Experience Finance Professional Who Understands How Hard Finance Can Be

Welcome, and thanks for joining! My name is Nicc, and I'll be your instructor for this course. My path into finance started with a Finance degree focused on private equity and venture, but the real education came afterward. With nearly a decade of working across commercial real estate, property appraising, and retail. Along the way, I noticed the same problem showing up again and again, that being that business owners with real financial questions who didn't have, and often couldn't justify, a full-time analyst to help them answer those questions. That gap is what pulled me toward teaching and consulting, and it's the lens I bring to this class. I'm currently pursuing my MBA, and if there's one thing that's stuck with me through every stage of my career, it's that finance isn't actually that complicated once someone translates it into plain language. The math matters, but the real skill is being able to look at a spreadsheet, a model, or a set of numbers and explain what they're actually telling you and what to do about it. That's what we'll focus on here. This course isn't about memorizing formulas as much as it's about building the kind of financial fluency that lets you read a business's numbers the way you'd read a map, and with a clear sense of where you're headed. We'll work through real models, visualize data in ways that actually make sense, and build habits you can carry into any financial decision you face. I'm glad you're here. Let's get started.