Senan Skalkos joined Hardman & Co in July of 2024 to undertake a private companies valuation internship, to provide him with valuable experience to aid his future career aspirations in the financial sector. He is currently undertaking a BSc in finance.
We spoke to Senan to reflect on his internship to date, focusing on working with the team, skills development and building his network. Over to Senan…
I have had a strong interest in financial markets and investing since I was 13 years old. After nearly seven years of observing markets, studying finance and competing in investment competitions, I was eager to use the skills I have developed in diverse valuation scenarios where I could also learn from top experts in the field.
Hardman & Co’s longstanding and strong reputation brings exciting clients with interesting projects which present a lot of learning opportunities. Most importantly, the team is full of exceptionally skilled people who have decades of experience and are enthusiastic about sharing valuable lessons about strategy, the markets and business. This made Hardman & Co very attractive to me.
I worked on a number of projects in different areas of the business throughout my internship. I primarily worked with Richard Angus and Larissa Adams, performing private company valuations (PCVs). Throughout my time working on PCV projects I built valuation models such as discounted cash flow models and comparable company analyses to understand the fair value of private assets. Before we could build the valuation models in depth, due diligence was undertaken. This involved assessing the company’s business plan to understand different growth scenarios, understanding their financial position, and understanding the market’s sentiment towards a given company’s industry, as well as many other different elements.
I also worked very closely with Kirsty Macrae to help with gathering and interpreting readership data and statistics for operational purposes. I was tasked with calculating statistics to help us understand the shelf life of Hardman & Co’s research, how we can optimise which day of the week to upload research notes on, how different services such as DirectorsTalk interviews impact readership and more.
I was thrilled to be given the responsibility of writing an article about young investors for the Hardman Monthly. I studied Gen Z investing habits and their implications for investors, companies and investor relations professionals. This involved macroeconomic research, finding appropriate case studies and analysing the results to draw conclusions that are interesting and relevant to Hardman and Co’s readers.
Working on private company valuations really allowed me to hone my financial analysis and valuation skills. I have previous experience of valuing public companies for investment competitions and personal research, so before starting the internship I was already familiar with techniques such as discounted cash flow and comparable company models.
The PCV business handles a variety of situations, often more complicated than simple share value calculation, such as valuations for M&A transactions. Furthermore, the world of private companies can be more opaque than public markets. Information about important considerations such as comparable companies can be more difficult to find – or even unavailable. As a result, valuations can be more challenging. Adapting my existing skills to the context of private companies helped me to become more efficient and flexible in my valuation abilities.
Working on readership data helped to improve my data analysis skills. I managed to get a lot of practice using Excel and other platforms, figuring out how to clean and format data more quickly as well as perform more complicated functions. I also gained experience in understanding what questions to ask when looking at data, as well as how to find useful insights. Finding methods to measure which days of the week see proportionally more people reading Hardman research, and how shares perform relative to peers, were great ways to practise this.
I have experience writing opinion pieces about economics and finance for newspapers in Ireland and Asia which are typically around 1,000 words. Writing an article for the Hardman Monthly has allowed me to practice writing a more in-depth piece about a given topic for a different audience.
This was my first internship so I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect when I started. I wanted to learn as much as I could and be a useful part of the Hardman team. To get the most out of it I tried to get as involved as possible in any ongoing project I could to understand the business and to make a positive contribution in many different areas.
The most valuable lesson I learned from Hardman & Co is being able to balance the human and technical side of the market. Richard Angus and Keith Hiscock were always happy to share their knowledge of how to interpret the market’s sentiment and the importance of combining EQ with IQ when assessing markets and businesses.
Parallel to this, when working with the PCV team I also learned a lot about the market’s cycles. I came to understand how companies are more susceptible to “ROOM” risk or “running out of money” risk in periods of declining optimism as opposed to during buoyant periods where funding problems can often be an afterthought.
Richard, Kirsty, Larissa and Keith have all been exceptionally helpful to me. We regularly met to discuss the projects I was involved with, from valuations with Richard and Larissa, to readership with Kirsty and my research for the monthly article with Keith.
All of the team members were incredibly friendly. Although I was working remotely I got to know many of the team who I was not directly working with in our morning meetings and through smaller projects.
The work I did at Hardman & Co has helped me to establish a strong technical foundation for future valuation work. It has also allowed me to learn from the invaluable experiences of some exceptionally talented people which will help me better read market activity in the future.
Thank you, Senan, for sharing your experiences and for the work you put into all the projects you contributed to during your internship.
Senan Skalkos is the youngest recipient of an award from the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment (CISI). The award was achieved for receiving the highest mark in their Introduction to Investment exam in Ireland at age 16.
Senan is a regular contributor to Echo Live and Islamic Finance News, writing about economic and financial issues. Senan has been an equity analyst in University College Cork’s student-managed fund. He has won investment competitions in Ireland and taken top places internationally.
Senan is currently studying for a BSc in Finance from University College Cork, where he is the student ambassador for the CISI.
