Understand the Income Statement with Business Acumen What is the P&L? The Profit and Loss statement is vital when learning about companies. Especially if you're in the sales space and want to better understand your customers, you need to be comfortable navigating the income statement. The second thing we noticed was their top-line. To find it, go to its investor relations page, and download its 10-Q. From there you'll find its consolidated statement of earnings which includes the income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows. While looking at Home Deport's P&L, the first thing we noticed is that their quarter ended May 1st, so that tells me that their financial year ends February 1st. This gives us a good understanding of their budget cycle. We now know that they probably finished the beginning of their year planning which you can ask about on your next sales call. Defining Business Terms: See a word that confuses you? Head to our Financial Glossary page! Sales Growth The second thing we noticed was their top-line sales growth. Home Deport grew to $38.9 billion from $37.5 billion last year. That's a growth rate of 3.7%. We also know that during their last earnings call, they had a goal of hitting $200 billion by the end of this year so we'd be curious to know if they think this is a strong Q1, if they're on pace for that goal, and if I can help them reach their goal. Their gross profit is $13.1 billion. If you divide that by their net sales or revenue of $38.9 billion, you'll find that their gross margin is 33.7%. That is much higher than the average retailer's gross margin, so we'd be curious what they think about that. Finally, their net income is $4.2 billion. Again, out of $38.9 billion in revenue, that gives a net profit margin of 10.8%. That's slightly lower than the S&P 500 average of 13%. If you wanted to help improve their bottom line, there are two levers to pull: growing sales and lowering costs. Now that we have a good understanding of where Home Depot's at, we can then ask on my sales call what lever they are focused on. What is the Business Strategy? As a salesperson, you should be curious about your client's business strategy. Know what's most important to them. That's our simple breakdown of a P&L in sixty seconds. Imagine what you could learn with a little more time and more business acumen. How to Win Sales with Business Acumen Business acumen is not a dispensable attribute. It's necessary to do your job well. And, if you want your clients to be EXCITED to talk to you, learn their metrics. Learn their business. Get business acumen. Continue your education and finish reading the article: If you'd like to talk to someone about our Business Acumen Training for Sales, Click here: ✅ Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more Business Acumen videos! ✅ For more on our business acumen training visit our website! #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #businessacumentraining #salesprocess #salessuccess #sales #trust #buildingtrust #HomeDepot

Getting the Tea with Business Acumen Earnings calls are the soap operas of business. If you think they're boring, you may not be understanding them. If you speak the language of finance and know some basic vocabulary, you can listen to those earnings calls, and all of a sudden it's like watching the Bachelor. It's human intrigue! It's the excitement of business watching those earnings calls. Part 1: Prepared Remarks This is how they work. Every quarter (obviously, because they're quarterly earnings calls), publicly traded companies report their financial results and answer questions from analysts. The first portion of an earnings call is usually the prepared remarks. This is when an executive — usually the CEO — gives a visionary explanation of where the company is headed. And afterward, the CFO wraps things up with a more number-heavy explanation which if you don't speak finance can be boring. That's totally fine. You may just want to listen to the CEO's section anyways. During the prepared remarks, you can tell how a company is doing by what type of metrics they report on. If they are reporting on obvious metrics like top line, revenue, bottom line, profit, gross margins, operating profits, or operating margins — basically all of the terms you're probably familiar with — they're more likely doing well. In that case, they may say, "we have increased here, we're hitting guidance here, we're doing well here." However, if everything sounds rosy but they're reporting on obscure key performance indicators like, "we were three points higher than expected in our Asian market corporate division," you know what they're doing is trying to find any good news. Anything metric that went, they want to report on. That's how you can use prepared remarks to tell how a company is doing just by listening to what type of metrics they're reporting. Part 2: Question & Answer The next section of the earnings call is the analyst Q&A. These financial analysts are familiar with this company's past earnings and will get the company's quarterly results a little bit before the call. They get the chance to quickly read their financial results, interpret them, and jump onto the call to ask their questions. What you don't know is that behind the scenes the CEO and CFO had the opportunity to move those questions around. They see them coming in and can change the order. The order is really important. Generally, they'll take the easy, lowball questions first. You know, start out with good news. Then they put the hard questions in the middle. If you start paying attention, you can almost skip to the middle of the transcript or middle of the analyst Q&A and those are the hardball questions. Then they usually try to end on a lighter note again so that it won't impact the stock market price too negatively. That's what they're hoping for anyway. What's so interesting though is it doesn't always follow that format. Getting the Most Out of an Earnings Call Get our Earnings Call Workbook for FREE: Tesla is an interesting company to follow. During one recent earnings call, Elon Musk took the hardball question right up front and used it to his advantage to hilarious effect. This is what happened. An analyst asked, "Mr. Musk, you aren't very accurate in your predictions. In the past, you've told us that [self-driving cars] would be launched a long time ago... you've been wrong a lot. Tell us why we can trust you now." Pretty hardball question! He took that as the first question. Brave! This is why people follow Elon, right? Musk replied, "I'm so glad you asked me that question. I want you to experience it for yourself. I want you actually to go to this website and try the self-driver." He totally turned it into a marketing opportunity. Seriously! He took the hardball question, answered it first, and turned it into a marketing opportunity. If these insights into the inner workings and strategies of companies aren't like watching the Bachelor, we don't know what is. If you want to be entertained, first you do need to learn a little bit of the finance vocabulary and then start jumping on those quarterly earnings calls of the companies that you work for, follow, sell into, partner with, or invest in, and be entertained! Continue your education at our next earnings call lab where we'll break down another amazing company: Listen to one of our Earnings Calls Analysis on Disney: ✅ Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more Business Acumen videos! ✅ Follow us on LinkedIn @AcumenLearning to keep up with all company updates! ✅ For more on our business acumen training visit our website! #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #stockmarket #stocks #earningscall #leadershipdevelopment #financetraining #businesstraining #financialstrategy #financialacumen #businesssuccess

Acumen Learning has Teamed Up with One of the Leading Medical Services Companies to Instill Business Acumen in their Leaders Press Release OREM, Utah – December 9, 2022 Download the Business Acumen Press Release: News Facts: A leading medical services company partnered with Acumen Learning for customized business acumen courses. The company found a gap in its senior leader's ability to see the big picture of the organization. As a result, they put a priority on aligning the goals of all executives and determined that business acumen training could help minimize the problem. Their initiatives have been focused on helping all employees see how their role can contribute to the overall company’s goals and money-making processes. One of the key objectives of the course is to help their teams feel unified and see how they directly impact the bottom line. To accomplish these goals, Acumen Learning created a custom program for the leadership team. Through this initiative, Acumen Learning created a “mini-MBA” course that included a combination of both Building Business Acumen and Advancing Business Acumen programs. Participants were able to use real data and business challenges to come up with solutions they could implement immediately. The course scored highest for meeting graduates' expectations and for being applicable back on the job. Company leaders thought highly of the course and found it relevant to their initiatives. Acumen Learning feels proud to have partnered with a highly respectable medical services company that’s committed to safety and outstanding patient care. Supporting Quotes: “Very beneficial. Great information, hands-on exercises instead of just being spoken to. Smaller breakout groups were helpful to better understand the content.” “Wow, it was very insightful to define and review budgets, profits, losses, etc. I found it very beneficial and will absolutely help me be a better team member and leader to my teammates. Thank you all for your time and investment in us.” “I thought the course was an excellent opportunity to understand more about the business side of the organization. I enjoyed the opportunity to get to know other team members better and formed working relationships that will extend beyond the course. I really got a lot out of this experience…thank you!” “I was able to learn more about the business and financial components of our business, and all businesses. I also believe I learned about better leadership skills and managing others, which I hope to be able to put to use. I have better financial acumen from this course.” “Healthcare is an interesting industry because of the wide variety of skills needed,” says Ryan Hunt, Senior Financial Consultant. “You have the medical teams, the flight crews, the managers, and coordinators of it all. You would assume it would be difficult to get them all on the same page and to understand business and financial acumen. I was very impressed with the cohesiveness and broad understanding these leaders had and think the business acumen course made a real impact.” About Acumen Learning Founded in 2002, Acumen Learning's highly customized business acumen and sales training programs have helped organizations develop employees who are more engaged, efficient, and effective in their work. To further support its mission, Acumen Learning published, Seeing the Big Picture – Business Acumen to Build Your Credibility, Career, and Company, in 2012 which quickly became a #1 Wall Street Journal and a New York Times bestseller. More than 20 years later, Acumen Learning has been trusted by more than 200 organizations on six continents to help employees understand how their company makes money, and to take real steps towards improving that process.

Business Acumen as it Applies to the Financial Statements The Financial Statements: The financial statements can feel a bit overwhelming. Especially if you're new to the business space and don't quite understand them. We're here to offer us some great advice on how to look at the financials in a simple way. Here is the transcript of the video: Do you think you know the Financial Statements? Test Your Business Acumen: "Hi everybody! I'm Ben Cook, the president of Acumen Learning, and I'm excited that you'd join! I just wanted to take a bit of time and give you some fundamental language about how businesses think, act, how they talk, and how you would navigate financials really quickly. Now businesses fundamentally talk about five things: cash, profit, assets, growth, and people. And CEOs of every business, large or small, talk about these five drivers of business and how they interact with each other. How Does Business Acumen Help you Understand the Financial Statements: But then how does a company measure its success on these five drivers? They typically release the financial statements, and the financial statements that link with this five driver model. If you want to see a company's cash, and how it generates it, and where it puts it, you go to the statement of cash flows. If you want to go see how it manages its profitability, its cost, its revenues, or sales you go to its income statement. If you want to look at a company you know, assets, and liabilities, and equity, you go to its balance sheet. So you see that this five-driver model links with the financial statements really cleanly. This is kind of like an MBA in one graphic. Now you look at these three financial statements that I'm showing here, they're actually only one statement that are broken up into three parts. And I want to give you kind of a 30-second view of how to look at these financial statements together, and as they link together, and how you find meaning from there. So I've taken a company, a company that many people know, it's very global, it's a very large company, I just chose one. Medtronic. A big medical device company. And I want to show you the link of these three financial statements together so that you can see the flow easily. The Income Statement: So the very first financial statement that goes in this flow is the income statement, or what Medtronic refers to as the statements of income. And the statements of income also referred to as the P&L. It starts with the sales of the company, you can see Medtronic had generated 31.6 billion, almost 31.7 billion in sales in this latest year, and then they have all of its costs associated with operating the business. And so the costs typically go in order from most connected to sales to least connected to sales. So you've got its sales. Then it walks through all of its costs, and what it has at the very end is net income or net profit. It's very very similar to your budgeting at home. Sales, costs, profit. And you'll see that out of the 31.68 billion they generate in sales, they had left over after all of their costs five almost 5.1 billion in profits. Statement of Cash Flows: Now where the P&L ends, the next statement as it goes in this flow starts. The statement of cash flows. So you'll see in that statement of cash flows, it starts with that 5.1 billion in net income, and then it does some adjustments on certain things. Right? It walks through from profits and then it turns those profits into - okay how much do they actually generate, what referred to as cash flow or operating cash flow. And there's various reasons on why there's a difference between profit and cash flow, but just know they generated about 5 billion in profits. And then you add back certain things like depreciation or other things and you get how much they generated in operating cash flow, which was about 7.3 billion. But then the question is what do they do with that money? Where did they put it to work? And they put it to work, some internally in things like capital expenses, and things like acquisitions, things like that. And then how much do they put in that cash flow externally? In things like dividends they would pay to shareholders, or stock buybacks that they also do as well. So the statement of cash flows starts with profit. Turns that profit into cash and then where they ultimately put that cash at the very end, it shows how much Medtronic had at the very end of the year in cash. So we start with sales, back out costs, and gives us profit. Statement of cash flows turns that profit, kind of adjusts for certain things to give us how much they generate in cash flow. And then where they chose to put the cash internal and where they put the cash to banks or shareholders, and how much cash they had at the very end of the year. The Balance Sheet: That's where the statement of cash flows ends which is where the balance sheet actually starts. Starts with how much cash a company has. And it talks and walks through all of the assets that Medtronic has. Starts with the most liquid assets down to the least. So it walks through from cash to investments, to things like inventories and receivables and it walks through all of its assets. Then it walks through all the liabilities it incurs and takes its assets minus its liabilities, then it ends with equity. Or what shareholders could lay claim to if they sold all the assets of the current value, backs out all the liabilities that they had to pay to those they owed, and how much left over is what shareholders would lay claim to which is what they call shareholders equity. And you can see Medtronic had about 53 billion in shareholders equity or also what they call book value. Business Acumen and the Five Drivers: So it goes from P&L to the statement of cash flows to the balance sheet. And it starts with sales, right? Customers right? The external people, you saw that people in that model before, it starts with people, with customers, and sales. It walks through the cost that gives you profit, turns that profit into cash, and that cash they put to work, and how much of all of those assets minus liabilities, their shareholders would lay claim to. So it starts with people, customers. And it ends with shareholders at the very end in total shareholders’ equity. So it starts with people and ends with people. And then what you find is everything that you and I and everybody else does to try to drive value to customers and value to shareholders and everything in between, are the decisions we make to try to drive value to the business. It's driving process improvements and operating efficiencies and innovation and finding ways to operate as efficiently and as effectively as we possibly can to bridge sales to shareholders and how we all operate together, is what drives shareholder value. So these are three financial statements in one slide a corporate finance class in one slide between P&L, statement of cash flows, and balance sheet to drive value for customers to shareholders. And there you go! Quick view of all three financial statements on one slide. Hope you enjoyed this, hopefully, this is helpful for you. Appreciate the time that you took. See ya!" Frequently Used Financial Acronyms Do you want to brush up on some frequently used financial acronyms? Continue your education and read this article: ✅ Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more Business Acumen videos! ✅ For more on our business acumen training visit our website! #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #leadershipdevelopment #strategicagility #financial #financialstrategy #financialacumen #financialliteracy #incomestatement #balancesheet #cashflowstatement

The Foundation of Business Acumen A 10-K is a financial report that publicly traded companies are required to submit to the security exchange commission on an annual basis. This document is a great resource to understand how any company is performing, what's going on in the business, and look at its key metrics and measures. Let's look at Costco as an example. The easiest way to access a 10-K is to look for a company's annual filings. The 10-K refers specifically to the form that every company has to fill out as a part of their SEC filings. If you see 10-Q, those are quarterly versions of the report but 10K is the annual version. First, there are 15 items within a 10-K. You have information about its business, risk factors, unresolved staff comments, properties, legal proceedings, all sorts of different items you can kind of look at. So there's a lot of information. If you look at Costco's 10-K, there are about 75 to 80 pages of information. Sometimes they're as big as 800 pages or more. That's a lot of information to sift through so how do you distill it to its most critical pieces? Get a demo for our Business Acumen Training: There are only three items we'll highlight. Item 1: Business Particularly if you're looking at a company you don't know very much about, always go to the business section. This is where the company reviews a little bit of its history, where it came from, then it jumps into the business itself. It looks at how the company breaks up revenue, for example by geography or by segmentation of the business, etc. In Costco's Item 1, you can see its core merchandise categories. It lists food and sundries, non-foods, fresh foods, as well as warehouse ancillary, things like gasoline, pharmacy, optical, etc. So it's a nice little review of the company itself. Item 7: Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations If I know the company and I just want to see what's going on in the business, I typically will jump to Item 7. Now, this is probably the most important part of a 10-K. It's going to give you a bit of a review of the company itself, but eventually, you're going to get to a section where it talks about the company's financial performance like the results from the operations section. Here you can determine what's happened in the business. For example, they'll show and explain why they may have increased or decreased in revenue. Highlight their profitability metrics like gross margin. Why did that go up or down? It shows you the numbers and it explains what it is you want to look at. Management Discussion Analysis is where to go to really see what's behind the numbers and really going on in the business. Item 8: Financial Statements and Supplementary Data This is where you find the financials themselves. Although in Item 7 you see little parts of the financials, here they are broken down in more detail. Item 8 will provide the audited income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flow. Here are its revenue and operating expenses and profitability numbers. Here you can answer the question of how financially strong is the company? What sort of risk is it taking? Look at its liabilities versus its assets and versus its equity etc. What is its cash position and where is it deploying it? With that, we hope the 10-K is easier to navigate. It's a great resource for individuals to be able to understand their own company or customers as well as just being a knowledgeable investor. It allows you to contribute to business conversations, contribute to the strategy of the company, and align your role to the goals of the company. What is Gross Margin? From a leadership standpoint, gross margin is a simple but distinctive metric to help give value to their products. Are the products and services valuable? Is the price point fair? Does the company have an efficient pricing and cost structure? Is the company effective in the way their managing their costs, and selling their products and services? The higher the margin, the more effective the company's management is in generating revenue for each dollar of cost. Continue your education with this financial glossary term: ✅ Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more Business Acumen videos! ✅ Follow us on Linkedin @AcumenLearning to keep up with all company updates! ✅ For more on our business acumen training visit our website! #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #leadershipdevelopment #financetraining #businesstraining #financialstrategy #financialacumen #businesssuccess #10K #Costco

The Business Drivers of Healthcare Doctors and nurses have the critical role of giving life-saving care — but they also, like all employees, play a part in the financial strategy of their company. Developing business savvy leaders who can utilize business acumen skills is essential in the healthcare industry. Hospitals face many unique challenges compared to say someone in retail, oil and gas, IT, or telecom. Particularly in the fact that they're dealing with human lives. They're also serving a product that people typically don't want to buy. Nobody's out there hoping to buy healthcare services, right? It's something that happens to you, but when it does you want the highest quality care. So what levers do you pull to be an affordable healthcare provider at a high quality? Well, it's primarily in how well you use your assets and how well you use your labor. Business Driver: People The biggest part is labor. It's skilled labor. It's people. Doctors, nurses, techs, housekeeping, food services, pharmacy, all those different organizations. About 60% of the cost structure of the average hospital is labor wages and benefits showing just how important people are to the care process. Business acumen in healthcare is incredibly important as healthcare organizations are really mission-driven. They're focusing on serving their community and creating a high-quality patient experience. They've got providers that they need to take care of and attract and so their focus isn't always necessarily on the business and finances quite as out front as some of those other priorities. But those healthcare organizations that can develop leaders to have a high degree of business and financial acumen, are those that are going to really be able to separate themselves now and into the future. Business Driver: Assets Sister Irene Krauss, who was the first head of the American Hospital and the first female head of the American Hospital Association, coined the popular phrase, "no margin no mission." And that's particularly relevant within healthcare because driving margin and being able to understand what levers leaders can pull to do that by relying on that business acumen gives them an increased capability in furthering that mission. So it's incredibly important for provider organizations — healthcare providers — to see the gap that can exist in business acumen and take steps to close it. In my experience working with healthcare providers, I worked for a large integrated delivery system in the bay area running their continuous improvement program for about five years. And the leaders in healthcare are typically people who love the people that they serve, they have a strong bias toward patient safety and patient quality, and they're just the heart and soul of the organization. They're truly fearless. Business Acumen Leaders in Healthcare And oftentimes they're the only person who is courageous enough to leave the bedside and take on the challenge of leadership. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of people who are interested in stepping up and taking on that challenge. They have so many individual competencies, but they're not trained in the business and financial side. They're clinical people who have stepped up to leadership. But in my experience working in those organizations, those leaders who were able to close that gap with business acumen and see both sides of the equation — being able to understand the interplay between safety, quality, the patient experience, AND the financial results for running their particular part of the business — were those who are able to be seen as someone who “gets it." Often times that's how I think about business acumen, it's somebody who just kind of “gets it”. And those people are the ones who are tapped to lead new and innovative projects. Healthcare organizations that can develop that competency in their people are the ones who are going to stand out and win in the long run. ✅ Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more Business Acumen videos! ✅ Follow us on Linkedin @AcumenLearning to keep up with all company updates! ✅ For more on our business acumen training visit our website! #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #leadershipdevelopment #financetraining #businesstraining#financialstrategy #financialacumen #businesssuccess #healthcare #hospitals

Why is Business Acumen Important? Two-Step Process: The balance between functional excellence and business acumen is a simple two-step process: obtain knowledge and use it. Business acumen is the awareness of gaps between processes and systems and then knowing which direction to pivot in order to make intelligent decisions based on the circumstance. Functional excellence is implementing recognition and knowledge into production. You can’t run a successful business without both in sync. Essentially, to know and not to do is not to know. 5 Ways to Resolve an Issue: Think of an assembly line in a factory. If we’re creating a product with 10 different people, each with their own unique function, how could they make the process better? How could they resolve issues in their strategy? Recognize a problem. A leader to take on the issue. Brainstorming a strategy to fix the problem. Open and frequent communication to execute the strategy. Effectively implement the new strategy. It takes very precise communication and individuals who can see beyond their role to collaborate and implement change. Recognition, communication, and execution are at the core of change. And business acumen gives you the skills to acknowledge a problem and speak the language of your business. Learn to Speak the Language of Business Acumen: The London business school describes business acumen as, "the ability to make judgments and quick decisions...keenness and depth of perception. What it is not is simply teaching executives to understand finance and strategy." We see business acumen as the key ingredient to reach functional excellence. It's more than understanding finances and the strategies within a business — though that is critical. It's, as an example, having the courage to explore options and collaborate with stakeholders. We see it as both business and financial literacy along with a vision for functional change. Test your Business Acumen with this 10 Question Quiz: How to Balance both? The most successful businesses in the market today have both skill sets. Without them, they would lose sight of the internal business metrics, or they would lose authentic relationships with their customers. Boeing, an extremely well-known aerospace technology company, implements both strategies within the core of its operations. The president of Boeing stated, “Seamless integration of businesses and functions provides competitive leverage, ensures compliance, and delivers productivity." The goal is to always be better tomorrow than we were today. To do this, both functional excellence and business acumen are vital. Building Business Acumen on your Teams: One of the primary questions we're asked is how managers can help to build business acumen for their team members - and the answer is more simple than you may think! ✅ Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more videos with business acumen definitions, stories, tips, and tricks! ✅ Visit our website to learn more about our business acumen training and the impact it has on organizations. #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #leadershipdevelopment #Boeing #functionalexcellence #LondonBusinessSchool #integrations #communication

Press Release OREM, Utah– November 12, 2022 Download the Business Acumen Press Release: News Facts: Acumen Learning has expanded its partnership with one of the leading pharmaceutical companies in the world to develop business acumen. A top priority for the company was an aggressive growth plan laid out by the CEO. To support this initiative, learning and development partnered with Acumen Learning to improve their sales and marketing leaders’ business acumen. Based on the success of this initial program, the learning and development team recognized opportunities to expand the training to medical advisors, directors of clinical processes and vendor strategy, diversity, equity and inclusion teams, human resource business partners, and more. ESG ramifications are an important focus of the CEO. To best support executive goals in this area, the courses were customized to focus on external factors specific to the pharmaceutical industry. The course helped these leaders better understand the impact of ESG on the market, the company, and their individual business decisions. The business acumen course has received great scores and feedback from graduates. Of note, Acumen Learning’s facilitators have scored a near-perfect 4.9 out of 5. Acumen Learning now teaches customized business acumen to 3 of the 5 largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Supporting Quotes: “This is one of the best learning experiences I have had here. THANK YOU for making this so effective virtually. You used every tool you had to keep us engaged and making the most of the time. I’ll be sure to carry forward everything I learned to be better in my role and future roles.” “Great course and very well packaged for ALL leaders. Highly recommend leaders of the organization take advantage of this offering and make it part of leadership and development programs.” “This is an excellent course delivered in an awesome manner. Literally could not ask for more. The delivery method was online, which is not easy, but that did not take wavy from this at all. Anyone thinking of learning more on this subject should not think twice and just go for it. You won’t be disappointed.” “Best course I have done in the past 10 years! Very relevant and informative!” “Exceptional! Best course I have attended in my 4 years with the organization. Gives you an understanding of how leadership thinks and the decisions they make, as well as assists you in preparing for customer discussion through evaluation.” “These leaders are quick to learn, comprehend, and progress,” said Kenny Snarr, Senior Consultant at Acumen Learning “I saw that personally. These business acumen courses were able to direct their mindset, adding a business-oriented element to their very knowledgeable skillset.” About Acumen Learning Founded in 2002, Acumen Learning's highly customized business acumen and sales training programs have helped organizations develop employees who are more engaged, efficient, and effective in their work. To further support its mission, Acumen Learning published, Seeing the Big Picture – Business Acumen to Build Your Credibility, Career, and Company, in 2012 which quickly became a #1 Wall Street Journal and a New York Times bestseller. More than 20 years later, Acumen Learning has been trusted by more than 200 organizations on six continents to help employees understand how their company makes money, and to take real steps toward improving that process.

The Delicacy of Name Dropping 2-5% of people reply with interest to a cold email. When a familiar name is dropped, it increases your chances of response by up to 468%. Just an opened email is considered a small win in the sales game. Name dropping in sales must be done delicately. Of course, you don’t want to ruin your reputation by throwing everybody’s name around. You don’t want your original sources to be frustrated with you, who will then spread that around their company. However, when appropriate and with permission, name dropping can be extremely beneficial. You could end up really improving the relationship! Or tarnishing it rather quickly if you aren't careful. Learn More about our Business Acumen Training for Sales: How to Name Drop If you can throw in a CEO’s name, your credibility skyrockets. Proving that you have done your research and are not simply looking for personal gain will push your prospects to warm up to you. Providing a familiar name helps prospects feel safe and confident. It helps them to build a connection with you because of that relationship - trust is almost automatic. It can feel like a mutual friend. Make sure you note that knowing somebody extremely well, a brief acquaintance, or somebody you spoke to on the phone with for 30 seconds, gives vastly different credibility. Being able to say “My great friend Jim said I need to meet you!” is much more beneficial, but make sure that is the truth. Because the sources are commonly checked. Use Business Acumen Skills to Succeed: Use your best judgment. You are the expert, you know your clients and your prospects, you know how to best approach each situation. Utilize name-dropping when you can, especially if it is a CEO or CFO that can give you some credibility and prove that you have done your research. How to Win Sales with Business Acumen: We love passionate and enthusiastic salespeople! But we've all been on a call when the salesperson is so amped to share their products or services, that they forget to really focus on your company's needs. Continue your learning and read this article: ✅ Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more videos with business acumen definitions, stories, tips, and tricks! ✅ Visit our website to learn more about our business acumen training and impacts it has on organizations. #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #leadershipdevelopment #sales #namedropping #CEO #CFO #coldcall #credibility

People You May Know Who Are Business Acumen Super Stars Not everyone who enters business leadership roles has the skills to keep their company afloat. In fact, Harvard Business Review found that 2 out of every 5 CEOs fail within their first 18 months. Some don’t understand the day-to-day struggles of their employees, don’t know how to prepare for economic downturns, or are unable to innovate beyond their day-to-day to-do list. However, we love to see when individuals who exude business acumen are successful because of it. Test your Business Acumen skills here: Steve Jobs One of the most iconic individuals of the 21st century Like many great ideas, Apple began in a garage — Steve Jobs’s parent’s garage to be specific. Though he left Apple for 12 years, his return in 1997 as the interim CEO could not have come at a more critical time. In fact, Dell CEO and founder Michael Dell said that if he were in Jobs' shoes, he'd “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” On Jobs’s return, Apple had a pipeline of 350 different products, many of which were outdated, expensive, and failing in the market. Jobs' solution was to first borrow cash to keep the company afloat and refocus the company on four products, one of which became the iMac. Of course, his innovative mind and pursuit for perfection from Apple’s products and employees brought us the advancements in computer processes and products which has led us to smartphones and internet accessibility of today. It all really came down to a change in business strategy and anticipating — even inventing — customer needs. Even after his death, Apple has continued to be a hallmark of ingenuity as the largest company with a $2.5 trillion market cap. Ray Kroc and Harry Sonneborn The team responsible for expanding the very successful McDonald's Dick and Mac McDonald may have started the small food menu icon, but Ray Kroc and Harry Sonneborn are the ones that made McDonald's the largest fast food chain in the world. In 1954, Ray believed that the initial six locations could be more, and he took on the risk of expansion and began building. When Ray met Harry two years later, that’s when things really started cooking. Harry Sonneborn offered an idea to Ray that would be the most critical financial decision to ever hit McDonald’s: real estate. Sonneborn suggested Ray not only license McDonald’s to franchisees but also rent the land the building was on. Sonneborn explained, “We are not technically in the food business. We are in the real estate business. The only reason we sell 15-cent hamburgers is because they are the greatest producer of revenue, from which our tenants can pay us our rent.” With this new business strategy in mind, Ray was able to open 597 McDonald’s by the time of his death in 1984, and today McDonald’s has a $190 billion market cap. Innovative, business savvy, and forward-thinking skills is what helped Ray and Harry succeed beyond the average business owner. A phenomenal business acumen example. John W. Nordstrom A legacy centered on the business acumen of people in every aspect of his company In 1901, John Nordstrom joined his friend, Carl Wallin, both Swedish immigrants, in the start of a shoe business. Their work ethic translated into a philosophy of providing exceptional service, selection, quality and value. Within the first four years of opening, they went from their opening sales of $12.50 to $80,000 and built a loyal customer base. Nordstrom's mission has always been around its people — not just its customers, but its employees as well. Nordstrom strives for fairness in all areas of its company. Even today, Nordstrom's motto is still, “customers [deserve] the best service, selection, quality and value.” This personal service touch has given Nordstrom its signature customer service persona and has placed it among the most successful department stores still to this day. Stars of Business Acumen Business acumen is about exuding the knowledge to succeed. Whether that be creating innovations with the changing technologies, keeping people the center of your business model, or having enough cash on hand to pivot when the economy crashes. Leaders who have taken the time to learn and implement their business acumen skills are the ones still successfully leading today. Business acumen is the key. Learn today the things that could change your career! Download the course overview for our Building Business Acumen Course: Examples of Strong Business Acumen: So, what are some examples of good business acumen? I think there are a lot of examples of business acumen, but let me share a few. Those people who can take a good idea and translate that into the economic value of that idea, to the company. And not just being able to frame the idea in the financial and business implications of that idea, but also how to tactically drive that idea forward to execution. 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Continue Your Education with Business Acumen A Journey of Business Acumen We believe Business Acumen are skills to be learned and used, not a one-time event of hearing the metrics and moving on. Without practicing the skills, you'll never fully grasp the concepts. Kenny Snarr gives great insights on how to further your business acumen. Read the transcript here: "I actually think business acumen is a lot more of a process than it is an event. You know, the learning initiatives are great events, but this skill is a process. If you don't practice it regularly, if you don't do it as part of your career at some sort of a regular cadence, you'll lose everything you learned either in a session or what you learned in college. In building your business acumen, a couple of things that I would recommend that you do on a regular basis around a regular cadence. Earnings Calls If your company is public, I would listen to your executives in their earnings call. At a very minimum the prepared remarks. I prefer the prepared remarks because that's the messaging that the executives prepared to give to the market that outlines their strategic focus, their goals, and objectives, and as a leader in the organization. I think it's paramount that you understand that. The analyst questions are interesting too. The analysts are trying to find gaps in that communication in order to build their understanding and be able to forecast what they think the organization will be able to do in the future, but at a minimum that prepared remarks I think is important for you to understand. What are the metrics that they're managing the business around? And if you don't know what those metrics are, research them. They might be things like earnings per share, and earnings per share growth. It might be a return metric like return on invested capital or something like that. It'll be a cash metric, like free cash flow. Some profit metrics, certainly revenue growth, and some margin. But understand the metrics that are important for your company's organization. You have to know what they are. If you listen for a few minutes to the prepared remarks there may be 15 or 20 minutes on a quarterly basis from the CEO and the CFO. Listen to what she's saying. Identify what's important. And then research and understand the metrics that are important. Free Earnings Call Resource: Download a free earnings call workbook to help guide you through the calls. Align Your Goals with the Executives Then second to that, I think it would be important for you to recognize as a leader inside of your organization, how you impact those metrics. How does your team, your role, your projects, your programs, your function impact the specific metrics that are important to your executives? I would do this every quarter. And if you ever bump into her in the hallway and she introduces herself and you introduce yourself, and she says what do you do for us in the organization? You could then articulate that you and your team and your project and programs are connected to the things she's trying to accomplish. I would do that every quarter. Analyze the Financial Statements If you have more time, I would look at the financial statements. We call it Navigating the Financials, but I would look at the key metrics and their trends. It's not every line item on a financial statement, there are a couple of basic ones. You're looking at the revenue growth, you're looking at the profitability growth, either operating income, net income, or some other important profit metric to your organization, and the growth rate of that. Maybe earnings per share growth, very common metric for executives. And I would just look at it and see how it's trending period over period. On the balance sheet, you might look at cash and cash equivalents, the amount of cash your organization has to invest. And the equity or the total shareholder equity. How much financial strength does the organization have? On the statement of cash flows, the most important number is the net cash provided from operating activities. That's the cash flow that the organization generates over a period of time. And I would look at the trend - is that cash flow growing period over period? If you look at those handful of line items on the financial statements, that will help you be able to tell the story that the financial statement tell about your company's business is doing. And if you look at it on a quarterly basis, you will be able to see the trend in that story or how that story is changing over time. Quickly Navigate the Financials: Build Your Business Acumen Quarterly (AT LEAST) Those are some fundamental things I would do on a quarterly basis. They’re relatively simple, they don't take a significant amount of time, you don't need an MBA in finance to be able to do that, and then you'll be better able to leverage your business acumen skill. You will build it over time and you might be able to help build it in the teams that you lead inside of the organization. And I think organizations need more leaders that have this, and that are willing to go and wrap their minds around it. I think it is a skill and like all skills it requires practice. Business Acumen Tools One of the great things about Acumen Learning and the way we teach that is we not only do we build their skills but give them a framework for how they think about their businesses. We also give them tools that they can use in their career that will help them apply what they learn. The Navigating the Financials worksheet is phenomenal for navigating the financials. The executive alignment might be the best tool of application I can think of the five drivers and of business acumen. Understanding what driver your executives are focused on, what goals and objectives the organization is trying to accomplish, and how an individual as a leader inside the organization impacts those goals and strategies out. It's not just understanding something at a point in time, it's being able to apply to affect your decisions, your choices, and your behaviors on a regular basis with an understanding of the implications to your organization. And then helping your organization in particular, the people that you lead learn it for themselves. So I think it's an important skill to build but it requires some work on the learner's part to continue that development for them, and then to pay it forward, and to help build that capability in their teams. And great things happen. We've seen great things happen inside of organizations when teams, and leaders in the organization are able to connect to some of the abstract concepts their companies are trying to accomplish." Attend a FREE Business Acumen Kevin Cope, the CEO of Acumen Learning gives a preview of our Building Business Acumen Course. Sign up below! ✅ Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more Business Acumen videos! ✅ Follow us on Linkedin @AcumenLearning to keep up with all company updates! ✅ For more on our business acumen training visit our website! #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #leadershipdevelopment #financialstrategy #financialacumen #process #organizations #leaders #accomplishments

Speak the Language of Business Acumen The Miscommunication Problem The language of business can be a complex and overwhelming topic. But it doesn't have to be! Learning the financial side of your company, the fundamentals of money-making, and business metrics can be easy! At Acumen Learning we've had the great opportunity of working with very large, multinational, publicly traded companies all over the world, and we've seen great examples of executives communicating with their companies and not-so-great examples. During a time like now, where we have low unemployment and a trend of transient employees, communication is critical to engaging your workforce. Business acumen can and should be a core skill set to help executives communicate better and employees align with that communication. Where is the organization going? Why are executives taking the organization in that direction? And are they explaining it in such a way that engages and inspires their employees? Without that, you're going to have more and more people likely to leave. Business Acumen: The Solution There are several things we'd recommend to these leaders that can help further engage their employees to stay, find meaning, and connect to their roles. Explain the Change in Business Strategy First, as a leader in the business when you have a strategy that you roll out to the organization, be as clear and connected as possible to why this is being done. Help people understand the business trends that you've seen, see the macroeconomic realities that you're dealing with, help people understand the environment that you're operating within, and get as clear as you can on why a shift of strategy makes sense for the business right now. Be it a change in customers, competitors, regulatory realities, or whatever it is, get clear on why the strategy needs to shift, and what the end state looks like to help position the business successfully over the long term. But also be good at speaking that language in a way people can understand. Executives tend to live in the world of finance and strategy but not everyone speaks that language. Make the Change About Employees Connect the business strategy change to each employee's role. Everyone wants to know that they matter, but most employees just see themselves as someone filling a role. When in reality, they're doing a job that actually plugs into a broader ecosystem of the company's success. Companies struggle with communicating the strategy of where they're going and making it personal to all the individuals who make it possible. If you can bridge those two worlds together — having a language that everyone can understand, clarity in where you're going as a business, and connection to what everyone does in their role — you'll have people that find meaning, connection, and are inspired to do things differently or better and enhance the strategy of your business. Leveraging business acumen is the core of that. That's how you engage employees. That's how you have everyone rowing in the same direction. And at the core of that is having everybody with a better understanding of business and better business acumen. ✅ Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more Business Acumen videos! ✅ Follow us on Linkedin @AcumenLearning to keep up with all company updates! ✅ For more on our business acumen training visit our website! #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #leadershipdevelopment #strategicagility #HRleadership #financialstraregy #financialacumen #employees #employeeretention #languageofbusiness