I love pawn stars, but it always kills me the sellers always end up “negotiating against themselves” as mentioned in the article. I’m always yelling at the TV: “Dude! You have a 200 year old priceless antique and you just dropped your asking price by 75% on the first counter-offer!”
I do a lot of work in Excel. Call me a nerd or whatever, but I enjoy it.
Everytime I’m faced with an Excel task (and most tasks actually), I veiw it is a brain-teaser. I ask myself, “How can I tackle this problem such that I have the least chance of making an error in the shortest amount of time possible within the given output/analysis constraints.” Thanks to some great Excel teachers at NERA, I’ve built a great toolbox of methods to use.
One of my main responsibilities at work is financial and operational planning which comes into focus around the end of the calendar year. This is when we put our heads together to try to figure out what we think next year will look like. The process requires many iterations, as strategies, storylines, assumptions, expenses, and tactics are fleshed out. Once, we have a good baseline forecast we run it through various scenarios to check out the “what ifs.” Easily jumping between scenarios, changing scenario assumptions, and easily comparing outputs is a critical step in the process and makes for an interesting Excel challenge.
The solution I use revolves around the Data Validation feature which allows you to create a dropdown menu in a cell. This post assumes you have an intermediate level of Excel knowledge.
#tldr
Problem: Use Excel to view the total sales from three predetermined 12 month sales scenarios
Solution:
- Create an in-cell drop down menu using Data->Data Validation to select the name of a scenario
- Use the text value selected by the dropdown as the lookup value in a match() function to return that scneario’s row number in a source table
- Pass that row number to an hlookup() function that uses the month as its lookup value to pull the sales number for a given month and scenario
Download example Excel file
I love checking out creative office spaces. Office Snapshots is a pretty cool blog showing the work spaces of startups, creative agencies, and the like that I recently came accross. This Ain’t No Disco is another good blog with the same theme.
Office Snapshots had a nice comprehensive gallery of shots from Weiden + Kennedy. I used to be pretty obsessed with working there.
Meet me in the basket.
Time to start a new blog.
I’ve had a good run on my personal site, The Consortium of Greater Minds. And it’s not over; posts here will be crossed-posted there. But, this is an excersise in personal branding.
After reading a post by Mark Suster on his blog on getting out there, hitting the streets, using some shoe-leather, meeting some people, etc. I decided I needed to do just that. Initially, I created the Consortium of Greater Minds to keep up with my close group of globally dispersed friends outside of the noise of Facebook. It was a place to pontificate on music, the street culture scene, and just update my friends once and awhile on what I was thinking. In contrast, My 50 Coffees will be a place where I can write about more prfoessional interests. I envision it as somewhat of a portfolio that I can pass along with my resume or share it with new friends and colleagues to add personal and professional depth to my web presence.
And, I’ll also keep track of my progress towards having 50 coffee/lunch/dinner/drinks meetings. It’ll keep me both motivated and honest in the journey to broadening my network in the relatively small scene that is LA Tech.
I invite you to check out my LinkedIn profile. If you think I can help or want to chat, drop me a line and we can have coffee.