I've been told I could be asked to walk through a paper LBO. Doing some practice ones online, where if you have to take CapEx as % of Sales, you end up having to do things like 121m*.15
Call me stupid, but 121 * 15 feels intimidating to do in my head under pressure. Is it acceptable to take a few seconds to work it out on scrap paper? Any tricks to help out with the mental math? Much appreciated - thank you!!
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Actually, I guess just 120*15 + 15 for this one, but some are a little trickier ... 65% of 178 and the sorts.
Yeah, ask if you could use paper but imo they won’t have an issue with it. Good luck
Break up your multiplication into easier steps. For example, for 121x15, do 100x15, 20x15, 1x15 and add those together. Method is called partial products.
Similar to above, if you have 15 you can break it up into 10% and 5%. You then know that whatever 10% is, 5% will be half. You also know 10% is just the number minus one decimal place or whatever you know what I mean. Then just take the sum of those 2 (the 10% and 1/2 of the 10%).
Speak the steps out loud, the more you do the quicker it goes:
15% of 121 ok so,
10% of 121 is 12.1,
5% is half of 12.1 which is 6.05
12.1 + 6.05 = 18 + .15, which equals 18.15
Sure there’s probably quicker ways to do this in less steps but I always found the rounding up and subtracting harder to keep track of. And if you do this quickly enough nobody is gonna care you took an extra few steps.
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