Niel built Attronica over 40 years. Now he wants the truth about what he has — what it's worth, and how much it can still grow. Your job this week: read five years of real financials, calculate the ratios, compare them to the industry, and tell Priya what's healthy and what's hiding.

What separates an FP&A analyst from someone who can just use Excel? By Friday, you'll know. Week 2 hands you operational data from inside Attronica — customer lists, monthly P&Ls, and inventory reports no outsider has seen — and three stakeholders waiting on your read. You'll tell Sales which customers are at risk, tell Ops what costs actually scale with revenue, and tell Finance why a profitable company is still cash-tight (with Claude and Perplexity as your research team). The numbers are the easy part. Turning them into "so what, and what do we do?" is the whole job. You're not here to calculate. You're here to answer. This isn't a report. This is the job.

The focus narrows here. Attronica's AV division needs a forward financial story, and you're going to build it. You'll get six years of internal accounting data, numbers that have never left the company's books, and start by constructing the division's standalone income statement. From there, you'll project five years forward, sanity-check your numbers against industry peers, and then stress-test every assumption — the hires, the cost, the cash runway. Every line has to hold up under scrutiny before it lands on Niel's desk. Historical numbers tell you what AV did. A projection that survives scrutiny tells you what it can do. This is how FP&A turns numbers into decisions.

How do you put a price on a business that's never been sold? By the end of Week 6, you'll know — and you'll have built the answer yourself. Weeks 5-6 walk you through projecting a business's future — how revenue, costs, and cash change over five years — then turn those projections into a DCF valuation. You don't need to know any of this going in. By the end, you'll have a value range that holds up — and the reasoning to back it. Your first real valuation.