Session #4 - Measuring and Evaluating Financial Performance
This session is all about finance and financial ratios. It’s definitely not my expertise, but as entrepreneurs we need to understand basic finance and accounting principles in order to monitor the health of our company. This session will cover a few accounting principles that are often misunderstood, such as the difference between cash and profit, as well as cover essential ratios around liquidity, conversion, and leverage.
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Session #3 - Business Plans & Investors
When developing a business plan to present to investors, there are three things that one needs to keep in mind to show that their plan is backed by a sound business model. A sound plan will generate revenues, make profits, and produce free cash flows. But before even looking at the financials, we need to determine the feasibility of the business idea. A very useful tool to assess business feasibility is a SWOT Analysis, which focuses on the strengths (S), weaknesses (W), opportunities (O), and threats (T) of the service or product idea.
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Session #2 - Principles of Entrepreneurial Finance
In short, we can define Entrepreneurial Finance as the “application and adaptation of financial tools and techniques to the planning, funding, operations, and valuation of an entrepreneurial venture.” There are seven key principles of entrepreneurial finance that we need to understand before going into business.
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I’m currently taking entrepreneurial finance as one of my MBA electives and I wanted to share some takeaways that I have from each class. I will post within 24 hours after the lecture. I have no idea how good the class will actually be (since i’ve only done one session) but I figured I’d share anyway…
Session #1 - Key Characteristics of an Entrepreneur
This session was definitely an introductory class - Not too many takeaways but the prof did mention some pretty cool and motivating things. In class, entrepreneurship was defined as “the process of changing ideas into commercial opportunities and creating value. An entrepreneur is an individual who thinks, reasons, and acts to convert ideas into commercial opportunities and to create value.” Although these are great definition, I believe it’s simpler than that. In my opinion, entrepreneurship is simply a state-of-mind, and entrepreneurs are the people who adopt the characteristics that form this state-of-mind. Registering a company and selling a product might allow you to go tell your friends that you’re an entrepreneur, but the question is: “Are you a REAL entrepreneur?”
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What up?! My friends call me Dia – I’m an Entrepreneur and Digital Strategist with an MBA in Entrepreneurship and Marketing. These are my experiments in Entrepreneurship, Digital Marketing, & Innovation. Read More…
