Financial Modelling in EXCEL for Startups
Numbers make for great stories. The stories we tell depend on the questions we ask. What questions do you want to ask?
How do you model growth in the midst of a pandemic? Will you have enough cash across a range of future timelines? How much are you really worth? Why?
Not just how, but why? Understand the why behind the process, focus on discovery, rather than mechanics. Graduate from being a simple model builder to a story teller. Just like learning a new language rewires our brain, building models should help us think better; if we use the exercise as a thought experiment, the model as a thinking tool.
Getting comfortable with the math that matters for our businesses saves us future pain as well as capital. If we don’t know what we need from our models, we keep going around in circles.
Financial Modelling for Startups – What is this course about? Why is it needed?
Applied financial modeling in EXCEL. How do you build better financial models faster in EXCEL? How is course different from other financial modeling courses.
Designed and put together by a market practitioner who has been building models for 30 years. Taught to bankers, founders and consultants, the course has evolved over 2 decades. Tested and optimized for online delivery. While our initial focus was on building models, we have added components that deal with thinking behind building models.
As a founder what are the most common uses of financial models at work? How do models focused on growth and scale differ from models focused on risk and strategy? Do we need complex models or simple models? How do we validate assumptions? How much does model design matter?
We start by focusing on asking and answering the right questions. The models we build are only as good as the questions we ask. Do we need to build a model to manage and plan for growth or debt servicing? Launch roadmap or capital requirements? Scale, turnaround or downside protection? For validating assumptions or pricing product offering?
We use two case studies to work with multiple approaches to designing models.
A model for forecasting growth for a startup on high-octane fuel. A model for determining debt service capacity for a turnaround school system in the Middle East.
- Building a financial model for growth and capital allocation for startups and founders. The Maya’s Closet case study looking at a growing startup’s capital need and decisions the founders need to make to pick one or more growth strategies.
- Building a financial model for credit analysis and financial forecasting. The GEMS Education case study looks at the GEMS school system debt load in the midst of the Covid-19 related slow down in UAE to evaluate the capacity of the group to raise more debt.
- Building a financial model for fun and curiosity. Extending the GEMS model to answer the valuation question.
Valuations for Startups – What is this course about? Why is it needed?
The value question. How many ways of answering this question exist? What should you know about investor approaches to valuing a business? Is cash really king?
What drives valuation multiples in a market like Pakistan? What are some of the things you can do to get better multiples? What factors lead to discounts during due diligence, what should you watch out for? How does one balance the debate between value and price?
When it comes to picking up a segment or a pricing model, are there decisions that can impact future value? Using our signature case study driven approach we split the course in two parts. Day one looks at models, mechanics, boundary condition and intuition. Day two focuses on insights and takeaways. Decisions and choices we need to be aware of as founders because they impact future value.
Building up on the successful Financial Modelling for Founders course, Jawwad Farid walks through valuation models and founder questions in two half days.
Designed from a founder perspective, this is a practitioner focused course that covers sharp turns most textbooks ignore. Jawwad raised his first round in 1999 and since then has raised funding for himself as well as helped other raise funding for their dreams. He has also been part of multiple acquisition due diligence teams and brings a balanced perspective to the classroom. Founders as well as investors.
Target Audience and Requirements
The intended audience are founders, product managers, financial analysts and consultants responsible for building growth, valuation and debt servicing models for clients.
What kind of questions do we ask in these courses?
Real world questions. Real world models. Real world answers. For the founder and credit analysis component of the course:
a) How is a business likely to perform under current economic outlook? Under more challenging times? Under the expected future economic outlook?
b) What would it take to break the business? What kind of an economic shock will substantially reduce the ability to service existing debt loads?
c) How are financing needs likely to change over economic cycles? How sensitive is repayment capacity to economic and business cycles? How sensitive are collateral, forced sale values and margin of safety to cycles?
d) How important are context, historical behavior and future expectations?
In addition to building financial model, this requires the ability to use available information to extend the model to answer the right questions.
We do this by adding multiple scenarios to our models that range from the most likely to worst case and see how the business fares across possible futures. Armed with this capacity, we can represent bank and customer interests in effective manner and understand the downside and risk exposure behind a specific transaction or relationship.
a) How do we build a fundamental model that works off market based drivers
b) How do we identify factors that have a relationship with the results we are trying to forecast
c) How do we build models that work in the real world.
For the Valuation for Startups course:
- How much is your startup really worth?
- How do you take conventional models and customize them for the startup world?
- What are the biggest drivers of value in the startup world?
- What decisions impact valuations more than others?
- What are the boundary conditions under which models break down?
- How do investors answer the valuation question in their minds?
By the end of the Financial Modelling for Startups course you will be able to:
- Build better financial models with a specific view towards free cash flows, risk and downside exposure.
- Link economic models to business models and analyze interaction of the two.
- Model impact of multiple drivers and relationships with each other using scenarios.
- Define and present key performance and business metrics and their relationship with risk and exposure.
- Analyze sensitivity of key performance and business metrics to changes in economic and business cycles.
- Review relationships and transactions from a hands on analytics lens.
By the end of the Valuations for Startups course you will understand:
- How valuations frameworks are used by founders and investors to evaluate a business
- Decisions, factors, and drivers that impact the range of valuations for a business
- Why are certain businesses more valuable than others? Why are certain markets more attractive than others?
- Tools and metrics they can use to compare businesses and their appeal to investors
Financial Modelling for Startups + Valuation for Founders Bundle
Bundle Fee
Testimonials from our live cohorts
The hands-on model treatment. How the P&L, Income Statement and Balance Sheet works together. Counter-intuitive insights. Creating models is a way to refine and improve your thinking. Where do I sign up for the next one?
JC Cangilla
DEAL TEAM, FACEBOOK
The course material and delivery were excellent! The structure of the course lends itself well to building on different financial concepts, as well as putting them to practice. Overall, really enjoyed the experience and would recommend the course to my colleagues.
Zermeen Sahar
CHATHAM FINANCIALS
If you are thinking about venturing into the world of entrepreneurship or want to manage your existing business better this is a “must take” course. Well worth the time and money.
Mohammed Sabzwari
EMIRATES AIRLINES
Jawwad was effectively able to demonstrate how numbers can tell an important story about your business, it’s past, present, and future.
Saman Ghani Khan
PWC, CO-FOUNDER
Great to learn from a true expert.
Shahid Mustafa
BANKER & INVESTOR
If you’re a founder, these five days could save you from tragic failure; If you’re not, you’ll want to be one.
Maaz Saeed
HABIB UNIVERSITY
I heavily rely on MOOC to improve my skill set. The engagement level during this course was second to none.
Ahsun Kamran
The course is perfectly carved according to the objectives committed and Jawwad has the ability to convey core concepts in analogies and storytelling is great.
Syed Waqar Uddin
The hands-on approach and real world examples. I loved that we stayed in excel for the entire duration of the course.
Seemab Hassan
Huawei
Coming from a non tech, non finance background, this course made me brave enough to think I can work on putting basic models together as well as understand models that are put in front of me.
Sana Farid
Helps you realize that numbers, charts, graphs aren’t intimidating. It helps you face your fear of numbers, or EXCEL in my case, and simplifies it for you in a way that you begin to enjoy numbers as well as EXCEL.
Khadeejah Habib
This course made me fall in love with numbers, projections and dynamic models! It’s a must to have course for founders!
Sameer Ahmed Khan
Social Champ
Course Samples
About the instructor
Jawwad Farid has been building, implementing risk models and back office systems since 1993. Working with clients on four continents he helps bankers, board members and regulators take a market relevant approach to risk management.
Jawwad is a Fellow Society of Actuaries, (FSA, Schaumburg, IL), holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and is a computer science graduate from FAST NUCES. During the last 29 years, he has worked as an advisor and a consultant in North America, Pakistan, Middle East, Africa, Far East and the United Kingdom.
Jawwad’s expertise include investment management and risk models.
Jawwad advises due diligence teams on risk assessment and valuation in banking, treasury and insurance sectors, sets up FX and commodity hedging desks, builds fair value models for illiquid securities for FAS 157 disclosures (US$ 600 million portfolio), estimates contingent liability reserves, implements treasury, credit and enterprise risk platforms, designs Economic Capital allocation strategies across business lines and helps life and general insurance clients with regulatory reporting, IFRS 17 implementations, and allocation and bid patterns for 10, 20 and 30 year bonds, ALM mismatch and fixed income portfolio gap reduction.
Jawwad is an adjunct faculty member at the SP Jain Global School of Management in Dubai and Singapore as well as at IBA, Karachi, where he teaches Fintech, Venture Capital, Risk Management, Derivative Pricing, Treasury and Portfolio Management. He has taught as an adjunct professor since 1995 and is consistently rated as a practical hands-on market relevant instructor by students and participants in Bangkok, Kula Lumpur, Singapore, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Nairobi, Bahrain, Doha, New York and Karachi.
Jawwad is the author of 5 books. The latest being Founder Puzzles. Earlier titles include Models at Work, Option Greeks Primer, Portfolio Optimization Models and Reboot.
You can learn more about Jawwad at: