What you'll learn
- Take control of your financial destiny both personally and professionally.
- Read, Understand, and Analyze Financial Statements. Financial Statements are the core documents of any business or enterprise.
- Distinguish yourself from your colleagues with a new financial skillset.
- How to Read a Financial Report
- Learn the gold standard tools of financial valuation and decision making.
- What Is an Asset? The most fundamental atomic unit of business is the asset. Understanding what an asset is and why it matters is critical to career success.
- Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs (and other non-financial types) Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits!
- If you want to get further than you’ve ever gone before you need to be willing to learn like never before.
Requirements
- No experience required.
Description
The smartest people invest heavily in their education and skill development, recognizing that their human capital is their most marketable resource.
Skills are the most valuable thing you can acquire in this lifetime because they keep compounding until the day you die.
The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.
I have just completed this course on Corporate Finance through Udemy and like MBA-ASAP I found the content to be extremely relevant. It is delivered in a clear manner which made the subject easy to understand. I had little very little corporate finance knowledge before the course and know I feel confident with reading financial documents and interpreting the stock-market. I would recommend this course to anyone looking to learn about corporate finance as its a great introduction with many valuable resources/ It would suit a person with a non finance background or someone who is looking to refresh their knowledge. John Cousins makes learning simple and the topics are easy to understand and have recently been updated. Excellent value for money and the videos are high quality and easy to watch. I also recommend MBA ASAP as an excellent resource for updating/learning new business skills.
Andrew Windebank
Can you truly run a business without a deep understanding of your financial numbers? The answer is a resounding no. Let's explore the potential pitfalls of this approach...
Imagine your business as a competitive sports team. Just as a coach needs to understand each player's strengths and the dynamics of the game to win, mastering your financial numbers is essential for driving your business to victory.
With my expertise in business and mathematics, I'm here to guide you in developing a winning financial strategy. Together, we'll unravel the intricacies of your finances, empowering you to make confident, informed decisions that drive your business forward.
Ready to make the leap?
Critical Strategies for Leveraging Financial Insights:
- Demystify Your Revenue Streams: Gain a precise understanding of how your business earns profit, much like knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your team. This knowledge of revenue inflows and associated costs will enhance profitability and operational efficiency.
- Focus on Gross Profit: Recognize that gross profit is more than a number; it's the backbone of your business, supporting all other activities and facilitating future planning and investments, just as a strong defense supports a winning team.
- Smart Allocation of Budgets: Use your understanding of gross profit to allocate funds to critical expenses like rent and payroll intelligently, ensuring they support rather than hinder your growth. It's like strategizing your resources to strengthen the key players in your team.
- Strategic Marketing Investment: Learn the art of budgeting for marketing. Determine the optimal amount to invest in attracting new customers, which is crucial for expanding your market reach without compromising operational funds, similar to how a coach invests in training to improve the team's performance.
- Utilize Numbers to Propel Growth: Move beyond maintenance; use financial insights strategically to drive your business to new heights. Armed with this knowledge, you'll make informed decisions that enhance growth and enable seizing new opportunities, much like a coach uses game statistics to refine strategies and achieve victories.
Let's use these insights to sustain and significantly amplify our business success. Let's win together!
Without understanding Finance you will struggle as a leader.
I take complex ideas and make them simple enough for a 5th grader to understand.
We all start somewhere. Start your financial education asap and make it a habit to invest in it every day.
personal and professional development. One habit I picked up from my rich colleagues — or perhaps I had it all along, but they incentivized it — is to constantly explore ways to gain new skills, or strengthen existing skills.
Online education is an investment, not an expense.
Finance is empowering. It enables innovation. It empowers big risk takers and bold builders and makes the world better. Finance pulls the future forward.
Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs (and other non-financial types)
How to Read a Financial Report
Accounting is the language of business.
The better you speak that language, the better you’ll be able to communicate with the locals.
Learn:
· What Is an Asset?
· Profit
· Profit Margin
· Valuation
· Cash Flow Statement
· Income Statement
· Balance Sheet
· Financial Ratios
· Cost-Benefit Analysis
· Lifetime Value
· Overhead
· Costs: Fixed and Variable
· Breakeven
· Amortization
· Depreciation
· Time Value of Money
· Compounding
· Leverage
· Bootstrapping
· Return on Investment (ROI)
· Sunk Costs
· Internal Controls
Knowing finance is power.
The most fundamental atomic unit of business is the asset. Understanding what an asset is, why it matters, and why investors paradoxically like asset-light businesses is critical to career success. This is the way I wish I was taught finance!
The tax law is a series of incentives for entrepreneurs and investors.
The tax laws favor entrepreneurs and investors. That’s because entrepreneurs and investors generally put money into the economy to produce rather than consume.
But, paying taxes is less expensive than failing at business. Be sure to get educated before you begin.
Start acting like an entrepreneur or an investor. That means the first thing you need to do is to increase your financial intelligence by investing in financial education.
Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits!
Finance is a critical in-demand career skill. It starts with being able to read and understand financial statements.
Becoming familiar with financial statements and how they are interconnected and flow is a critical skill set for enhancing your career and understanding of business.
Financial statements also underlay Discounted Cash Flow analysis, NPV, IRR, and all the valuation techniques of finance. Therefore, we should spend some time thoroughly understanding financial statements.
Knowing how to read and understand financial statements is a business skill you can't ignore. Understanding finance fundamentals can help you work your way up the corporate ladder by communicating with others in your company and understanding the big picture. Knowing where your efforts and work can make the most impact is also a helpful skill that financial decision-making tools enable.
When you are thinking about possibly changing jobs and working for a company, you can check their financials and make sure they are a healthy organization. Likewise, if you consider starting your own company, you will need to have your accountant's financials prepared to talk to investors, bankers, and vendors.
If you want to invest wisely in the stock market, analyze the competition or benchmark your performance, you can look up the financials of any publicly traded company at the Securities and Exchange Commission website's EDGAR filings and get an idea of how they are doing. But, first, check out any public company's most recent 10K filing there. A 10K is the Annual Report of the company and its most important business and financial disclosure document.
Becoming familiar with financial statements and how they are interconnected and flow is a critical skill set for enhancing your career and understanding of business.
Financial statements also underlay Discounted Cash Flow analysis, NPV, IRR, and all the valuation techniques of finance. We will now spend some time thoroughly understanding financial statements.
Knowing how to read and understand financial statements is a business skill you can’t ignore. It can help working your way up the corporate ladder by communicating with others in your company and understanding the big picture. It is also a useful skill in order to understand where your efforts and work can make the most impact.
When you are thinking about possibly changing jobs and working for a company you can check their financials and make sure they are a healthy organization. If you are considering starting your own company you will need to have financials prepared by your accountant in order to talk to investors, bankers and vendors.
If you want to invest wisely in the stock market, analyze the competition or benchmark your performance, you can look up the financials of any publicly traded company at the Securities and Exchange Commission website’s’ EDGAR filings and get an idea of how they are doing. Check out any public company’s most recent 10K filing there. A 10K is the Annual Report of the company and its most important business and financial disclosure document.
Who this course is for:
- Entrepreneurs, employees, managers, and anyone interested in enhancing their career and opportunities with an essential skillset.
Instructor
I am the author of Patent It Yourself!, Negotiation Communication Nation, Learn Accounting Fast!, Managing and Leading Organizations and People, Reading and Understanding Financial Statements, MBA ASAP, and nine other books. I am the founder of MBA ASAP which can be found at MBA-ASAP dot com an "online business education community" chock full of business skills and knowledge on the web.
Previously, I was CEO of a biotech company developing innovative cancer diagnostics. I took two companies public and I was the CFO of several public companies for 15 years. For the past decade I have also been teaching business classes at a number of universities and colleges.
Writing these books and creating these courses has been a wonderful opportunity to gather and organize my thoughts and experiences and share them. I have an electronics degree from MIT, a BA from Boston University and an MBA from Wharton.