The eleven Acton Foundation courses below can be licensed by teachers of entrepreneurship that complete the Acton Foundation teacher training process.
Each course consists of:
- Assignment sheets with the required cases, supporting materials, and relevant class discussion questions.
- Course introduction.
- Course framework to help you structure your course.
- Note to teachers for each individual case.
- Access to the Master Teacher Files, our online case preparation database
- Consultations with an Acton Foundation Master Teacher, as needed.
Integrative Courses
- The Entrepreneurial Journey
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The Entrepreneurial Journey course delivers the tools, skills, and judgment your students need for a long and meaningful life as an entrepreneur. The Entrepreneurial Journey takes students on an adventure, from evaluating an opportunity, to launching a business, through growing it, and finally to harvesting the profits.
At each stage of the journey, students stand in the shoes of an entrepreneur and make tough decisions, squeezed by the demands of customers on one side (sales) and the need to make and deliver their product cheaply enough (operations) on the other.
By experiencing the trials at each stage of starting, building, and running an entrepreneurial venture, your students will be better prepared for their own entrepreneurial journey-to "begin with the end in mind" and survive until harvest. - Opportunity Analysis
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Every successful business is built around a good opportunity. A Master Entrepreneur must learn to assess opportunities because neither hustle nor clever deal-making can create a profitable business out of a "bad" opportunity.
FEE's Opportunity Analysis Course (OPP) will teach students how to identify a good opportunity and design a venture that maximizes its value and mitigates its risks. By comparing and contrasting the basic elements, required commitments and likely cash flows for a variety of opportunities, they will learn to spot archetypal patterns that help to quickly assess any venture's long-term prospects.
By the end of the course, students will know how to:
- Predict how many (if any) customers will buy a product or service, and what price they would be willing to pay.
- Determine the cost of delivering the product or service and calculate how unit costs will vary with volume.
- Evaluate the intensity of the competitive environment and estimate how long margins can be protected.
- Gathering Resources and Launch
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The Launch course provides an overview of the process of launching an entrepreneurial business and teaches specific techniques (pro forma financial projections, valuation, term sheets, deals, etc.) used in the process. By the end of the Launch course, your students will be able to respond to the following challenge: How do I take my business idea and make it a reality?
The three key "operational" questions of the Launch course are:
- What? What resources do I need to launch my business? Although the amount of cash needed to launch the business will be a constant question, it is not the only resource most start-ups need. People and deals with other companies are often required.
- How? How do I obtain those resources? Under what terms should I obtain the needed resources (especially cash)?
- Who? What type of people do I need to work in the business? Do I need a partner? What type of investors do I need?
- Priorities: The launch stage is absolutely chaotic. Learning how to sort out the "must do" items form the "can wait" and "nice to have, but not essential" tasks is a key skill entrepreneurs must develop to successfully navigate the launch phase.
- Growth
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The goal of the Growth course is to give students the tools, skills and judgment to make the most of any opportunity and build a company that produces a lasting stream of profits. In the Growth course, your students will learn what it is like to stand in the shoes on an entrepreneur who is facing the overwhelming pressures of a growing company and take action. The Growth course is 10% strategy and 90% execution.
Your students will see how the pressures and decisions facing an entrepreneur change as the size and complexity of a company grows. They will learn how to shift from doing everything themselves, to simple delegation and finally installing processes and systems to manage a more complex company.
By the end of the Growth course your students should know how to:
- Predict how large a business could become in terms of sales, profits and employees.
- Choose the appropriate growth rate to maximize long-term value.
- Select the Key Success Factors (KSFs) that are critical for this stage of growth and predict how the KSFs for the next stage may be different.
- Recognize assets for growth and when they should use them, and recognize barriers to growth and when they should invest to remove them.
- Recognize the key process for a business and how its structure and economics drive the Unit Economics for the entire business.
- Define a long-term vision for a business and set short term priorities.
- Learn to "focus and shift" so they achieve 80% of the value from 20% of the effort for their highest priority task, before shifting their attention to the next most important goal.
- Recognize the "transition flags" that tell them it may be time to consider a leap to the next level of size and complexity for their company.
- Harvest
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The goal of the Harvest course is to give students the tools, skills and judgment to pick the right time to sell or exit their business, decide what it is worth, design a process to attract the right buyers and close the sale. You will train them to approach Harvest from the perspective of an experienced entrepreneur who moves thoughtfully and carefully through the hard questions below, from deciding that it's time to sell to closing the deal and depositing the check:
- Is it time to sell?
- What are my main goals for the harvest?
- What is my business worth?
- Who are the likely buyers?
- How can I design a process to attract the right buyers, qualify them, create a competitive atmosphere, negotiate and close the sale.
Our Integrative Courses put students in the shoes of a real entrepreneur, standing between Sales and Operations and making the difficult decisions, trade-offs and incremental investments needed to serve customers and make both short and long term profits.
Tools Courses
- Customers
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The Customers course delivers the tools, skills, and judgment your students will need to identify customer needs, create and price products to satisfy those needs, determine the size of markets and how quickly to penetrate them, locate customers and convince them to buy a product or service, and provide service after the sale.
With the Customers course, you will train your students to approach sales from the perspective of an experienced entrepreneur who moves purposefully through the steps below, from evaluating a potential opportunity to creating a fully functioning sales organization:
- Stand in the shoes of a customer and feel what they feel so you can discover a need or desire that others have missed.
- Determine what the customer is willing to spend to satisfy this need, paying special attention to substitute products that address the same need.
- Sell at least one item to a real customer.
- Estimate how many similar customers exist, how difficult it is to find them and how hard it is to convince them to say "yes."
- Decide how quickly you want to penetrate a market and the best ways to reach and convince your customers.
- Create a Sales Funnel that maps out each step as a potential customer moves from a raw lead to a satisfied customer. Use this Sales Funnel to predict the time lag between sales efforts and revenue, and the average cost required to sell each unit.
- Design, hire, evaluate, coach and inspire the appropriately sized, talented and equipped sales force to reach your revenue goals.
- Increase the number and quality of leads moving into your Sales Funnel.
- Operations and Costs
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Business is mainly about the design and management of processes - processes for manufacturing, selling, serving customers, hiring and training people, and so on. Some processes add value by transforming material inputs into more desirable outputs. Others provide people with useful skills or information.
A value-added process turns resources (like labor, materials, energy and equipment) into a good that an entrepreneur can sell at a profit - that is, at a price that covers the costs of all resources used to produce it. To manage a process profitably, an entrepreneur must track these costs and determine which parts of the process generate value in excess of cost - and which parts do not. The entrepreneur also needs tools for predicting how changing the process will affect revenue, costs, and profit.
In Operations and Costs, students get comfortable thinking about processes: manufacturing, service delivery, and screening. Understanding processes - how they work and what they cost to run - is half the challenge of understanding business.
The Acton Foundation's Operations and Costs Course (OC) prepares students to:- analyze production processes
- draw flow charts of processes so they can discuss them with others
- design processes from scratch
- modify processes to improve performance
- anticipate the effects of variability and uncertainty on process performance
- determine the cost of production associated with a given process
- report a firm's costs of production in terms that others will understand
- interpret financial statements in terms of production processes
- predict how revenue, costs, and profit will change when you modify a process.
- Cash and Valuation
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Many people who work in large businesses neglect the importance of cash flow, assuming that rising net profits indicate a healthy business. An entrepreneur knows that cash, not profits, is the lifeblood of a business. The value of your business will soar if you measure cash, invest it well, and continually increase the free cash flows. But, run out of cash and your business will die.
The Cash and Valuation course delivers the tools, skills, and judgment students need to (a) create or evaluate a business model; (b) know how much investment a business will need and how much free cash flow it is likely to produce; (c) value the free cash flows produced by a business; (d) understand how staging, option value and financing affect risks and rewards; and (e) report financial results to third parties.
By the end of the Cash and Valuation course, students will be able to:
- Create financial statements and evaluate a business model for a start-up using basic Unit Economics to predict how much cash a business will need to reach breakeven and how much future free cash flows it will then produce;
- Analyze historical financial statements and evaluate a business model for an existing business to use trends in revenues, costs and asset intensity - along with your analysis of the Unit Economics and competitive analysis - to predict free cash flows;
- Develop an intuitive sense of how the interplay between revenue growth rates, margins and asset intensity impact cash needs, free cash flows and the value you create in your business;
- Value the free cash flows produced by a business using several valuation methods;
- Understand how staging, option value and financing affect value; and
- Report accurately financial results to third parties.
- Raising Money
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The Raising Money course provides the tools, skills and judgment students need to supply a business with the right amount of external funding, on the right terms, with a deal structure that adds value.
By the end of the Raising Money course, your students should be able to:
- Evaluate an opportunity and clearly explain to a financier the reason they need money, how much they will need and how likely it is that any or all of the investment will be lost.
- Decide if they should raise funds in the form of debt, equity or a hybrid form;
- Establish who they should approach to raise the right amount of money, in the right form at the lowest total cost
- Craft a robust deal that adds value.
- Make a compelling presentation to potential investors.
- People Management
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Enduring companies are built by entrepreneurs whose talents and values organize people to serve a specific group of customers. An entrepreneur must first understand him/herself before picking an opportunity and group of people to lead.
The People course delivers the tools, skills and judgment your students need to attract, select and lead the people they need to run a world-class company.
By the end of the People course, students should:
- Understand their gifts and views on human nature and how these qualify them to excel in leading certain types of companies.
- Know how to define a compelling vision, a clear mission and concrete Key Success Factors for their employees to execute.
- Describe who they need "on the bus" to make their business succeed.
- Create a process that attracts, screens, hires, coaches, and rewards the right people and reassigns or fires those people who are in the wrong place.
- Build an efficient organization that serves their customer's needs and celebrates honesty, transparency and accountability.
- Construct systems to monitor their progress and keep people headed in the right direction.
- Communicates priorities throughout the organization.
Our Tools Courses teach students the tools, skills, frameworks and processes that are required for entrepreneurs to build larger businesses.
Life of Meaning
- set practical goals that align with their deepest values and aspirations
- effectively engage others in their career discernment process
- find a Next Job that moves them closer to their Dream Job
- face adversity and find opportunity in it
- enact their principles with grace and courage
- recognize denial when they slip into it
- connect with and learn from those with whom they disagree
- make peace with their "shadow" side
- unpack "baggage" about money
- run reality checks on their plans and dreams
- respond generously and creatively to the needs of others
- make ethical decisions consistent with their standards of integrity
- do what they believe is right, even in the face of opposition
Life of Meaning (LOM) guides a student's exploration and introspection as they prepare for the next stage in their Life's Journey. Through case studies, films, works of literature, life-planning and accountability exercises, and ethical challenges, students will get clearer about what matters most to them. They'll gain perspective on how to make decisions, how to learn and grow, and how their mind changes. They'll identify long-range goals and next steps. They'll discover strategies for staying true to their principles and aspirations when they're distracted, discouraged, or oppressed.
A life in business can be truly gratifying - but only when business success is part of something bigger. The questions and exercises in LOM will help you integrate your professional aspirations with your other dreams, values and commitments - and undertake the ultimate act of entrepreneurship: building a Life of Meaning.
The Acton Foundation's Life of Meaning (LOM) course prepares students to:
Above all, LOM helps students form the habit of asking questions that connect to reliable sources of inspiration.
