It’s Always in the Details: Excel, interviewing and life

Going through interviews during your MBA is the same as the first month on a job as an analyst in Finance. Having been a victim the last four weeks of the former, I had some serious flashbacks to the latter. I was suited up and walking into the tallest building in the financial district of San Francisco, after getting my computer, HR documents and ID badge, I had an 11am meeting with my new boss. I was filled with nervous energy, wanting to make nothing but a good impression. I listened attentively, took good notes, asked questions to understand the business, probed to clarify her expectations of me and finally left with a mountain of work due by 8am the next morning. The assignment was simple: evaluate whether we should loan $10MM to company X, type up a one page brief with the risks, and attach proforma projections of the impact of debt to their financial statements.

Being a liberal arts manger, I figured I would tackle the risks and the evaluative narrative of the project. Not having much knowledge on the subject, I started with reading similar companies’ 10k and 10Qs. Pretty quickly I realized the risks were similar: market, environmental, any profit erosion possibilities and repayment risk. Before my afternoon cup of coffee my Memo was done. Then started the eternal abyss of excel. While my 2am model was accurate, my 8am self, realized there were errors. Sadly, my boss found them. They were rookie to say the least; I missed that the interest had to be calculated on the amortized loan amount vs. a flat rate. The following day was filled with coffee and brutal coaching sessions, through which I learnt the ‘hard’ stuff.
But when it comes to Excel, it has been the simple things that have remained and allowed me to excel!

To name my 6 best practices for any analyst:

• Let the model be intuitive with your thoughts

• Never hard code when not needed!

• Always colour code: assumptions in blue, calculations in black and green

for direct references to one or more sheets

• Use Centre Across Selection vs. Merging

• Never ‘Hide’ Cells, always ‘Group”

• Never send a file to someone without having it formatted for Print

It is always the little things that make an impact in the long run. Having managed a few analysts though the years, the attention to detail shows me that they care. As Roosevelt said: “No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” As I flash forward to the last four weeks, I have just landed my dream internship and I was fortunate enough to talk to some of the Senior Executives over the weekend to get some one-to-one feedback on my interviews. My version of the interview day was all the same anxiety and irrational fears as day one of being an analyst: need to have my lucky pen, need to change my shoes before I got into sight of the security guard at the front desk, need to be 15 minutes early (no more, no less), need to wear the right amount of lipstick etc.

The executives’ positive reinforcement of why they extended the offer was ironically again, rooted in the details. They liked the fact that when I challenged, I was calm and used logic to defend my position; when asked a question, even a personal one, I structured it to keep their attention. When asked to calculate something, I jotted things down and then turned my paper around to engage with the interviewer, lastly, when I left I smiled, maintained eye contact and had a firm handshake. All these were indicators to them that I would one day ‘fit in as senior management’.

Had I known before the interview about all these details that mattered, I am confident that I would have panicked and it would have all gone quite horribly wrong. But, the one thing I have learned is that if it matters to you, it matters to someone else, so always take the trouble because it counts, sometimes subconsciously.

Mod Note: Nisha is a first-year MBA student at London Business School. Prior to LBS, Nisha was a Vice President at Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco. From 2011-2013, she was the Asia Business Execution manager for the Global Expansion Team. In this role she was responsible for licensing, product expansion, and executing other revenue growth strategies in the Asia Pacific offices. From 2007-2013, she was a Relationship Manager in Commercial Banking, managing a portfolio of industry agnostic clients, responsible for annual revenue generation of up to $1.2Mn. Nisha was raised in Mumbai, India, and has a BA degree in International Studies and French Literature from the University of California San Diego."