How to Build a Financial Model to Support Business Decisions
Michael Robson, General Manager of General Assembly Enterprise
Wednesday, December 12 from 6:00 - 9:00 pm


Models mean different things to different people, but they are basically a simplified representation of a system built to support predictions and/or decision making. In this class, we’ll talk about first steps in building a model, how to define the purpose/use of the model, and how to determine what business questions you’re trying to solve. The class will be hands-on and students will work in groups to build several different types of models, which we will review as a class.

Student Takeaways:

• Understand in which situations a model will be a helpful tool to support decision making
• Quickly build a basic model (financial or otherwise) using a simple 6 step process that ensures you “build it right” the first time
• Apply model building “best practices” to reduce errors and improve usability of model
• Understand and leverage models to apply basic analysis techniques (e.g., break even analysis, growth rate calculations, simple scenario analysis)

Prerequisites: Comfort with basic excel commands: “if” statements, copy and paste, addition, subtraction. If you need to brush up on Excel “if” statements, check out this article: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/if-HP005209118.aspx

Preparation: None

Michael Robson is the General Manager of General Assembly's Enterprise business. Prior to GA, he was a consultant with McKinsey and Company for 8 years, working with large organizations throughout Australia, Asia, Latin America and the US. As part of this work, Michael built, or oversaw the development of over 30 financial models in a range of different industries (financial services, consumer products, high tech, agriculture, industrial etc), and developed and taught an introductory modeling program for McKinsey Business Analysts. He has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a BComm (Finance) from the University of Queensland.

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