How to Develop a Financial Modeling Business

How to develop your very own financial modeling business? Just like any kind of profession, you start from the bottom and practice, gain experience, reputation, connections, perseverance, then eventually, once you have accumulated enough and confident enough to start your own trade, then you can start your own business. The same can be said about a financial modeling business.

Financial modeling – a Highly Valued Skill

Financial modeling and analysis with financial spreadsheets in today’s world are always required when making important financial decisions as the consequences are complex and require in-depth analysis and understanding of each case. First of all, financial modeling is a very sought-after skill which has been proven to be critical when making rational financial decisions, be it when running a business, starting a new business, deciding about an investment, performing a valuation, measure financial performance or it could be as simple as personal finance management. The demand for financial modeling services is very high and the market exists worldwide. This fact is a great opportunity to be taken advantage of, but developing a financial modeling business is not as easy as it sounds. You will need to practice a lot and go through constant improvements when it comes to learning how to develop good financial models for professional use.

Offering Financial Modeling Services via Freelance Platforms

Fortunately, with today’s technology, it is possible to develop your practice by building financial models for others through the web. There are several freelance platforms where you can offer your financial modeling services for custom-made financial models. With a platform where you can offer your services to start on, as a financial modeler with the goal to developing a financial modeling business, you need to be proactive and keep on bidding on projects to work on. Why do so? Well, it is, of course, normal that you will have competition in this trade. If you can determine that this field of business is a great opportunity, then obviously, others can too. You are not alone and the competition will be fierce, especially if you are new. Therefore, it can be hard to start such business at the beginning, since nobody knows about your skills and the sector is very competitive.

Offering Financial Model Templates on a Niche Website

A better approach than starting on a competitive platform is to use a specialized niche website for financial modeling resources such as eFinancialModels. eFinancialModels focuses primarily on providing industry-specific financial model templates in Excel, Google Sheets or similar spreadsheet programs. The advantage here is that you can showcase your work and users can better understand the quality of your work by seeing the exact structure and design of your financial models.

Financial model templates listed on eFinancialModels are proven and used by many business leaders, CEOs, CFOs, investment managers and financial consultants all over the world, from countries ranging as far as the USA, Canada, UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, France, Russia, Turkey, Greece, Egypt, India, Malaysia, China, Japan, Australia, Mexico, Columbia, Peru, Brazil, Argentina and many other countries would need to be mentioned here as well. The bottom line is, many users are looking for help and for great financial model templates as these help them to save hours of their precious time when performing their financial analysis and financial modeling tasks.

The Benefits of Starting your Financial Modeling Practice with Great Financial Model Templates

Preparing a financial model template, which is more general and not specifically designed for a certain project, offers a great tool to use for anybody seriously interested in that industry as a base to start with their analysis with the similar settings, industry characteristics, or use cases. For financial modelers, creating spreadsheet templates for others to use have been proven to be a great way to showcase their skills and expertise and get potential customers for financial modeling services interested to procure financial modeling services. Offering financial model templates, therefore, allow you to better position yourself in the industry and sourcing work for follow-on or custom financial modeling projects.

The benefits of selling financial model templates are twofold:

(1) Marketing and credibility
(2) New income stream.

Showcasing your financial model templates can be a great way to establish you in the financial modeling world as here the structure and design of your models are very important. Users appreciate well-designed financial models as it makes their lives considerable easier and therefore they are ready to go with unknown financial modelers provided their models are good. As a result of establishing credibility and showcasing your skills, not only will you gain value to your trade but also, you will gather reputation for helping users with great financial models. Another way of boosting your reputation is to conduct a follow up after sales with support inquiries/questions/help. Not all users have the know-how about financial models or how to customize it so there will be cases that they will need your assistance to complete the model or cases where the users need your time to explain the logic behind the financial model. Therefore, though the task can be tedious, it is for your own good so that you can build a reputation which will be a factor for your customers to keep coming back for your services and templates.

Another benefit of preparing financial model templates is that they can be sold, meaning the generate income for you. As the models are sold 24/7, this means you can also generate income while you sleep, while on vacation while you are busy with other projects. Its, therefore, a very valuable income stream as this is just on top of all your other work. Important here is not only to prepare one financial model but to keep adding new models on a regular basis so that you can build-up your income stream and find additional users. On eFinancialModels we have helped several independent and skilled financial modelers to create such income streams, generating thousands of dollars additional income every year for them. We know how to market new templates and literally helped our vendors to make them known. To know more about this, feel free to register as a vendor on eFinancialModels here.

Conclusion: Start with a Financial Model Template

Financial modeling represents the practice of projecting a business’s financial results in the future and deriving important analytical conclusions from it. The process of building, maintaining, and using financial models involves many interrelated and complex steps. Basically, financial modeling is a great tool to help with making solid and well-understood financial business decisions. Financial modeling by itself requires many years of experience and is not an easy skill to acquire. Given its importance to the business, it is a field where good financial modelers are in great demand but with minimal supply due to the high requirement of building a great and useful financial model. One would need to keep on practicing for years to gather experience and know-how about the economy, industry, and other use cases.

If you have the right set of skills and know-how as a financial modeler, then you can start to develop a financial modeling business. To develop a financial modeling business, you will need to do the following:

  • Showcase your skills by offering Financial Model Templates
  • Establish credibility, skills, and value
  • Offer follow-on and custom modeling services
  • Use the help of eFinancialModels expertise to market your templates

If you are interested in how to sell financial model templates better, you can check out our article sharing our (tested and proven) set of guidelines to help you build a financial model template which users prefer here: How to Design a Great Financial Model Template. You can also refer to our existing financial model templates so that you can get an idea on what are the Most Downloaded Financial Models that are in demand by our users.