Insights

I recently developed a quick template to look at potential commission structures for a business with customer concentration and large contracts. I thought a simple version of the Excel workbook would provide some decent Excel formula practice.

The two most commonly used functions for scenario selection are =CHOOSE() and =OFFSET(). The =CHOOSE() function is the simpler of the two, and is sufficient for most simple scenario analysis. If, for example, you only intend to run three scenarios, then you may prefer =CHOOSE(). This function can cause frustration, however, if you are constantly adding or deleting the number of scenarios in your model. The reason is that it requires you link directly to the scenario. The image that follows demonstrates:

I generally find it difficult to listen to long interviews and podcasts. One recent exception to this is an interview with Aswath Damodaran titled “Aswath Damodaran on the Art of Corporate Valuation” (click on the link for the interview).

We are making baby steps towards profitability at ASimpleModel.com! This month revenue covered all fixed expenses excluding web design / development efforts and my time. A small victory, but it was exciting nonetheless. The most recent installment walks through these updates, and demonstrates how quickly you can update a business dashboard once you have one built. For those that are interested I have included an image of the business dashboard at the bottom of this post.

Distribution waterfalls define the economic relationship between the equity participants involved in an investment. In private equity transactions this generally focuses on the relationship between the general partner (“GP”) and limited partners (“LP”).