Business Principles and Entrepreneurial Thought

What does it really mean to think entrepreneurially?

The entrepreneurial process isn’t only for start-ups, it’s a comprehensive mindset that will teach you to identify, assess, shape, and act on opportunities in a variety of contexts, settings and organizations. In this entrepreneurship course, you will learn to implement the method of Entrepreneurial Thought & Action® (ET&A™) – which will give you a roadmap to create and add value for stakeholders and society.

ET&A™ is a tactical, results-oriented process that may be applied to new venture creation as well as to promote innovation within existing organizations – large, small or family owned – and across profit, not for profit and social ventures.

The ability to ‘think like an entrepreneur’ and ‘act like an innovator’ are critical skills for success across industries and are proven tools to help distinguish you in the workplace and to accelerate your career.

In order to compete in an ever-changing market, business leaders must assess and respond to consumer needs and wants. Marketing is a means of creating value for consumers and engendering loyalty and enthusiasm for your product or service.

If you’re starting or running a business, identifying and targeting your consumers is the single most important decision you can make. Business leaders often wrongly believe that every customer is a good customer. This is not always the case; knowing which customers to let go of is just as important as finding customers. In this marketing course, you will learn how to assess the value you provide to the consumer as well as the value the customer offers your business.

The course will also provide you with a toolkit you can apply to real world situations. Topics include:

• the marketing mix
• segmentation
• targeting and positioning
• marketing strategy
• consumer behavior

Marketing is often an afterthought for entrepreneurs as they focus on getting their venture off the ground. You will learn how marketing is a vital part of launching a successful business, and for keeping one running, and how marketing concepts can be applied to entrepreneurial situations. By the end of the course, you will be thinking about marketing strategically in order to grow your business, rather than as a tactical cost.

This course is part of the Business Principles and Entrepreneurial Thought XSeries.

Are financial statements a mystery to you? Do all those terms and metrics make your head spin? Do you avoid conversations with your finance leaders because you are not confident of your finance ability?

Having a solid understanding of financial terms, statements and metrics is critical to becoming a successful entrepreneur or manager. In this finance course, you will learn how to interpret and use the information contained in financial statements to make key operating decisions, evaluate business performance, and create forecasts of profits and cash flow.

This course introduces you to the form, content and definitions included in the primary financial statements: income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. You will learn how to use this information to make key operating decisions, such as how to balance growth with cash constraints. You will learn how to use ratios to diagnose a company's financial health and apply these concepts and tools to evaluate a company of your own choosing.

Eliminate your fear of accounting! Financial accounting can be fun once the barriers to learning are broken down. Through a series of learning scenarios that take you through the creation of a simple business, you will become comfortable with basic accounting tools and concepts that you need to more effectively manage your business. By the end of the course, you will become a much more confident user of financial information and will be able to effectively engage with your finance leaders.

This course is part of the Business Principles and Entrepreneurial Thought XSeries.

How do you find the money necessary to effectively manage your business? How do you know if a business opportunity is worthwhile? When should you invest in a stock, bond or company? Do you fear the financial side of growing your organization?

This finance course will take the mystery out of financial analysis and help you make the right business decisions. In order to establish your company you need to secure funding. Once you have money, you need to determine the most efficient and effective use of your capital. You also need to have the knowledge to have professional and engaging conversations with finance professionals who control access to funding.

In this course, you will discover a variety of options for funding your business and how to successfully negotiate financial opportunities. You will learn how to value and evaluate ideas to determine the appropriate benefits and costs in order to screen them correctly. Finally, you will learn how to value a business and the securities you can use to potentially fund your organization.

This course is part of the Business Principles and Entrepreneurial Thought XSeries.

What do business luminaries like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Netflix have in common? They’re digital businesses – meaning that they blur the digital and physical worlds – and their CEOs have built companies from idea to over $10 billion in revenues and kept them growing at an annual rate of at least 20%.

The surprising reality is that while you may never reach their level, you can be a better leader by learning from their success. The key is to understand how they grappled with the basic questions of digital strategy and action. How did they:

• Decide what problem to solve?
• Create a product that customers were eager to buy?
• Build their teams to capitalize on growth?
• Raise capital?
• Win market share?
• Sustain growth?

In this business and management course, you will learn from these maestros how to pick digital strategies with the greatest potential; use prototypes to match your product to unrelieved customer pain; identify, attract, and motivate the talent your company needs to grow; raise capital while maintaining control of your company’s future; win market share by delivering customers a quantum value leap; and build disciplined growth trajectories.

This course will combine the principles of Entrepreneurial Thought & Action ® with the ideas developed in the instructor’s books Hungry Start-Up Strategy (2012) and Disciplined Growth Strategies (2017). It will inspire you with in-depth case studies of how Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos built its most profitable business by selling companies access to the computer infrastructure that powers its e-commerce business; how Facebook boosted 37-fold its April 2012 $1 billion investment in Instagram; how Netflix CEO Reed Hastings wiped out Blockbuster Video through its DVD-by-Mail service and in 2007 moved to replace that service with online streaming when Apple launched the iPhone.

Who should take this course

Aspiring CEOs should take this class so they can beat the long odds against entrepreneurial success by understanding how the world’s top leaders keep their companies growing. Those who work for big companies can use these insights to accelerate their growth while defending themselves against digital business leaders seeking to win their customers.

This course is part of the Business Principles and Entrepreneurial Thought XSeries.