In most companies, budget season is a predictable exercise in “incrementalism,” taking last year’s numbers and adding a 5% bump. But what happens when leadership drops a bomb and says, “This year, we start from zero”? In this episode of Corporate Finance Explained on FinPod, we explore Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB), a high-stakes financial framework in…
In corporate development and finance, the excitement of an acquisition often masks the underlying risks. Financial Due Diligence (FDD) is the structured investigation into a company’s total financial health. It is the crucial “forensic” step that moves a deal from celebration to investigation, determining whether a transaction is a winning strategy or a multi-billion dollar…
Hayley Rosenlund’s career is a masterclass in navigating the high-pressure world of Capital Markets while maintaining personal integrity. From her early days at the LSE to leading sales teams in London and Paris, and eventually transitioning to executive coaching, her journey offers profound lessons on resilience, the “producer” mindset, and the evolving landscape of global…
“Going green” has transitioned from a PR commitment to a core financial strategy. For corporate finance teams, the challenge is no longer whether to invest in sustainability, but how to fund it while delivering long-term financial returns. In this episode of Corporate Finance Explained on FinPod, we move past the buzzwords to explore the specific…
In FP&A, an executive summary turns complex financial analysis into key insights and recommendations that leadership can quickly understand. Your executives want implications they can act on, not just data recaps. That matters when you start using AI tools to prepare executive summaries of your analyses. This guide shows you the practical workflow FP&A teams…
In corporate finance, we often focus on balance sheets, cash flow, and NPV. However, there is an “invisible factor” that dictates whether those numbers hold up: Corporate Culture. While it doesn’t have a line item, culture acts as either a precision tool for financial discipline or a toxic liability that destroys enterprise value. In this…
What Is a Finance Lease? A finance lease is a lease agreement where the lessee effectively controls and uses an asset while assuming most of the risks and rewards of ownership, even though legal ownership may not transfer immediately. For accounting purposes, a finance lease is treated similarly to purchasing an asset using borrowed funds,…
Corporate success is often measured by growth and diversification, but for many conglomerates, being too big leads to a “conglomerate discount.” This is the moment when the boardroom turns to corporate separation—the strategic process of intentionally breaking a business apart to create massive new shareholder wealth. In this episode of Corporate Finance Explained on FinPod,…
The Leveraged Buyout (LBO) is one of the most powerful and high-stakes tools in modern finance. It is the primary engine of the private equity (PE) industry, where a massive amount of debt is used to acquire a company, with the goal of restructuring it for a highly profitable exit. In this episode of Corporate…
In the high-stakes world of M&A, Goodwill is arguably the most important yet invisible asset on a modern balance sheet. It represents the “engine of ambition,” but as history shows, it is also a significant source of financial volatility. In this episode of Corporate Finance Explained on FinPod, we unpack why companies pay billions in…
