Entrepreneurship: Growing Your Business

About this course

Growing a business needs a dynamic set of skills, ranging from leadership, employee management, strategy, planning, finance, accounting, ethics, accountability, and profitability. Developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, and led by top-ranked Darden faculty, this specialization covers challenges faced by private businesses, when they attempt to grow substantially. It starts with common challenges and human resource issues faced by private business. It then teaches you essential financial accounting skills for entrepreneurs, such as creating and interpreting cash flow, balance sheet, and income statements to make financial health conclusions. This specialization also presents an exciting new approach to values-driven leadership development in the workplace, in business education, and in life. In an action oriented introduction to Giving Voice to Values (GVV), it is not about persuading people to be more ethical, but instead starts from the premise that most of us already want to act on our values, and we feel that we have a reasonable chance of doing so effectively. It then discusses the emergence of a new story about business, contextualizing it within a societal framework. Finally, it teaches you to write innovative business plans, by driving meaningful focus, forcing specificity, and bringing linkages between key business drivers to the foreground.

Course objectives

• understand the challenges of growing a business
• apply values-driven leadership in decision-making
• contextualize business practices within a societal framework