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.

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.

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

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