Warm Up
**FOR NEW STUDENTS**———————————————–
- What industry do you work in and what is your role?
- Can you describe to teachers the function of your workplace/company?
- What are your responsibilities in your role/position?
- What is the Minimum requirements for employment? i.e Education or Experience?
- How many opportunities are there to ‘move up the ladder’?
-
What is the process for changing job roles i.e Interview? Test?
——————————————————————— - General discussion about your workweek; Current projects? Deadlines? Opportunities? Anything of interest happening?Can you describe a particular day?
Listening
Before the video: Teachers will read the following questions aloud, please prepare for listening!
After the video: Did you get it? If not, please tell your teacher specifically which part you didn’t understand. Let’s review the video again 🙂
- What was a really bad idea?
- What is the engine or your business?
- What is the peak of the 5 layer pyramid?
Key Words & Phrases
Do you understand the following Key Words & Phrases? Your teacher will select Key Words & Phrases and ask you about their meanings.
If you don’t understand, your teacher can explain them. Afterwards, try to use the Key Words & Phrases to make a sentence!
- Sometimes entrepreneurs think they can leave the finance and the numbers to the bookkeepers and accountants. That’s a really bad idea.
- You certainly want to have a bookkeeper, You certainly need accountants and you can use them to collect and analyze the financial data, but you need to understand the underlying financial flows of your business. That’s key to your understanding of how to manage your business and sometimes finance is not about money.
- So for example, how long will it take to get a customer to buy your product? How much cash do you need to get to this milestone?
- How much do we spend on marketing in order to generate the revenues we’re looking for? How long will it take to convert a prospect into a paying customer?
- These are some of the questions that investors are going to ask you that you should be asking of yourself that finance can help you answer.
- The tools we’re going to talk about are going to help you manage the business that you’re running from day‑to‑day and most importantly, they’ll help you get into the future and build an even more successful company.
- The five key elements of startup finance form a pyramid on which you can build your company. At the base of the pyramid is the foundation of your business, that’s reflected in your balance sheet and in your capitalization table.
-
Foundation – balance sheet /capitalization table
- Above that are the processes of your business. Those are reflected in your income statement and your cash flow statement.
- Processes – cash flow statement / income statement
- Above that is your business model and your business model formula. That’s the engine of your business. We’re going to talk about converting that into financial numbers.
- Model – business model / formula
- Then we’ll talk about your operating budget and your long‑term financial forecast.
- Monitoring – monthly financial statements / management dashboard
- These tools help you understand what has happened in your company, what is currently happening in your company and what you can expect will happen in your company going forward.
- If you take full advantage of these tools, they can even give you an early warning system to make sure you see what’s going to happen in your company before it happens. The world of entrepreneurship is really filled with uncertainty. Things are changing rapidly so you need every tool that you can get to manage that uncertainty. By the end of this series, you will have the tools you need to build a successful company.
- And I hope you will see finance not as a dark art, but rather as a powerful tool to help you build a brilliant successful company.
- Would you like to run your own business? Have you ever considered it before? What would be some other “pros and cons” of running your own business?
- Discuss: Let’s entertain the idea that we all have an opportunity to begin our own startup companies, we inherit 10million yen and the will asks us to full fill their dream of owning a business.
- What type of business would you like to run? Would it be in a similar industry to which you currently work?
- Would you prefer to do something you love or try your hand at a promising idea? (look up business startup ideas) Where would you open it? Would you try to handle all the operating alone? financial etc How long would you allow for the business to grow?
