Earlier this month, a project team (4 Nicholas Center students and I) completed an important milestone in our Applied Corporate Finance class. Our team was asked to lead an Early Stage Financial Modeling & Valuation workshop for entrepreneurs in Madison. The workshop is part of an Innovation Roadmap Series sponsored by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (“WARF”) and our project sponsor, Mike Wagner (Investment Director at WARF), said “We want every entrepreneur that seeks funding from WARF to use the framework you’ve developed.”
Our goal was to condense years of valuation experience and finance training into the key concepts that the entrepreneurs needed to know – starting with the most basic concepts, then going into advanced topics.
Our key deliverables are publicly available using this link: https://uwmadison.box.com/s/vlgflxxddv85lmt0xf364spygy8fw67e and include:
- 70+ page presentation – everything they needed to know about early stage modeling, valuation, how to have a conversation about valuation with an investor, etc.
- A model and valuation Excel template
- Ready-to-deploy
- Monthly model for 5+ years with a flexible start date
- Isolates exactly where they need to provide inputs, then automatically generates financial statements, investor returns, etc.
- 60 page Instruction Manual explaining how to use the model
- 17 videos explaining how to use the model
- At our workshop, we delivered
- Our presentation on the key concepts of early stage modeling and valuation
- A demonstration of the model
- A group exercise to make sure they understood how the model works
- Individual consultation with entrepreneurs based on their ideas
- We will also be doing a follow up Q&A session with the entrepreneurs once they’ve had a chance to work with the model
This is an excellent example of the type of consulting projects that are part of our curriculum at the Nicholas Center. Stay tuned for more information about our projects, including an interesting analysis we are doing for Amazon!
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