Chapter 1 - All Gold(wo)men Were Once Greenhorns

G2G Chapter 1 - All Gold(wo)men Were Once Greenhorns

All Gold(wo)men Were Once Greenhorns

A Series on Corporate Finance for Everyone CHAPTER 1 OF 13 - WELCOME Canary Wharf, London - 17th Floor, SBCI 23:47. Trace Flint, 23, sits alone on the 17th floor. The floor is hollow - empty seats, darkened screens, the faint whir of servers below. Her screen glows: Subtrax_Model_v44.xlsx. Four years of company financials. Line items stacked thirty-deep. The model was built by an intern two months in. The intern was smart. The intern went to Oxford. But the intern made a fundamental error in his cost forecasting. She scrolls through the detail tabs. There - in "Cost Structure Assumptions." Support costs: marked as "Fixed at £187k." She writes in her notebook: "Support scales with headcount. Headcount scales with customer count. If you double customers, you roughly double support tickets. You need more support staff. Cost is not fixed." She scrolls down to the summary. The intern's model shows: Revenue growing from £5.3m to £16.6m by FY28. EBITDA turns positive in year two - £4.2m, climbing to £9.8m by year three. Too smooth. Too neat. When you add customers, costs don't stay flat. The cost rises with headcount. You can't keep support costs flat while your customer base triples. She clicks into the assumptions and rewires the mechanics. Support costs as 5% of revenue instead of fixed. Host costs scaled more realistically. The new trajectory is radically different. Revenue still grows to £16.6m. But EBITDA: negative in year two (now -£1.1m instead of +£4.2m). The inflection point is delayed. By year four: £3.2m, not £9.8m. She makes a note in clean handwriting: "Numbers fixed. Cost structure corrected. EBITDA trajectory more realistic per actual cost scaling. - TF"

She saves the file as "Subtrax_Model_v45_CORRECTED" and emails it to herself. She closes the lid and walks to the DLR. She thinks about the model. Tomorrow someone will take her corrected version and build a pitchbook. That pitchbook will form a valuation. That valuation will determine whether Subtrax gets funded or not. She doesn't know this yet. But her three-hour correction is now doing real work in the world. Investment banking looks intimidating. Not because the ideas are hard. Not because the maths is complex. It's intimidating because the explanations usually are. This series exists to fix that. You will learn corporate finance not through formulas or textbooks, but through stories. Five characters. Two companies. One story. By the end, you will understand finance well enough to walk into any meeting and hold your own. Every Goldman once began as a greenhorn. The difference between them and you is not talent. It is exposure. Think of this series as a novel about numbers. Each chapter opens with a scene - a conflict, a problem, a decision point. The conflict illustrates a financial concept. By the end of the chapter, through the story of real people making real choices, you will understand not just the concept but why it matters. Read this on your own time. Fifteen to twenty minutes per chapter. If you get lost in the numbers, re-read the scene. The scene always explains the number. Finance is most useful when you can apply it to something you actually care about. ⁂ Part One Meet the Cast Le Pitch Jean-Baptiste Fournier, MD / SBCI (London) - Age 34 Known for Immaculate pitchbooks Style Hermès ties, South Kensington Paris, France - Lapérouse Restaurant