For anyone who has followed the string of posts that I've put together over the past few months/years, you'll know that I've been fighting an uphill battle since graduating college. To keep the back story brief, I fought my way into a boutique ER shop as an equity sales assistant. After working much like a slave for the better part of two years, I got the call up from the bullpen (~2 months ago) to work for a very well known analyst and it has been a pleasure so far.
With that said, I've had an extremely hard time "shaking" off my responsibilities from my previous role. I've had to train multiple people in this role (very high turnover) and I have previously been a large part in planning management events for my company (typically host pretty large conferences). Being that I am practically forced to spend a quarter of my day training the new sales assistants, a quarter of my day doing busy work for the ceo (as his assistant just recently left) and a quarter of my day planning for our upcoming conference, I have not had a moment to REALLY dig into any models. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't be concerned; but I am trying to get out of this dysfunctional company as quick as possible and from everything I've heard, I need to know how to forecast in a model, let alone, build one from scratch.
Am I wrong in this assumption? I've been getting messages from a few recruiters but given this slight dilemma (on top of me not being up to speed with about half of my coverage universe yet), I have been reluctant to pursue any opportunities. I know my company will typically only make you take a writing test, of which I believe I would be fine with. Long story short, if I need to know how to model to move companies, do any of you have tips/tricks for me to get up to speed as soon as possible? I know how to read our models, I understand how they work, but I haven't been put in a position yet where I am the one forecasting our numbers, etc.
I obviously plan on taking earnings from previous quarters and updating some models, but I haven't had a second to breathe, let alone train myself yet. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
~ fluffhead
Stop being good at planning parties. They will stop asking you after you display disinterest, not overall disinterest, and start focusing your time & energies in the real deal stuff.
I've already been told that this is the last one I need to help plan for. They know how much I despise that part of the gig.
I think you gotta go through the exercise of updating a model and projecting the quarters yourself, then comparing how you did to your senior analyst. Go in and ask him any questions as to why they modeled something a certain way where it differed from your own. Not exactly a fast way to learn, but I think you have to do it this way. Go through each input and line item and you'll have it down eventually with enough earnings.
Having no time is a relative and arbitrary concept (i.e., I doubt that all that you said you were doing at work takes 24 hours) and, pardon me for being blunt, the fact that you had the time to write this post and browse the forum, you should have spent that time working on your modeling skills. There are no shortcuts, so you just have to get your hands dirty. That's the only way to learn. Also, don't blindly follow things, but think critically about each input and understand them.
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