Hi - I’m new into a well-known strategy firm and, being honest, I’m scared to death I won’t be bale to do the job. In particular, I keep being told I need to perform at a high level with my modelling and am not sure I will be able to do so.Some colleagues have said not to worry - it is just numerous excel worksheets, with some formulas, well presented.Rather than just worry I wondered if anyone had any advice or suggestions about what I can do to get myself up to par in modelling. Thank you.

I am interested in this topic as well.. I'm actually on a similar situation. Started to work in a big Strat House straight from uni and they asked me to do business modelling for a project. While I have absolutely no problem in using excel, I have no clear idea on how the whole thing should be structured and presented.A solid book (if there's any) would be a good start!

Use common sense.Work out dependancies, and who you have in which teams waiting on whom, then look at your costs the contract price and the GP your expected to deliver.Model it all to fit and blame the Indians when it goes wrong, works wonders.

Don't worry.If you are at a decent firm you will have plenty of training before beinng let loose on a model, plus the consultants/managers will develop schematics for you to follow and will supervise you very very closely.

Keep it simple! That's the only advice I can tell you from bitter experience. I'm still revisiting financial models that I developed a year ago (I now work in strategy for a company, rather than consulting) and trying to remember how I constructed it. Avoid complexity and building it every possible permutation. You will have to explain it to someone and someone else will own it at some point. So keep it SIMPLE.

Document things as you go along. I have some models and they are complex as feck!

you bus/strat guys! you feign supperity but cannot even annotate your work!!!!! a freshly minted grad coder learns this as step 1!SIMPLE

For pseudos like taxmansuggest people like you should not be wasting everyone's else time with stupid advice & commentary.