Excel modeling

Welcome! I'm excited to help you dive into Excel financial modeling. Before we map out our journey, I'd love to know a little more about your background so I can tailor everything perfectly to your level.

Could you tell me a bit about your current experience with Excel and why you are looking to learn financial modeling?

I'm a complete beginner to both Excel and finance.

Thank you for sharing your background! Starting from scratch is actually a massive advantage because you won't have to unlearn any bad habits. We will build your skills step-by-step, starting with the core concepts before we touch a single Excel key.

Before we begin, here is our game plan for this session. It is designed to take you from a complete beginner to confidently understanding how to build your first dynamic model.

Your path

Excel Skills for Modeling

Building a Basic Model

What is Financial Modeling?

At its heart, is the process of building a dynamic, mathematical summary of a business's financial performance. Think of it as constructing a digital sandbox of a real-world company inside Excel. But we aren't just recording what happened in the past. The true power of a model lies in forecasting. By plugging in historical data and combining it with educated assumptions about the future, we can project how the business will perform next month, next year, or even five years from now.

How Models Drive Decisions

Imagine you run a lemonade stand. You want to know if you should buy a new high-speed juicer for $100. Instead of just guessing and spending the cash, you build a basic financial model. You plug in your assumptions: how many more cups you can sell with the faster machine, what you charge per cup, and the cost of lemons. The model automatically calculates your future profits and shows you exactly when that $100 investment will pay for itself. In the professional world, companies use these exact same principles to make massive decisions, such as deciding whether to acquire a competitor, build a new factory, or raise money from investors.