging in and out of traffic

• crosswalks, intersections, roundabouts, parallel / colored curb parking, traffic tickets, double fine zones, vehicle registration, organ donation

It was a ton of info. It all made sense in isolation.

But when it came time to actually get behind the wheel, my head was swimming and I couldn’t keep it all straight.

Alls I wanted to know was: What do I ACTUALLY need to know RIGHT NOW to operate this vehicle?

My driving instructor sat in the passenger seat and made it way simpler.

Buckle up. Check your mirrors.

Brake. Shift to reverse. Back out slowly.

Brake. Shift to drive. Turn the wheel.

Drive.

When you’re learning the basics, all you need to know is: when to brake, when to drive, how to steer.

That’s it.

Keep it simple.

All that crap about colored curb parking, emergency lights, and organ donations doesn’t matter.

I’m not saying they’re never important. Just not when you’re starting out, trying to get your foot in the door.

 

WHAT’S THIS GOT TO DO WITH FINANCIAL MODELING?

Well, getting good at financial modeling works the same way.

Maybe you’re prepping for investment banking or corporate finance interviews.

Or maybe you’re getting ready to start a new banking job and you want to brush up and get a head start on financial modeling and DCF skills to hit the ground running.

One essential skill to master is building a fully integrated 3-statement financial model and DCF valuation in Excel.

By the time I joined the Corporate Finance Practice at McKinsey & Company, and later joined the global private equity firm Huntsman Gay Global Capital, I could build these models in my sleep.

But when I first learned to do this — man, I struggled.

I read a ton of theory. But after literally four or five finance books, I STILL didn’t know exactly how to put it all into practice.

Why?

Because in school and books, you learn abstract theory like: Fama-French three-factor model, Dividend Discount Model, Capital Asset Pricing Model, Security-Market Line, Weighted Average Cost of Capital.

They all make sense in isolation.

But how do you actually put them all together when it’s time to crank out an Excel model RIGHT NOW? Like, literally after you open up Excel, what’s the very first step? And the second? And the third?

Well, guess what?

Almost none of that academic finance theory actually matters. Not in your interviews, and certainly not on the job — at least, not in the way you might think. It never comes up in client meetings or presentations.

Don’t get me wrong. You DO need to know how to do things like evaluate goodwill, amortize intangible assets, recognize deferred revenue, and compute WACC / terminal value. But the way the pros actually construct 3-statement models and DCFs is far more straightforward than the way academics think about it.

Bankers don’t debate the tradeoffs of Fama-French vs. CAPM vs. DDM.

They don’t agonize over calculating Beta.

It’s not that these aren’t interesting. They just don’t ultimately drive and create value for companies. That’s why bankers don’t spend time fussing over academic details.

Think about it this way. Not counting Wharton grads — who presumably learn finance theory in school until their noses bleed — a huge contingent of banking analysts come from Ivy League or similar schools that DON’T EVEN HAVE business classes where you can learn finance theory.

Harvard. Yale. Princeton. Stanford. MIT. Columbia. Dartmouth. Amherst. Williams. Duke.

These places don’t have fancy college classes on finance and valuation. Yet undergrads there routinely get recruited for analyst jobs at banks.

And it’s not because they magically learn the canon of financial theory two months before their interviews. It’s because there are only a few key finance concepts that really matter; everything else is just common sense and business judgment.

So you can save a lot of time prepping for your interviews by just focusing your energy on the few concepts that really matter.

Ironically, at the same time, even when colleges DO have undergrad business programs, they usually do NOT teach skills that are actually useful: like how to parse a public company 10-K or how to interpret a debt footnote.

But you WILL need to be able to do these quickly, efficiently, and accurately to succeed in banking and corporate finance interviews — as well as on the job.

That’s where this course comes in.

 

WHAT WILL OUR FINANCIAL MODELING COURSE TEACH YOU?

We cut through all the excess theory and focus only on what really matters.

Our video training course teaches you step-by-step how to build the kind of fully integrated 3-statement financial model in Excel that you will do EVERY DAY on the job as an investment banker or corporate finance professional.

We use a well-known public company for our case study: Chipotle Mexican Grill.

We don’t dwell on abstract financial theory. We focus only on practical concepts and skills you need to:

• Analyze a public company 10-K  

• Efficiently extract all the information you need to build a 3-statement model

• Intuitively understand how the core statements link to the supporting schedules

• Rapidly and accurately model historicals, supporting schedules, and projections in Excel

• Troubleshoot your model accurately and quickly when accounts don’t balance or reconcile

• Understand the key concepts you need related to depreciation & amortization, goodwill, circularity, unlevered vs. levered cash flows, terminal value, weighted average cost of capital, and enterprise vs. equity value