Modeling Leveraged Buyouts ~ Simplified

This book, Modeling Leveraged Buyouts - Simplified, is for MBA, CFA or undergraduate finance students interested in understanding and modeling leveraged buyouts (‘LBO’). This book is also helpful for financial executives and others interested in understanding and modeling LBOs. It is a wonderful resource for students or professionals interviewing for jobs in the private equity, investment banking or hedge fund industry because it will teach you how to build a basic LBO model in 1-2 hours.

This book assumes that the reader is familiar with basic finance and accounting concepts. For example, the reader is expected to know the structure of an income statement, the meaning of the term working capital, internal rate of return (IRR) and multiples. The reader is NOT expected to be an expert in Microsoft Excel but has to be reasonably familiar with Microsoft Excel.

No two LBO transactions are exactly alike. Each LBO transaction will have unique features, characteristics and structure. This book will teach you how to build a simple LBO model. Once you can confidently build a simple LBO model, you can add many bells and whistles to reflect the numerous specifics of the LBO transaction you are considering or modeling.

Modeling Leveraged Buyouts - Simplified is based on Senith Mathews’ experience tutoring students and executives in financial modeling over 10 years and building models as a management consultant with Arthur Andersen and Mercer Management Consulting (now Oliver Wyman). Modeling Leveraged Buyouts - Simplified narrowly focusses on modeling leveraged buy outs given the surge in interest in LBOs.

The first part of Modeling Leveraged Buyouts - Simplified (chapters 1-5) walks you through building and analyzing an LBO model step by step. The first chapter of the book lays the foundations of the LBO model outlining the basic principles, components and structure of an LBO model. The second chapter lists and describes the ingredients of an LBO model. This chapter covers the background and assumptions required to build an LBO model. The third chapter of the book shows you how to build the heart of an LBO model: the cash flow projections. It is the cash flow projections that drive investment returns and performance. The fourth chapter of the book teaches you how to develop the output of an LBO model. Here we look at how to compute the key metrics in an LBO transaction. You will see how a project’s returns differs from the private equity investor’s returns and how a project may give poor returns but the private equity investor generates huge returns from the same LBO transaction. The fifth chapter of this book teaches you how to analyze the LBO model you have just built. We show you why and how sensitivity analysis is done. We also study how an LBO will create value and teach you how to quantify the value generated by the different drivers of value creation in chapter 5.