Wall Street Prep Financial Modeling Course Guide

The numbers shuddered, trembled, and then… converged. The revolver balanced. The cash flow turned positive. The bottom line was green.

Priya had told him, “Anyone can build a DCF. An LBO is a personality test.”

He had built his model. Revenue growth was 5%. COGS followed historical averages. Depreciation was linked to PP&E. But when he added the revolver (a type of short-term loan), his Interest Expense exploded. Interest Expense ate Net Income. Net Income reduced Retained Earnings. Retained Earnings broke his debt covenants, forcing him to borrow more on the revolver, which raised Interest Expense again. wall street prep financial modeling course

Three weeks later, Leo sat across from a real client—a middle-market logistics company looking to acquire a rival. The MD was sick. Priya was in another meeting. The client asked, “If we lever this at 4x debt-to-EBITDA, how long until we delever?”

“Learn this. Don’t embarrass us,” she said. The numbers shuddered, trembled, and then… converged

The villain of this act was the IRR calculation . Leo’s IRR kept coming out to 4%, which was worse than a savings account. He had spent three hours chasing a stray negative sign in a Cash Sweep macro.

Finally, at 4:00 AM, he found it. A single minus sign in front of the Shareholder Revolver . He corrected it. The IRR jumped to 22.5%. The bottom line was green

He clicked Enable Iterative Calculation . He set the max iterations to 100. He pressed F9.