Throughout the 2024 Business Immersion Program, we 20 freshmen had countless opportunities to meet with alumni in all areas of business, ranging from sales, to marketing, to project management/consulting, and my personal favorite, finance. Over the past five weeks, Zack Carl ’18 was very generous of his time and made it to Crawfordsville for not one, but two finance sessions centered around Excel and Financial Modeling.
Zack currently works at RMK Maritime (an Investment Banking firm that provides advisory and capital raising services to the maritime industry) as an Associate and has an immense amount of knowledge about the finance world. Before diving too deep into the specifics, Zack was able to give us an overview of possible career paths in the finance industry and broke it down into the three main sectors: Corporate Finance, Investment Banking, & Asset Management.
We then got to my favorite part of the workshop – Excel! Zack taught us all the excel basics, beginning with understanding the layout of the software, to eventually being able to use more complex formulas and variables, such as XLOOKUP, VLOOKUP, and IFS, so that we could manipulate data to paint an accurate and digestible financial picture of our companies.
The final part of our workshop with Zack involved us taking a deeper look at the three financial statements: Income Statement, Balance Sheet, & Cash Flow Statement, to accurately read them and learn what these statements can tell us about a company’s financial health.
After finishing up the BIP and going through the process of building and pitching a company, I can confidently say that Zack’s workshop was immensely valuable in my team’s success. With the Excel skills that we learned and the knowledge of the three financial statements, we were confident in our financial projections and understood what it took to be a profitable business.
