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Telling Stories with Numbers

Evening

FACULTY: ROTHBERG 0.3 CEU CREDITS

Boston: June 19 & November 13 2013

Is your firm’s financial performance on par with its competitors? How aggressively can your competitors invest in R&D, marketing and expansion activities? Executives use financial information to drive key strategic decisions. Intelligence professionals need to be able to speak the same language. The finance guys will review income statements and balance sheets. Intelligence professionals need to be able to pick out a few key ratios to tell a competitive story. Which ratios are important depends on what industry you are in and what story you are trying to tell. Providing a financial snapshot of the firm and significant competitors increases the firm’s understanding of what they really can do. It also bolsters the credibility of competitive intelligence analyses.

Designed for analysts who do not work in or with finance on a regular basis, this hands-on, case-based course will teach how to tell stories with numbers by:

• Defining competitive advantage using ratios that are telling for an industry’s life cycle
• Identifying different financial health indicators for low cost and differentiated firms
• Discovering telling financial ratios for different industries
• Creating a financial health report card
• Presenting financial information deliberately and succinctly

Problem Sets

1. Do competitors have the cash flow to make big market moves or to invest in value chain activities? Competitor earnings reports may indicate yet another profitable quarter. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have the cash flow or asset base to make bold moves or large investments.
2. Firms claim that they have competitive advantage. Just because they say it doesn’t make it so. For instance, they may boast to shareholders that they have the most efficient operations. Investigating a few key indicators regarding their expenses and efficiency ratios can tell a very different story.