Meet Diarmuid Early, the so-called "Excel guy." He's the LeBron James of spreadsheets. Early makes building financial models using Microsoft's omnipresent software look as easy as the hoops star draining a buzzer beater.
Co-workers were the first to spot Early's spreadsheet skills. In his first job after college, Early emerged as a rising Excel star at London-based Boston Consulting Group. He was the go-to-guy that co-workers went to for help solving spreadsheet brain teasers.
"I had a reputation as the guy who can do funky things in Excel," Early, 37, said. "If you have the answers, people quickly figure out, 'Oh, this is the guy who knows how to do things.'"
Diarmuid Early: Double Down On Your Talent
Early has been making a good living crunching numbers on Excel ever since. His specialty? He turns Excel rows and columns into digestible and actionable information for big financial firms.
Today, Early runs his own data analytics firm and is also a star Microsoft Excel Esports athlete. It might sound nerdy, but there are competitions using Excel that attract tens of thousands of viewers on cable sports network ESPN.
Early, the winner of the 2021 Financial Modeling World Cup, is arguably the baddest — and fastest — spreadsheet problem solver on the planet. Early was ranked No. 1 in the world after the 2021 season.
The FMWC competition, launched in September 2020, is played in stages over the course of the year. Players must solve three real-life financial problems per stage in just two hours by building financial models in Excel. An example of a World Cup challenge is putting together a profit-and-loss statement and subscriber metrics for a software product that just raised its subscription cost.
Use Creativity To Find Answers
Competitors face off against Early in the World Cup as well as Esports battles. Those competitions are more akin to problem-solving challenges, such as totaling up final scores of 100 bowling games in 10 minutes. But Early's opponents know they're facing an Excel superstar.
"It's like playing against LeBron," said Max Sych, chief operating officer at Financial Modeling World Cup. Early, who has a degree in math and physics and a Ph.D. in computer science, gets kudos from Sych for his "speed of thought," countless hours of practice, and ability to think creatively. "He always tries to find the most efficient approach to solving a problem," Sych said.
DataRails, a financial analytics platform, recently did a story on Early with the provocative headline, "The Greatest of All Time at Excel?" and dubbed him "the undisputed face of Excel as an Esport."
For Early, who spent 10 years at Deutsche Bank before starting his own firm, work is all about number crunching, data analysis and financial modeling using the same Excel software that hundreds of millions of people around the world use every day at work and at home. He's founder of Early Days Consulting. Whereas Excel as Esports is more about fun for Early, it's also a way to sharpen his Excel skills and build his brand by promoting his Excel chops to a broader audience.
See Competition As A Way To Improve
Tuning into an Excel competition is like watching an NFL football game. Commentators talk about players' strengths and analyze game strategy just like they do a third down and 10.
In the FMWC's Battle of 16 Excel as Esports clash in September, for example, the announcer set the stage in pregame remarks: "Diarmuid Early is very much the top seed, the favorite, the heavyweight of financial modeling."
There's a scoreboard. And a clock shows how much time is left. Top plays are talking points: "Diarmuid Early," said an announcer, "just broke out the SEQUENCE function. Look at that. It's an interesting play." And postgame interviews with the Excel Esports players get their take on the game.
The battles between Excel geeks excites fans, too. During the FMWC Open in December streamed on Alphabet's YouTube, fans flooded the comments section. "Can this be a new Olympic sport," said one fan. "Better than season eight of 'Game of Thrones,'" said another. "This will sell out stadiums," another fan said.
"It's certainly nerve-wracking," said Early, referring to building spreadsheets with all those people watching. "It's a lot of pressure."
Foster Your Hobbies Like Early
Early didn't grow up dreaming of being an Excel Esports star. He started tinkering with Excel over the summers while in college.
Excel, he says, was a substitute for the Mathematica software he used at school to solve math problems. But back then he wasn't using Excel in the way it's commonly used in business, such as valuing companies or estimating the projected costs and profits of a new project. "I was trying to come up with workarounds to make Excel do things that it's not exactly supposed to do," he said.
And that experimentation led him to realize that the power of Excel was its versatility. Its ability to do everything. And, more important, that if he mastered Excel, he could call on it to do lots of things fast. "It just sort of clicked for me," Early said. "If you learn to be good at Excel then you could make a pretty good stab at almost everything to do with data."
Keep It Simple Like Early
What's the secret of a well-designed spreadsheet? In a word: simplicity, says Early. And the fewer unique formulas the better. "Every formula you write, therefore, will be doing more work," he said.
The five-time former finalist and 2014 champion of ModelOff, a financial modeling world championship that ran from 2012 to 2019, says he despises doing tedious tasks.
Early's biggest tip for success? Find a new, faster, more efficient way to get things done.
"Early in my career, I would often spend hours working out how to do something in two minutes instead of 20," he said.
If he has a choice between spending 15 minutes doing something in a manual way or spending an hour researching a more efficient way to do it, he always spends the hour. That approach pays big dividends later on, he says.
For example, Early told DataRails that if you want to merge two databases, learning to use VLOOKUP or Power Query will take longer at first than sorting the two lists and then manually cutting and pasting. But if you learn VLOOKUP or Power Query then the next 100 times you do it will be a lot faster.
Build Muscle Memory With Practice
The best of the best never stops practicing or think they know it all. Early is no exception.
"Excel is probably hard to master if you're not spending a good chunk of your time on it," he said. Early is constantly improving his Excel techniques, such as mastering new features such as Power Query, which lets you import and connect to outside data, dynamic arrays, and the LAMBDA function.
To acquire new Excel knowledge, Early regularly seeks out the wisdom of other Excel users. "Almost any problem you come across," Early said, "hundreds of other people have probably come across it and have probably answered your question."
Another effective way to excel at Excel, Early says, is to attempt to solve the real-life financial problems that contestants of the Financial Modeling World Cup must decode. (Samples and actual cases used in competitions are available at www.fmworldcup.com.) Reviewing the cases gives you instant feedback and enables you to see if you solved the problem correctly. And, if not, where you went wrong and a chance to try again.
Early: Make Yourself Indispensable
If you want to make yourself irreplaceable at work, one way to do that is to get so good at something that co-workers can't match it, Early says.
"Being sort of irreplaceable gives you a lot of leverage," Early said, either when discussing a key project with your boss or negotiating a pay raise or promotion.
He adds value via Excel. The key to a good spreadsheet, he says, is more than just the numbers and benefits of automation: "It needs to be turned into something that is readable and actionable by everyone, from the individual salesperson all the way up to global senior management."
Being good at Excel can give even a junior employee enough actionable intelligence to provide insightful data to team leaders and stand out from co-workers, says Early.
"That's a big distinguishable feature," Early said. And senior managers who can reanalyze an Excel data set created by someone else can come at a problem with more confidence. "It gives you the ability to push back, challenge, or ask better questions," Early said.
Diarmuid Early's Keys
- Winner of the 2021 Financial Modeling World Cup. Considered the fastest spreadsheet problem solver on the planet. Early was ranked No. 1 in the world after the 2021 season.
- Overcame: Not having access to some software packages in college, forcing him to use Excel instead.
- "Being sort of irreplaceable gives you a lot of leverage."
