Hizbawi Meresa · St. Louis, Missouri
I’m a WashU Olin MBA candidate graduating in May 2027 and a former manufacturing co-founder and general manager. I’m pursuing roles in investment banking, M&A, corporate finance, corporate strategy, and consulting — bringing valuation and FP&A skills, structured problem solving, and the judgment that comes from owning a P&L through growth, crisis, and recovery.
Co-founder & general manager
Built and scaled a manufacturer
WashU Olin MBA
Dean’s Scholar · May 2027
U.S. permanent resident
No sponsorship required
What I bring
Investment banking, M&A, corporate finance, corporate strategy, and consulting all draw on the same three capabilities — and each is stronger for years of owning a P&L.
Putting a defensible number on a business, a deal, or a decision.
Serves
Driver-based DCF, comparables, precedents, LBO, and synergy analysis — built to stand up in front of a client or an investment committee.
Planning, measuring, and steering performance from inside the business.
Serves
Budgets, rolling forecasts, variance analysis, working capital, and capital allocation — from someone who has lived with the P&L.
Finding the problem worth solving — and making the answer usable.
Serves
Hypothesis-driven analysis, market and competitive assessment, and clear synthesis that leaders can act on.
The foundation
Co-founded and ran a manufacturer through growth, a two-year wartime shutdown, and a rebuild — owning the P&L, the team, and the turnaround.
~45%
revenue CAGR over three years, co-founded company
Co-founder & general manager · 2018–21
17 t/day
production capacity, nearly doubled from 9.5 tons
Demand forecasting and Kaizen · 2018–21
65+
employees and laborers led across operations
25 staff and 40+ laborers
85%
of pre-war customers won back
Within three months of the restart, with costs down 37%
Selected work
Each case is labeled with the capability it demonstrates — the question, the approach, and what came of it.
Skills
These are the skills that investment banking, M&A, corporate finance, strategy, and consulting teams rely on — each tagged with the capability it supports. Choose a role to focus the list, and follow the links to the work where I used them.
Choose a role to see the skills it calls for.
Rated advanced in all eight
AdvancedMicrosoft Excel
DCF, LBO, and three-statement models; budgets and forecasts; scenario switches, sensitivity tables, and integrity checks.
AdvancedMicrosoft PowerPoint
Answer-first decks for executives and clients — a UPS strategy deck and a 24-slide recommendation to RGA.
AdvancedMicrosoft Word
Investment memos, advisory reports, and technical memos, from an M&A recommendation to an ASC 606 analysis.
AdvancedPython
Building and scoring datasets — 6,184 resolved forecasts evaluated for accuracy and calibration.
SQL
Querying and joining structured data to answer business questions.
AdvancedR
Statistical analysis, regression, and data exploration.
AdvancedTableau
Dashboards and visual analysis for performance reporting.
AI research agents
Agents that gather and cross-check market data from multiple sources into concise, sourced briefs.
Product names and logos are trademarks of their respective owners, shown only to identify the tools. R logo © The R Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Putting a defensible number on a business, a deal, or a decision.
Finding, pricing, and structuring deals that create value.
Planning, measuring, and steering performance from inside the business.
Deciding where to compete, what to invest in, and what to stop.
Structuring messy questions and letting evidence decide.
What makes the analysis land — and the plan happen.
Current coursework · In progress
Alongside completed MBA coursework in Advanced Corporate Finance (Valuation; Financing), Mergers & Acquisitions, Financial Accounting, Strategic Cost Analysis, and Data Analytics for Business Leaders.
See the analytics in practice: my RGA-sponsored MBA project used Python to evaluate crowd forecasts across 6,184 resolved questions.
Explore the forecasting projectTry the model
These are the four execution scenarios from my independent UPS valuation — each one a full DCF with its own margin path and cost of capital. The judgment is in the probabilities. Set your own and see where the value lands against the market.
Four execution scenarios from my 26-tab UPS model. Drag a weight — the others rebalance to 100%.
Probability-weighted value
$102/ share
−8% vs. market ~$111My weighting: ≈$102
Probability-weighted value $102 per share, −8% versus the market price.
$73/sh · margin 9.3% · WACC 9.4%
$76/sh · margin 9.4% · WACC 9.0%
$110/sh · margin 10.0% · WACC 8.4%
$155/sh · margin 11.0% · WACC 7.6%
Writing
Essays drawn from real projects — each tagged with the capability it explores, most with a model you can test yourself.
UPS is deliberately walking away from its largest customer. A single growth rate can’t value that. Here is how I rebuilt the model around revenue quality — and why my answer is a range, not a number.
5 min read InteractiveOperating leadershipIn 2023 I came back to a detergent plant that had been shut for two years by the Tigray conflict. No outside capital, lapsed suppliers, lost customers. What mattered most wasn’t any single fix — it was the sequence.
3 min read InteractiveStrategy & problem solvingOur team tested whether a global reinsurer could use crowd forecasts to see emerging risks earlier. The platform beat its baseline by 30.5%. The more useful finding was where that number should — and shouldn’t — be allowed to go.
3 min read InteractiveOpen to full-time roles · Graduating May 2027
I’m pursuing roles in investment banking, M&A, corporate finance and FP&A, corporate strategy, and consulting. I bring valuation and modeling, structured problem solving, and hands-on experience running a manufacturing business through growth and recovery. U.S. permanent resident; no sponsorship required.
Get in touch