Читать книгу The Value Equation - Christopher H. Volk - Страница 7

I did not initially set out to be an entrepreneur. I graduated from college in the middle of a major economic recession with a mediocre grade point average, having avoided taking a single business class. It was then that something fortunate happened to me that would guide my future choices: My applications for employment were declined by more than 300 companies.

Getting rejected by so many businesses was an accomplishment in 1979. Each letter I sent went by regular mail and was hand typed. So were the replies. For years, I kept the rejection letters as a reminder of the privilege of employment. Those letters also provided me with added motivation to succeed. With my mounting rejections, I would likely have taken any reasonable offer of employment at just about any location. Fortunately, the rejections deprived me of that opportunity and gave me time to think.

I committed to a course of action, narrowing my focus. I decided to convince a commercial bank to hire me. The idea was to maintain my career options while finding a job that would give me valuable knowledge about business and finance. I also attended night school, eventually earning an MBA. My brief banking career led me to finance and eventually to the opportunity to take three companies public on the New York Stock Exchange, two of which I co-founded. All the while, I have been a student and observer of business.

This book has been years in the making. It began with many published articles written throughout my career that eventually provided the material for an award-winning video series on business. In turn, the video series was inspired by an educational program called Schoolhouse Rock! When I was in high school, it was brilliantly conceived to make many complex subjects simple. I wanted to do something like that for business, using math you learned in middle school.

This book ultimately emerged from that effort.

Corporate business models cannot be conceived or evaluated without math. Over my career, I have found that most businesspeople are taught to look at absolute numbers. The approach within this book is intended to be broadly accessible and is centered instead on universal relative numeric relationships, beginning with investor rates of return. In taking this approach, which I have used throughout my career, complex business models can be hugely simplified. For you, the result is that a wide range of business financial fundamentals can be addressed using a single integrated approach and then condensed into a few pages.

When you are done reading this book, you should have more than just a basic understanding of how businesses create wealth. You can expect to have a good idea how companies are assembled and valued. And you will also gain insight into how business leaders work to improve corporate business models in ways that generate personal and collective wealth. These fundamentals rest at the heart of the creation of most of the largest personal fortunes ever assembled.

Businesses lie in the middle of the great river of global commerce. They are the engine of our global economy and are ultimately responsible for our collective prosperity. I have spent a career in the middle of the river and am happy to be able to share my observations with you. This book contains many illustrations of businesses, including STORE Capital, the most recent publicly traded company I co-founded.

The business case study illustrations within the book generally stop at 2019. The reasoning should be intuitive. The global pandemic that began in early 2020 created major global disruptions that resulted in near-term business performance and business model distortions. Given the timeless nature of the concepts in this book, this does not matter.

I have been fortunate to work in a time characterized by a high level of business formation and creativity, which has helped me and many others start large businesses from scratch. To my knowledge, business formation has never been more accessible. It is my hope that this book serves to inspire readers to harness the wealth creation potential of business as they contribute to, create, and run businesses that benefit us all.

Christopher Volk

Paradise Valley, Arizona

March 18, 2022