Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

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Why do I need a degree to read financial reports? Can't I get a book or just Google it?

If I'm running a business, why do I need to be able to read financial reports at all? Especially for some other random company. If I need to make a financial report, couldn't I use an online generator, template, accounting software, or hire someone to do it? Looking online there seem to be many services for less than a few thousand dollars for financial reporting.

If I have a product wouldn't I be able to take time to research applications for it thoroughly rather than relying industries that I remembered from some course.

As far as measuring clients worth, do I need a course on that really or do I just need to be aware that there are clients that will waste our time and try to get practical evidence that won't be the case.

Can I not get quite a bit of useful knowledge by reading and carefully digesting some key books like The Mom Test?

When you say think like a marketer, so far every article that comes up when I google that is listing things that any used car salesman would apply.

Just based on what you said it sort of makes MBA degrees seem like a waste of time to me.

Oh man, all the questions you just asked only highlight exactly why an MBA is so beneficial for mid-career people haha! I'm an adult student doing concurrent CS and business degrees after a long time dabbling in both, and in both cases the value of college was in the things I wouldn't have thought to learn or wouldn't have thought were valuable, especially in places where the signal-to-noise ratio is really low and snake oil is everywhere, like the marketing example you just gave.

Just as a small example, why do you need to read financial report at all? Because that is the language of investors and managers. Why read financial reports for some random company? Benchmarking, so you can tell investors and stakeholders "this is how well we are doing vs comparable companies." A template generator won't help you with this kind of analysis, and those services you mention won't help you if you can't really understand them.

I'm not saying you need an MBA to be a good business person, and I felt like my BBA (which I'm told is mostly the same material as an MBA, at least at my school) only confirmed that my instincts and self-learning after 8 years in the workforce was pretty good...but man, those little bits I didn't know and hadn't thought to learn (especially around finance and proper marketing) were the ones that have ended up mattering the most.

Just to reply to one of your lines of thought. Measuring a clients worth. How do you measure who's a waste of time? How should you factor in fixed costs vs variable costs, opportunity cost, legal costs, license fee structures, travel costs, whether to bring on new employees for clients, everything that entails what a client's actual worth is to you beyond simply saying "you're a waste of time"?

I think everything you said makes me appreciate my MBA more and how I can truly understand the finer points of running my successful business.

(And I like your comment about learning Excel in 7th grade...truly the key to a successful business is knowing Excel)

Come on... most MBA programs are 2 years of full time study. You really going to compare "just Google it" or "digesting some key books like The Mom Test" to a MBA program? To push the logic further, what if it was a Harvard or Stanford MBA?

> Why do I need a degree to read financial reports? Can't I get a book or just Google it?

It isn't just "how to read financial reports" but learning how companies can game those financial reports. It is learning that the most important stuff you'll get out a financial report isn't the top level balance sheet but in all the footnotes where they describe how they derived some top level figure.

Accounting is way, way more than simply counting numbers. It is every bit as much of an art as it is a science. For example, learning all the different ways to recognize revenue and, more important, how the particular revenue recognition strategy you use can incentivize behavior--both good and bad.... you probably aren't gonna get that out of a book. You need to be made aware of it.

That is the value of a good MBA program. Sure you can "learn it all out of a book", but not in a holistic way.

The value of financial modeling is mostly in being able to run various scenarios quickly, not in the final report. You can plug in different assumptions for development velocity, labor costs, market segmentation, sales conversion rate, cost of inputs, financing sources, etc. and then see what their effect on the bottom line (= net income) is, along with other metrics like burn rate, IRR, etc. Then you use your domain knowledge to judge how likely all these scenarios are, giving you a much more complete picture than if you aren't conversant with these financial tools.

But yes, you can learn all of this from books & the Internet, you don't need an MBA for it.

Sure but I taught myself how to use Excel when I was in 6 or 7th grade. It's actually not very hard.

By your definition, neither is learning to code. Just pick up a book that describes the programming language you are gonna use and boom. You are a coder!

Excel is easy. Knowing what to put into excel is not at all easy. And yeah you can get a template but if you don't know how that template is created or why the creator did what they did you are gonna set your business up for failure. Accounting is not just math but an art.

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