Finance for Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Marketing, and Engineering

Why this Finance MasterCourse?

Are you an intrapreneur or entrepreneur ready to raise funds from angel investors, venture capital funds or your company’s CFO? Do you feel that ROI has turned into just another meaningless marketing buzzword? Do you feel the engineering or marketing team can’t reliably build a capital budget or prioritize product or project investments?

What is the goal of this MasterCourse?
To give you the core knowledge, language and tools of finance to:

• Prepare entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs to raise funds for new products, projects, and companies.
• Understand the CFO, CEO, and investor tools, language, and perspectives when evaluating new products, projects or deals.
• Build superior cash budgets and capital budgets for strategy development and business planning.
• Use financial tools to make value-based decisions on product development, project development, business plan development and market strategy.

“Taking this course changed my whole career. It made corporate finance easier and dramatically improved my business planning skills.”
- Andrew Mitchell

Participants learn key concepts in finance such as cash budgeting, capital budgeting, time value of money, discounted cash flow analysis, break-even analysis, sensitivity analysis, scenario analysis, ROI, NPV, IRR, payback, management options, and growth models. The difference between cash and profits, ways to value a venture, deciding and prioritizing multiple projects or products.

Who has taken this workshop?

• Product, marketing and brand managers
• Directors of marketing, sales, research, and development
• Engineering managers, project managers, product managers, and senior engineers
• Entrepreneurs and executives of startup and growing businesses
• Entrepreneurs-in-residence

Hundreds of entrepreneurs, product development managers, and product marketing managers and engineers have taken this course and have found it invaluable to improve their careers and organizations. They have come from a cross-section of Silicon Valley: Google, Yahoo!, Oracle, Microsoft, eBay, PayPal, NASA, Intel, Cisco Systems, Juniper, Genentech, Visa, Symantec, McAfee, HP, and many other startup and large companies.

Day One

• Understanding Financial Statements – Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow Statement. How are these connected? Annual Reports.
• Understanding Performance analysis and ratios – Profitability, liquidity, leverage, and activity ratios
• Cost of capital, Economic Value Added (EVA)
• Understanding Cash Management – Cash budgeting, working capital, cash conversion cycle.
• Understanding Time Value of Money – Time Value of Money, Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) analysis, Present Value (PV), Future Value (FV).
• Selecting and prioritizing investment alternatives to increase shareholder wealth – Capital budgeting, payback, NPV, IRR, MIRR.

Day Two

• Building Capital budgets and Cash budgets
  • Capital budgeting with timing and risk
  • Sensitivity analysis and scenario analysis
• New Product Finance
  • Developing a capital budget for a new product or company
  • Building, valuing, and prioritizing the investment – what a new product proposal should incorporate
• Venture Capital Finance
  • Company Valuation, Acquisition Valuation
  • Case: Valuation of Venture Capital deals
• Project Finance
  • Project Finance, Project Valuation, Selection Case
  • Case: Valuation of a Solar Power Plant Project
• Selling on a Value Basis
  • Analyzing and building a product/customer ROI case.
  • Case: software or telecom product ROI analysis

“It was excellent. I had written successful business plans before. However, the in-depth analysis of each step and topic improved my marketing planning dramatically.”
-Ellie Ay, Product Marketing Manager, Avaya