13 Leaders Loop skills on corporate finance & capital allocation. Read each one, then prove it with a short Skill Check to build toward your Leaders Loop Credentials.
The valuation gets the headline. But the terms underneath it, liquidation preference, dilution, the shape of the cap table, quietly decide who actually walks away with money. Here is how the machinery works, in plain English.
Two phrases that get thrown around boardrooms as if they mean the same thing, and a quiet trap inside the most-used scoreboard that catches even strong companies. Here is what each one actually means, and how to use them without fooling yourself.
When a business throws off more cash than it can sensibly reinvest, handing some back isn't a defeat, it's a decision. Here's how to make it well, in plain English.
Every pound or dollar your business runs on is either borrowed or owned. How you split that, and how much you borrow, changes who gets paid first, how much room you have to be wrong, and how fast a good year (or a bad one) hits your owners.
Every business needs money to grow, and there are only three places to get it: the cash you keep, the money you borrow, and the ownership you sell. Knowing which to reach for, and in what order, is one of the quiet superpowers of commercial leadership.
A business case isn't a sales document for getting a "yes." It's a forecast you'll be held to. The leaders who get funded twice are the ones who write the second kind.
A company makes thousands of operating decisions a year, but only a handful really move the needle: where the money goes. Capital allocation is that handful, and it is the part of leadership most quietly responsible for whether value compounds or leaks away.
Your money is never free, even your own cash carries a price. The cost of capital is that price, and it sets the bar every investment in your business has to beat. Here's what it means, where it comes from, and how to use it without fooling yourself.
Every new capability lands on the same fork in the road, make it yourself, pay someone for it, or do it together. The right answer turns less on cost than on who should own the risk.
Options, vesting and the option pool are a way of paying people in ownership instead of cash, a real lever for retention and alignment, and a real way to give away the company by accident if you don't understand the mechanics.
You can't fund everything. Portfolio management is the discipline of deciding which bets get the money, which get starved, and which get killed, and the evidence says most organisations do it far too slowly.
Tax isn't a bill you minimise after the numbers are in. It's a variable you design around, and the leaders who treat it that way make better decisions about debt, deals, and where the work actually sits.
Five numbers get thrown around in every funding meeting. They are not interchangeable, and they sometimes contradict each other on purpose. Here is what each one actually measures, where each one quietly lies, and which one to trust when they disagree.
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