This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Most companies can tell you their revenue to the nearest thousand and cannot tell you which customers are profitable.

The question nobody can answer

Ask a leadership team what a customer costs to acquire and what they return over their life, and you will get a range rather than a number, because the two figures live in different systems owned by different people. Ask when the price was last changed deliberately, and the answer is usually that it was set at the beginning and has moved with inflation since. Ask which product line to close, and everyone will explain why theirs is strategic. None of that is incompetence. It is what happens when the decisions that determine revenue — the product, the customer, the price and the measurement — are made in four separate rooms.

What this course covers

Forty-five lessons across those four rooms. The product first: product-market fit and how to keep it, the portfolio and the decision to invest, maintain or retire, Jobs to be Done and journey mapping, the North Star metric and the pirate metrics, monetisation models from freemium to subscription, growth loops, and unit economics with lifetime value against acquisition cost. Then the customer after the sale: journey audit, service strategy and standards, service levels and standard procedures, automation, and the numbers — net promoter, satisfaction, effort, first-contact resolution, handling time. Then the money in full: strategic planning and forecasting, currency and interest risk, preventive and detective controls, the cash conversion cycle, free cash flow, break-even and return on capital, acquisitions and valuation, the case against budgeting and the rolling forecast instead, nine distinct approaches to pricing including elasticity, net present value and payback, cash gaps and pooling, investment policy, debt and equity financing, credit ratings, going public, investor relations, reporting and finance technology. Finally the measurement: the four types of indicator, the 10-80-10 rule, critical success factors and the workshop that finds them, design traps, visualisation, a three-step implementation, and six myths that quietly destroy most indicator systems.

A note on the finance block

Twenty of these lessons are the finance block, and the last nine of them cover how growth is financed rather than how revenue is earned: debt and equity instruments, credit ratings, public listing, investor relations and public company reporting. That material is there because a growing company eventually meets it, but if you run a small business, treat those nine as reference rather than as the core of the course. The eleven before them — control, cash, break-even, acquisitions, budgeting and pricing — are the part you will use immediately.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike Pritula. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 45 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working models: the portfolio matrices, Jobs to be Done, the pirate metrics, unit economics, nine pricing approaches, net present value, the cash conversion cycle, the rolling forecast, critical success factors, the 10-80-10 rule

• A full finance block: control, cash, break-even, budgeting, pricing and capital

Where to start

Write down what one customer costs you to acquire and what they return over their life. Then write down when you last changed a price on purpose. Two numbers and one date — that is the diagnostic. Enrol now and start today.