The Corporate Finance Lens: What No One Teaches but Everyone Needs
Across industries, the biggest killer isn’t bad strategy or bad product. It’s capital in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ve watched smart, credentialed people follow the frameworks they were taught … straight into decisions that crippled their best growth engines.
Business schools, undergrad finance programs, and accelerators all add value but none delivers a practical system for aligning capital, timing, and execution. By the time most people figure that out, they’ve already paid for the lesson but in capital, not tuition. And usually, they don’t even realize what lesson they paid for.
That insight led me to build The Corporate Finance Lens™, a decision system for real operators. It’s the system I wish I’d had when I was trying to make real capital allocation calls with half the data and none of the hindsight.
Why B-School is Useful, but Incomplete
The gap runs through every rung of the learning ladder. MBA programs hand you well-designed case studies about billion-dollar decisions in hindsight. You leave knowing how to talk strategic pivots but not how to make one with incomplete data and a short runway.
Undergrad corporate finance? Good foundation, but over-indexes on formulas and theory. You spend a semester pretending WACC is a fixed number accurate to two decimal places, running formulas no real CFO uses without heavy judgment calls. I once watched a company debate whether their WACC was 8.3% or 8.9% while missing that the capex case had broken assumptions and overly optimistic forecasts, a flaw no discount rate tweak could fix. The Lens focuses on spotting and fixing those flaws before the meeting.
Accelerators: Speed Without the Framework
Accelerators are great at driving product velocity and market testing but tend to push capital allocation to “later.” The problem? “Later” often means year three, when the biggest bets are already locked in. By then, broken unit economics and burned capital aren’t just expensive, they’re almost impossible to unwind. The Lens gives you that framework from day one to make faster, better calls.
The Career Gap
Early roles in banking, consulting, accounting, or finance give valuable exposure, but they don’t always put you in the seat where final capital allocation calls are made. It’s the difference between preparing the deck and owning the call when the tradeoffs are messy and the data incomplete. The Lens is built for that seat.
Same with many accounting-driven CFOs. Strong on GAAP compliance and closes, but less tested on putting capital to work. I’ve seen variance analyses proudly showing “expenses down 8%” while omitting that the cuts gutted the product line driving long-term growth. A short-term win that killed the growth engine. The Lens is built for people who have to make the call when the numbers are messy, the tradeoffs real, and no one else sees the whole board.
The Unfilled Gap
Capital allocation isn’t taught directly because it’s messy; judgment calls, timing, and tradeoffs that don’t fit in a formula. It’s about treating the business as a portfolio of options, not a checklist.
That’s what The Corporate Finance Lens teaches:
- How to evaluate tradeoffs when the numbers aren’t conclusive.
- How to integrate timing, risk, and constraints into every decision.
- How to avoid false precision and focus on probabilities, optionality, and adaptability.
- How to make early moves that don’t cripple you later.
Forma drills this through repetition and application: short sprints where you make the call, compare it to how top operators would, and recalibrate. This isn’t theory or financial modeling theater. It’s how you avoid being the smartest person in the room with the weakest balance sheet.
Why It Matters
Capital allocation is the highest-leverage skill in business. Get it right, and value compounds. Get it wrong, and no amount of hustle, incremental tweaks, or branding will make up for it.
Almost no one teaches it this way. The Corporate Finance Lens gives you the decision system top operators use to make the right calls before small missteps become problems you can’t unwind. Because by the time they do, it’s never the spreadsheet that’s broken. It’s the discipline.