Introduction

As a leader in your organization, the decisions you make can have a significant impact on your company's financial health. This program will help you assess the value of your strategic decisions by giving you a broader understanding of finance and the interaction between business strategy and financial strategy. In this program, you will achieve a more sophisticated understanding of how the tools of modern finance can be used to evaluate investment opportunities and make capital structure and capital management decisions to drive organizational value.

Program Objectives

• Communicate more effectively with financial executives within the organization and with important external stakeholders such as analysts and investors
• Gain a sophisticated understanding of how to use financial statements to better understand the economics of other entities, including competitors.
• Obtain a deeper understanding of how your organization’s economic outcomes are reflected in its financial statements, and how those statements are used inside and outside the organization.
• Develop a strong strategic intuition to make smart investment decisions.
• Learn how to manage external communications and capital to avoid unwanted attention from activist investors, short-sellers, and other corporate predators.
• Learn why optimizing management of capital, including liquidity and leverage, can affect firm value and how to value other businesses.
• Better understand how to use modern valuation techniques to evaluate investment opportunities, including M&A and LBOs.
• Understand entrepreneurial finance, including private equity and venture capital.

Personal Impact

This program aims to deepen your skills and understanding of current trends in capital markets and corporate finance to increase value and improve performance in your organization. Topics include how to evaluate and finance capital investment projects, M&A, the role of private equity and nontraditional financing, and formulating strategy

Target Audience

The program is for executives in finance-related roles or those who have strategic financial oversight of their unit or organization, and have at least a basic understanding of accounting and finance. This program is also an excellent fit for those who expect to have more financial responsibility in the future

RECOMMENDED TITLES

• General Manager
• Managing Director
• Director of Finance
• Financial Advisor
• Controller
• Treasurer
• General Counsel
• VP
• President
• C-suite

Program Outlines

Day 1

FINANCIAL STATEMENT ANALYSIS AND CASH FLOW FORECASTING

• Learn terminology, review financial statements, cash flows, and DuPont formula
• Use DuPont analysis to understand drivers of profitability
• Evaluate the quality of earnings analysis
• Understand free cash flow versus earnings

Day 2

INVESTMENT DECISIONS AND VALUATION

• Evaluate projects using net present value (NPV) and internal rate of return (IRR)
• Calculate cost of capital: weighted average cost of capital (WACC)
• Study valuation methods: discounted cash flow (DCF), multiples, adjusted present value (APV)
• Apply valuation to M&A deals

Day 3

ENTREPRENEURIAL FINANCE 

• Gain an overview of entrepreneurial finance, PE, VC, and LBOs
• Learn a new venture strategy
• increasing revenue
• increasing profit margins
• retrenching in times of hardship
• earning a return on investment.

Day 4

FINANCE AND BUSINESS STRATEGIES FOR THE SERIOUS ENTREPRENEUR 

• Understand financing sources
• Understand the basics of capital structure decisions and how these decisions affect the value
• Learn the differences among financial instruments to implement desired capital structure
• Examine distressed debt

CREATING SHAREHOLDER VALUE

• Explore practical perspectives: corporate governance and the role of boards; CFO viewpoint

Day 5

FORMULATING STRATEGY

• Understand the vital difference between goals, strategy, and management: which are easy and which are difficult?
• The role of top management in setting strategy: what is the real challenge great strategists see?
• Analyze competitors: how to better think about and predict competitors’ actions and why this is critical for success
• Collect data to build your strategy: how to decide which data are useful among the many sources