Adding Value with Excel Skills? - Newbie

[Sevy Bialke]

I own one accidental rental and am looking to purchase a smf house hack in about 1 year in the Twin Cities / St. Paul suburbs MN area. I'm anxious to dive into this game but with a family that doesn't yet see the big picture and 2 small kids, it's going to be a bumpy start with time commitment.

I'm convinced on the mentor/knowledgeable partner to start off on the right foot. I can't count how many times @Brandon Turner has said "50% or some other % of the profit is better than 100% of no profit" in the first 80-or-so podcasts I've rifled through in the last 4 weeks and I've agreed every time. However with 2 kids under 2 and as-of-yet reluctant family, I've been reflecting on my skill set on how I can add value to a more experienced investor without  consuming all of my free time not being home.

I can do just about any DIY project but so can any joe-blow looking to be a handy man. Where I may have some uniqueness is that I have an extremely strongly skill set in Excel and VBA. I spent 2 years almost exclusively operating in excel for my company, building KPI reports, budget review files, rough-&-dirty P&L statements that would update daily for my division instead of monthly from accounting, inventory tracking sheets, etc. My crowning achievement was to take my 50 hour/wk job and automate all of it down to about 2 hours of pulling some data sets and then running macros with formulas so I could pass it on and take a promotion in the operations side of the business. At one point I built out a reporting package for a volley ball coach on their team's overall stats and individual team performance, all based on data entry from one source. I toyed with trying to turn that into a side gig but never went further.

I realize any very seasoned investors are likely paying for a software that probably handles the majority of standard reporting so my value-add may be limited to investors with a smaller port folio or investors with very specific and customer reporting desires. Regardless, in my corporate world, there is never a shortage of need for random excel files to be built (automated capex request forms that email out reports, one-off analysis market sheets, rebuild an ROI to be user-proof, etc.)

Am I barking up the wrong tree?

Where can I add value?

How can I market myself to those that see the value?

Any recommendations on how to approach that relationship assuming I get to an initial conversation?

[Joe Villeneuve]

I love it. I too found out how important Excel skills are to REI. I have had no formal training in it, but I bet I know more, and can do more with it, than at least 60% of the users today. Of course the other 40% know 50 times as much as I do.

I've ended up designing software (for personal use) with it for too many things to mention here, but two of the biggest are Market Analysis and design/executing a REI Business Plan.

Your skills with Excel should not be taken lightly, and can be a very valuable asset as a partner to many REI.