UPDATE - Director wants to “chat” about my model as an intern. Wtf?

Quite a decent amount of people shared their opinion on my last post where the director wanted to "chat" about my DCF so I thought I'd give an update as the chat occurred yesterday. Long story short most of you were right.

It was surprisingly pleasant although despite expecting and preparing for it I was still flash-banged by the sheer directness and pragmatism. I'll re-word some of the quotes that stuck with me. "Show me the terminal value", "why this multiple" "good." "This is unnecessary" "It looks the way it should." "Growth could be played around with a bit" The criticism was actually given in a surprisingly positive way too.

Essentially it was: "I appreciate the complexity you achieved here but next time remember the input assumptions trump the way the model looks".

One of you also said he might talk about how the group does the WACC or different assumptions which was also true. He mentioned that the way I approached the WACC calculation is expected and not completely wrong but it needs to be worked on, but it's expected for me not to have known how the group does it.

I honestly feel like I navigated the questions well and I actually thought the feedback was solid and true. I also feel like he appreciated the technical skills of putting the damn thing together especially since I tried to really achieve the standard of a FT analyst, and even added both the exit multiple method and the perpetuity growth method with a nice little matrix so sensitivities can be played with. Then we spent 10 minutes just talking about how I like it and where I'm from/ my background etc. Really solid experience overall tbh and thanks to all of you who told me to chill out.

8 Comments
 

"The criticism was actually given in a surprisingly positive way too."

Get used to this - this is how the job works (i.e. seniors providing comments, not criticism)

Array
 

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