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Learn to evaluate, fund, and monitor growth strategies with the financial discipline needed to avoid costly expansion mistakes
Business growth can create higher profitability, stronger cash flow, greater diversification, and improved ability to attract and retain talent. Yet rapid expansion can also erode margins, strain working capital, increase operational complexity, reduce customer satisfaction, and create liquidity crises. This course provides a practical framework for evaluating, funding, and monitoring growth initiatives so that companies can pursue sustainable value rather than simply larger sales volumes.
The course begins with the strategic case for growth and the risks that can undermine it. You will learn how to assess organizational readiness before committing resources.
You will build the financial skills needed to analyze a growth initiative. You’ll learn marginal profitability analysis, net contribution statements, cost-volume-profit analysis, and break-even analysis to test whether projected sales will support acceptable returns.
Because profitable growth can still fail without liquidity, the course places strong emphasis on cash flow timing. The course examines the cash conversion cycle and the role of inventory, receivables, payables, and permanent working capital in creating funding gaps. You’ll learn how to convert income projections into cash flow forecasts and estimate the amount and timing of funding needs.
The course then introduces essential investment and performance measures. The course then expands beyond single-project considerations to portfolio thinking, showing how leaders can model multiple growth investments across products, locations, and initiatives while accounting for capital constraints and risk.
The course also examines the major sources of cash for growth. Participants consider sustainable growth rates, leverage, debt-term matching, loan covenants, equity dilution, and the trade-offs among funding sources.
The course addresses decision-making errors when considering growth and ways to mitigate these errors. You’ll discover how to use driver-based forecasting, rolling forecasts, and key performance indicators to monitor performance, update assumptions, and make timely decisions about whether to continue, modify, or abandon a growth strategy. By the end, you will be prepared to evaluate growth opportunities with stronger financial discipline and clearer insight into the relationship between expansion, risk, cash, and long-term value.
Founder of CFO Perspective
Rob Stephens is the Founder of CFO Perspective, which provides continuing education courses for CPAs and financial management courses for business advisors and staff. He has been quoted in Forbes, U.S. News and World Report, Bloomberg Businessweek, and many other news sources. He is also the author of Key Performance Indicators and KPI Dashboards. Rob has a 30-year career that includes serving as a CFO, Director of Operations, and SVP of Finance. Rob is an adjunct instructor for the MBA program at Gonzaga University. Rob holds a Masters of Science in Personal Financial Planning and a Graduate Certificate in Financial Therapy from Kansas State University. He received a B.A. in Business Administration from the University of Washington.