Balance Sheet Management: The Least Understood Risk

Overview

Most organizations manage their income statement, but many virtually ignore the balance sheet until balance sheet problems create seemingly insurmountable emergencies. This session discusses how to analyze and manage your financial statements more holistically, allowing you to identify and correct balance sheet issues early. How do you choose whether to raise debt or equity? What are the key considerations and the advantages of each? What is the cost of capital? What are the ‘hidden’ balance sheet risks? We will also examine several crucial ideas you can incorporate into your analyses to enhance performance and reduce risk. If you want to enhance your corporate finance skills, this session is for you.

Prerequisites

Some corporate finance classwork or experience is helpful

Objectives

• Understand the key concepts of proactively managing a balance sheet, raising capital, managing balance sheet risks and considerations when deciding between financing sources

Highlights

• Understanding your balance sheet
• Analyze your balance sheet today and in the future
• Plan your balance sheet structure
• Properly balance debt and equity versus other funding sources
• Know the balance sheet pitfalls and risks to avoid
• Understand your cost of capital
• Interpret your cost of capital
• Evaluate the risks, pros and cons of debt
• Know how to raise debt
• Understand the risks, pros and cons of equity
• Examine alternative methods to raise financing
• Understand the decision process through real-world examples