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Keep shoppingBusiness Fundamentals for Non-Business Professionals [EN]
2,740 students
Business Fundamentals for Non-Business Professionals [EN]
business fundamentals | how business works | finance for non financial managers | marketing basics | unit economics
Last updated 5/2025
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Read a profit and loss statement, a balance sheet and a cash flow statement
- Use Porter's five forces and the Boston matrix on the market you work in
- Explain why interest rates and inflation show up in your company's decisions
- Follow a revenue funnel from first contact to money in the bank
- Calculate unit economics and say whether a customer is worth acquiring
- Tell a symptom from a problem, and state a business problem so it can be tested
- Read a process map and see where work actually gets stuck
- Understand why your company is organised the way it is, including the matrix
- Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
Explore related topics
Course content
15 sections • 42 lectures • 24h 42m total length
Requirements
- A job inside a company, in any function
- No business or finance education required. Everything starts from the beginning
- Basic arithmetic. Nothing here needs more than a spreadsheet
- English at intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
- Willingness to ask what a term means rather than nodding through it
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
You can be excellent at your job for years and still not know how the company around it actually works. Most people learn a function, not a business.
The specific version of this
You are in a leadership meeting. Someone says the gross margin will not support that acquisition cost at current churn, and everyone nods, and the decision gets made. You understood roughly half of it and looked up the rest afterwards, and by then the conversation had moved on. That is not a gap in intelligence. Nobody ever taught you the vocabulary, because your training was in something else. I came into business from a specialist track and spent two years quietly translating.
What this course actually covers
Six blocks, assembled as one loop around a company. First, what a business sits inside and how it is measured: market structure, Porter's five forces, the Boston matrix, inflation and interest rates, regulation, risk, and the three financial statements explained from zero. Second, how a company finds customers — market diagnosis, marketing strategy, budget and return on marketing spend, brand, digital channels and how the function is structured. Third, how money actually arrives: the revenue funnel from lead to payment, where it leaks, acquisition cost against lifetime value, and how team metrics connect to the profit and loss. Fourth, how a business problem gets framed — telling a symptom from a problem, gathering requirements, and seeing the system whole. Fifth, how work flows: process description, BPMN, and running a mapping project. Sixth, how companies are arranged, including the matrix, levels of management and span of control.
A note on one block
The first eight lessons come from a course recorded for a people-function audience, and its final lesson closes with justifying that function's initiatives financially. The content itself is entirely general — STEEPLE, five forces, the Boston matrix, central banks, international trade and the three financial statements do not change by department. The folder name is the only thing about it that is specific.
Who is teaching this
I am Mike Pritula. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.
What is included
Lifetime access to all 42 lessons
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
A Udemy Certificate of Completion
Working material: five forces, the Boston matrix, the three statements, 4P and STP, the revenue funnel, unit economics, BPMN, the six design drivers
Explanations built for someone hearing each term for the first time
Where to start
Write down five words you have heard in meetings this month and could not define precisely. Most of them are in this course, and none of them are complicated once someone explains them properly. Enrol now and start today.
Who this course is for:
- Specialists from technical, creative or scientific backgrounds now in a business
- Engineers and designers who joined leadership meetings and stopped understanding them
- Support-function professionals who need to argue in commercial language
- Freelancers and founders running a business without ever having studied one
- People moving from the public sector or academia into a company
- Anyone who nods at "gross margin" and quietly looks it up afterwards
- Managers promoted from a specialist track with no commercial grounding