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UdemyFinance & AccountingPaid courseBeginner levelCertificate

Corporate Finance for Non-Financial Professionals (Udemy.com)

Finance for the rest of us.

Created by: John Cousins

Last updated July 2025

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What you will learn

  • Take control of your financial destiny both personally and professionally.
  • Read, Understand, and Analyze Financial Statements. Financial Statements are the core documents of any business or enterprise.
  • Distinguish yourself from your colleagues with a new financial skillset.
  • How to Read a Financial Report
  • Learn the gold standard tools of financial valuation and decision making.
  • What Is an Asset? The most fundamental atomic unit of business is the asset. Understanding what an asset is and why it matters is critical to career success.
  • Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs (and other non-financial types) Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits!
  • If you want to get further than you’ve ever gone before you need to be willing to learn like never before.

How it compares

Against the other 376 rated Udemy courses in Finance & Accounting on CourseDuck:

  • Rating4.2 out of 5higher than 10% of them
  • Reviews27#374 of 377 by number of reviews
  • Length7.7 hourslonger than 66% of them
  • Last updatedJuly 2025more recently than 50% of them

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Course Description

The smartest people invest heavily in their education and skill development, recognizing that their human capital is their most marketable resource.
Skills are the most valuable thing you can acquire in this lifetime because they keep compounding until the day you die.
The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.


I have just completed this course on Corporate Finance through Udemy and like MBA-ASAP I found the content to be extremely relevant. It is delivered in a clear manner which made the subject easy to understand. I had little very little corporate finance knowledge before the course and know I feel confident with reading financial documents and interpreting the stock-market. I would recommend this course to anyone looking to learn about corporate finance as its a great introduction with many valuable resources/ It would suit a person with a non finance background or someone who is looking to refresh their knowledge. John Cousins makes learning simple and the topics are easy to understand and have recently been updated. Excellent value for money and the videos are high quality and easy to watch. I also recommend MBA ASAP as an excellent resource for updating/learning new business skills.

Andrew Windebank


Can you truly run a business without a deep understanding of your financial numbers? The answer is a resounding no. Let's explore the potential pitfalls of this approach...


Imagine your business as a competitive sports team. Just as a coach needs to understand each player's strengths and the dynamics of the game to win, mastering your financial numbers is essential for driving your business to victory.


With my expertise in business and mathematics, I'm here to guide you in developing a winning financial strategy. Together, we'll unravel the intricacies of your finances, empowering you to make confident, informed decisions that drive your business forward.


Ready to make the leap?


Critical Strategies for Leveraging Financial Insights:

- Demystify Your Revenue Streams: Gain a precise understanding of how your business earns profit, much like knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your team. This knowledge of revenue inflows and associated costs will enhance profitability and operational efficiency.

- Focus on Gross Profit: Recognize that gross profit is more than a number; it's the backbone of your business, supporting all other activities and facilitating future planning and investments, just as a strong defense supports a winning team.

- Smart Allocation of Budgets: Use your understanding of gross profit to allocate funds to critical expenses like rent and payroll intelligently, ensuring they support rather than hinder your growth. It's like strategizing your resources to strengthen the key players in your team.

- Strategic Marketing Investment: Learn the art of budgeting for marketing. Determine the optimal amount to invest in attracting new customers, which is crucial for expanding your market reach without compromising operational funds, similar to how a coach invests in training to improve the team's performance.

- Utilize Numbers to Propel Growth: Move beyond maintenance; use financial insights strategically to drive your business to new heights. Armed with this knowledge, you'll make informed decisions that enhance growth and enable seizing new opportunities, much like a coach uses game statistics to refine strategies and achieve victories.


Let's use these insights to sustain and significantly amplify our business success. Let's win together!


Without understanding Finance you will struggle as a leader.


I take complex ideas and make them simple enough for a 5th grader to understand.

We all start somewhere. Start your financial education asap and make it a habit to invest in it every day.

personal and professional development. One habit I picked up from my rich colleagues — or perhaps I had it all along, but they incentivized it — is to constantly explore ways to gain new skills, or strengthen existing skills.

Online education is an investment, not an expense.

Finance is empowering. It enables innovation. It empowers big risk takers and bold builders and makes the world better. Finance pulls the future forward.

Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs (and other non-financial types)

How to Read a Financial Report

Accounting is the language of business.

The better you speak that language, the better you’ll be able to communicate with the locals.

Learn:

· What Is an Asset?

· Profit

· Profit Margin

· Valuation

· Cash Flow Statement

· Income Statement

· Balance Sheet

· Financial Ratios

· Cost-Benefit Analysis

· Lifetime Value

· Overhead

· Costs: Fixed and Variable

· Breakeven

· Amortization

· Depreciation

· Time Value of Money

· Compounding

· Leverage

· Bootstrapping

· Return on Investment (ROI)

· Sunk Costs

· Internal Controls

Knowing finance is power.

The most fundamental atomic unit of business is the asset. Understanding what an asset is, why it matters, and why investors paradoxically like asset-light businesses is critical to career success. This is the way I wish I was taught finance!

The tax law is a series of incentives for entrepreneurs and investors.

The tax laws favor entrepreneurs and investors. That’s because entrepreneurs and investors generally put money into the economy to produce rather than consume.

But, paying taxes is less expensive than failing at business. Be sure to get educated before you begin.

Start acting like an entrepreneur or an investor. That means the first thing you need to do is to increase your financial intelligence by investing in financial education.


Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits!

Finance is a critical in-demand career skill. It starts with being able to read and understand financial statements.

Becoming familiar with financial statements and how they are interconnected and flow is a critical skill set for enhancing your career and understanding of business.

Financial statements also underlay Discounted Cash Flow analysis, NPV, IRR, and all the valuation techniques of finance. Therefore, we should spend some time thoroughly understanding financial statements.

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Instructor Details

John Cousins

I am the author of Patent It Yourself!, Negotiation Communication Nation, Learn Accounting Fast!, Managing and Leading Organizations and People, Reading and Understanding Financial Statements, MBA ASAP, and nine other books. I am the founder of MBA ASAP which can be found at MBA-ASAP dot com an "online business education community" chock full of business skills and knowledge on the web.  

Previously, I was CEO of a biotech company developing innovative cancer diagnostics. I took two companies public and I was the CFO of several public companies for 15 years. For the past decade I have also been teaching business classes at a number of universities and colleges.  

Writing these books and creating these courses has been a wonderful opportunity to gather and organize my thoughts and experiences and share them. I have an electronics degree from MIT, a BA from Boston University and an MBA from Wharton.  

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Reviews

4.2

27 ratings on Udemy

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By Martin Waititu on 10/17/2024

so far so good. Am at the beginning

By Ute Oduol on 5/21/2024

Consists of very few videos, and lots of downloads to save and read (which beats the purpose of buying the course)

By Christopher Eugene Cochran on 1/17/2024

It was very informative and relative to my line of work as a new credit analyst

By Ihab Hamed Ahmed on 11/2/2023

The metrical is becoming more relevant; however, the course presentation is a bit fragmented in some sections giving the impression that something is missing. Highly recommend to have a coherent material videos.

By Bobby Lampkin on 4/30/2023

Great groundwork so far!

By Manisha Shrivastava on 8/6/2022

Good As expected

By Mohammad Ahmed on 8/4/2026

Showing all 7 reviews on CourseDuck

Read all 27 reviews on Udemy

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Quality Score

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Overall Score : 84 / 100