How to develop your business acumen

This post focusses on the “how” and not just the “what” — hence, equally useful for beginners and the experienced. Not a clickbait.

16 min readMay 7, 2020

This is a no non-sense blog post intended to provide you with strictly actionable steps to build strong business acumen (in case you are a beginner) or further strengthen your acumen (in case you are experienced).

Before beginning to develop business acumen, you must first properly understand what it means. Put simply, business acumen is the ability to understand how businesses operate.

Please note: We will be focussing on the overall field of business than a specific niche like Marketing or Finance or Strategy.

The goal

Understanding how a business functions is essential, no matter your career. Academicians need to understand the business of their clients well to be able to consult them better. Lawyers need to understand businesses well before they can help them save taxes, avoid legal issues, or help them in a merger/acquisition. Even engineers need to understand their users before engineering products or solutions.

But here’s the thing: despite the well-recognized importance, not everyone understands this. In this blog post, we’ll try and change that. Through real-world examples and simple explanations, I want to help you understand the “how”, where it is useful, and where it isn’t and not just the “what”.

In this post, I’ve tried to distill all the big ideas I’ve learned from working around different industries in different functions — from tiny corporations to big multi-nationals. By the end of this post, you’ll be able to explain most, if not all, of the following things —

How does this company make money? (Ex — How does Netflix make money?)
What could be the potential role of an individual in this company? (Ex — What does a Product Manager do at Goldman Sachs?)
Who are some of the largest players in a given industry? (Ex — Who stands to win in the hyperlocal delivery space in India?)
Who are the users of the products/services we provide and what are their needs? (Ex — Why did Zoom struggle with privacy issues when demand surged during COVID 19?)
What could be some of the potential outcomes (or motivations behind) of a particular product launch? (Ex — Why did Flipkart launch Flipkart Videos?)

Will you find the exact answers to these questions in the post? — Maybe not as each of them deserves an entire blog post of their own. However, you’ll definitely have the tools you’ll need to decipher them yourself. Let’s jump right in.

Step 1: Pick an industry/niche

This is essentially a pre-requisite. In 2020, most businesses are very flexible with their revenue models. Hence, it is easier and more effective for one to learn a lot about a certain set of companies and how they operate than learn a little about a lot of companies (of course, you aren’t preparing for a GK quiz, are you?).

Thus, pick out an industry that excites you or one where you have some degree of formal training. I picked out healthcare as I was a Pharma major in the first year of engineering. Once, you’ve picked out the industry, healthcare in my case, you should try and pick some 5–7 companies in the space. Unless you are an experienced professional, you should aim for the top 5–7 companies in the space and not hunt for startups. Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Novartis, GSK & Merck are among the top 5 names in healthcare.

Once you’ve zeroed down on the industry and its top players, the next step is to understand their current and short term goals. A simple search on the web is the most effective way. I follow “Pfizer Stock Price” and I’d get something like this:

Google’s search result will essentially give you a chart/graph talking about how the company’s stock is doing, both historically and currently, and will also provide you with two or more top articles from the web that speculate on why the company is doing as well/bad as it is currently. Depending upon the time of the year, you’d also see analysis of how the company is expected to hit/miss its earnings reports of the respective quarter.

For the uninitiated: Publicly traded companies release their financial reports to the public markets once every quarter. Based on historic trends and the current situation of the industry, Wall Street analysts estimate the overall revenue and profits for the company. A strong performance by the company helps it meet/beat (called a hit) the estimates & is typically followed by a huge increase in their stock price. Similarly, failure to deliver on the expectations (called a miss) typically results in a dip in the stock price.

The best form of learning happens in the week when the company is supposed to release their earnings reports. Shortly before the date, speculations would peak and the rubber meets the road on the date of the earnings. You’d be able to understand why the street speculated in a certain way & why/how the company was/was not able to meet the expectations. Interestingly though, an earnings report will expose you a lot of jargon used consistently across the business world — Earnings per share, operating revenue, MAUs, DAUs, acquisition costs, etc. Investopedia will become your best friend and will help you decipher the terms and intuition.

The key is to keep doing this exercise for each of the companies you chose for yourself for 3–4 months, preferably such that a quarterly earnings report is released sometime during the 3rd/4th month. Stalking established companies in a particular industry will help you build an intuitive understanding of it. And the right ones (ideally you should be choosing the largest companies) have significant R&D budgets. Understanding their R&D investments will also give you an idea of some of the emerging trends the big players are betting on (for example, established players in technology are betting on Quantum computing to be the next frontier of computing & have allocated significant R&D budgets).

Step 2: Tear down the industry & niche

Once you have followed Step 1 rigorously for the mentioned time, you’d have picked up sufficient information about how the particular industry is moving forward and what are some of the emerging trends in the same. However, all this knowledge is essentially useless without practice. You cannot hone a craft beyond a certain point without application.

The application of this newly acquired knowledge can be in several ways. Some people choose to build a community of people around themselves and then keep discussing/debating about these topics with them. This helps you develop constant analytical skills and also helps you learn how others perceive/interpret the same piece of information.

Another way to apply could be participation in case study competitions. I’d personally recommend participating in the events that resonate with your niche initially as it’d help you understand if you’re made for the niche or should switch to a new one. However, it is totally okay to participate in events where the topic/theme is different from the niche you’ve picked for yourself. Case study events and sessions can be thought of as real-world simulations of how corporates operate. Hence, the problem statements tend to be very realistic and chances of your suggestions being implemented are high provided they’re actionable.

Thus, please treat a case study session as something that gives you an idea of how a particular company functions. Of course, you can read up about an industry and come out with decent solutions. However, your learning experience will be bookish and devoid of any appreciation for the industry/company and we’re not talking about outliers.

An increasingly popular medium of sharing your knowledge and extending your discussions to the virtual world is social media. With blogging platforms like Blogger (owned by Google) and Medium (pun intended), starting a blog and gathering an audience is as easy as it gets. You also have platforms like Quora and LinkedIn where you can engage in meaningful discussions with seasoned professionals and domain experts. The best part about a Quora or a LinkedIn is that you can choose to engage with others’ content and not necessarily need to create your own.

Case in point — I started with commenting on the posts of others on LinkedIn back in my second semester and participated in several case study competitions which were related to my major or the job function I’d interned in. Not only it helped me perform better in the events, it also helped me understand which industry is right for me and which industry isn’t.

Step 3: Try for industrial visits, internships and/or industrial projects

If you’ve followed steps 1 and 2, you’d have sufficient meat in your resume. Blogs can be thought of as a Github for people who wish to seek a career in non-tech (I know several people who got internships in Private Equity and Venture Capitalist firms purely because of the type of content they put on their blogs) and if you have a few wins from case study competitions under your belt, you’d be set to send a strong signal to others about your budding competencies.

As they say, experience is the greatest teacher and there’s no better place to hone your craft than the real field.

But how does one get to it?

Depending on your college, the amount of practice you’ve done, and of course, luck, you’re now set to apply your learnings to embellish and dazzle the people in the corporates. The best platforms for you to dazzle corporates are the events in your college fests (if you’re a university student) and/or through a networking event (if you’re a working professional). And if you do your job well, you’ll be rewarded with an industrial visit, internship, and/or an industrial project.

I cannot stress the importance of experiential learning. No matter how many people you talk to or the number of reports/blogs you read about a company, your learning gets maximized when you learn the ropes from doing the work in the field.

When I was learning about healthcare, I was interning in Pfizer and Reckitt Benckiser. When I was learning about FMCG, I was fortunate to have gone and visited the largest manufacturing factory of HUL as I was working with them on a long term project. All the mentioned experiences helped me excel in my role when I was a Product Management Intern at a hyper-growth focussed health-tech startup, Lybrate, and deeply appreciate the perspectives of Sudhir Sitapati on the FMCG industry in his book.

TLDR; there’s no substitute for experiential learning and having documentation of your thoughts, perspectives, and analysis helps you stand apart. And when some famous personalities come to your college during fests as guests/speakers/judges of events, these documentations should help you make a lasting impression that could open the doors for internships/industrial visits/industrial projects.

Step 4: Hustle, hustle, and hustle harder

Steps 1, 2, and 3 are actionable techniques to build acumen in a particular industry. You’d need to repeat it as a cycle for every industry you’d want to learn about. Ideally, you should focus on knowing the depth about an industry or two than knowing a little about the most.

And Google would help you go deep in a particular industry. The more digital impressions you provide it, the better its recommendations get. Most of the relevant (business-related) information I consume today is served to me by Google Ads in the search app. Put in other words, if you do your job properly (as mentioned in Step 1), Google would do the rest and since Google rarely misses out, you’d know who is at fault, in case you’re not satisfied with the results :P.

Once you’re confident about your knowledge in an industry, try to take it to the next level and participate in several webinars/conferences/meetups. You’d learn a lot about practical nuances, networking, and effective communication. In several of my previous internships, the location was Delhi NCR and I didn’t have the concept of weekends as I used to spend them attending coffee chats, VC meetups, conferences, etc and I learned more doing that than I did attending the lectures in the college.

For instance, I learned that the same job function varies largely across companies — in a B2C company/startup with a tech product, a Product Manager’s task would be one or more of the following (but not limited to): new user acquisition, product growth, feature addition, etc. However, the same role in a financial services company like an Investment Bank becomes very different. It is imperative to understand that technology is a support/back-office function in such an industry where people use technology as an enabler to do their core job better. Here the Product Manager serves very different stakeholders and the end-user is someone who’d use the product to do his job more efficiently. Hence, the skills and the mindset required for the same are very different.

Similarly, the nature of a subscription business (like Netflix) is very different from that of a transactional business (like a hyperlocal delivery startup). In a subscription business, tend to pay a sum upfront and then access a large catalog of offerings for the same. Essentially fixed price for (potentially) unlimited offerings. However, for transactional business, one pays for every transaction. Hence, the parameters to judge both businesses are, by and large, very different.

So, if you follow Step 4 to the core, you’d be moving towards having in-depth knowledge about a particular industry, have insights as to how it is evolving, develop deep user empathy — essentially enough for you to begin developing your own perspectives. It’s actually the most difficult part but if you do it well, the results would be beyond your expectations.

I was fortunate enough to have written something on Kirana Stores and how they’re changing the entire landscape of the country — from e-commerce to electric mobility — and several people reached out to me to see if I could help them with discussing their venture ideas, help them with product thinking or provide with primary and secondary market research after reading that. Several of those discussions ended up in becoming paid freelance projects. I’m attaching a note that a happy client left on my LinkedIn profile. :)

Steps 1–4 are a wrapped set of instructions which are extremely actionable and transferable. What I mean by that is you can use them to build proficiency in a few industries. Initially, it might look very daunting as it requires a lot of reading upfront but every step also includes (several interesting) applications as well. Steps 1 and 2 are for building industry-related knowledge and one can easily transfer that knowledge to different domains.

Case in Point: I discussed this with an undergrad student from BITS Pilani and he ended up writing a blog with his analysis on the IPO of IRCTC. My younger sister (currently a B.Comm Major in the University of Delhi) used this to understand how the telecom market in Singapore functions. I understand technology companies well and with just a basic reading through the concepts of CapEx, OpEx, EBITDA, Operating Margins, I was able to analyze the S-1 filings of Uber and Lyft just before their IPOs.

Of course, there’s an element of luck involved in Steps 3 and 4 as you cannot quite control where you end up studying/interning. However, use that as a motivation and build an online presence on LinkedIn. In the information age, no one cares if you’re from Kolkata or Koraput. All you need is a stable internet connection with the desire to learn. So, I’d urge you to not fret about it and try to maximize the value out of the things you can control. I have a dedicated post on the importance of networking along with some tips from personal experiences.

I am sorry for the length of the post but it is about building business acumen (at least a year long project) and not winning a Case Study or a B-Plan Competition (short-term project).

A few weeks back, I’d sourced out a form seeking questions. I’ve tried to cover them in through the post. Hence, I’d try to keep the answers short.

Hey! Can you talk about the resources one should read to keep themselves updated in the world of business?

Ans — Covered in Step 1. Also, don’t be fixated on a set of resources. Focus more on synthesis (your own insights) and use that to discuss with experienced people in the field. Unfortunately, I realized its importance in my 7th semester.

What are some of the best sources to learn finance/consulting?

Ans — For Consulting — Step 1 and 2.

For finance, you could easily start with a few courses on the MOOC platforms. Books for CFA Part 1 will teach you a lot more than you’d need and there’s an MBA in one course on Udemy. I relied completely on Investopedia and some bit of intelligent Googling though and I think it shall suffice.

How did you start learning about business/management?

Ans — Steps 1–4 done for over 3 years now.

Let us know the process involved in writing a quality analysis (such as your linkedin posts)? Details as selecting a topic, researching, articulating, etc.

Ans — I spend about 5–7 minutes on a LinkedIn post. Any more time I invest doesn’t make sense for me considering the ROI. And I do not sit and select a topic for a LinkedIn post per se. I tend to keep on synthesizing things in my mind almost everyday and hence when I’m in a good headspace to put together a 1300 character post on LinkedIn in under 10 minutes, I decide to take a crack at it. Articulation is the art I’ve experimented over the years and I think the best way to do that is practice. You cannot improve articulation unless you articulate. Also, be receptive to feedback. Not everyone will like your posts or what you write. Some won’t even agree to what you say and many would criticize you. The key here is to keep your chin up and continue to improve.

Source for Problem solving case studies.

Ans — Step 1 will give you enough case studies. Unless a company shuts shop, it’d continue to announce its earnings reports publicly. What better way to solve actual case studies? :)

How to stay in touch with Product Management while doing a PhD in tech? :P

Ans — Product Managers tend to experts on the industry trends and the user needs. A Ph.D. in tech means you’d have the technical chops. Try to read up about the industry trends by following Step 1. Or you can also choose to learn more about the users as entailed in Step 4. I would stick to Step 1 as I think it is easier.

How to narrow down on your interest area? It easy for anyone to feel they into more than one things. From a practical point of view, how does one get into?

Ans — Keep doing Step 1 for different industries and you should find the industry you’re interested/good in. For the job function part, I’d urge you to not fret too much about what you’re doing while starting your career but don’t go easy on whatever it is you end up doing. First jobs are essentially getting your foot through the door and not a 30-year career imprisonment sentence. Life will give you a lot of chances — be ready to grab them.

One important mental model, that I use — What are you deeply passionate about? What can you put your heart and soul into without expecting where it leads you to? And what drives your economic engine?

Do you want to make the trades and do the deals in an investment bank or write software for those who do? Do you want to build a brand in a top FMCG company or want to handle their finances? Do you want to build and launch products or execute the strategy? These are questions you need to find answers to. Again, this post is about the “how”.

For a beginner it’s tough to start & to suggest a topic for conversation. Can you guide us the point from where we should start?

Ans — The key to any conversation is to get people to talk about their work. Everyone likes to talk about their projects and achievements. Hence, do proper background research and try and understand what is it exactly that they do. There are a lot of other nuances and I’ve described them here. Also, Steps 1 and 2 should give you something to talk about.

Your list of top ten books from from Biz/PM/finance perspective?

Ans — I am a big fan of reading one book several times; especially if you’re looking at that to help you professionally. Everybody reads the same text but the comprehensions differ based on the amount of prior reading you’ve done or experience you have.

Some of the all-time classic reads (I've read each of them at least once) —

The Shoe Dog [Business]
The Four [Business]
Hit Refresh [Business]
Hooked [Product]
One up on Wall Street [Finance]
Inspired [Product]
The CEO Factory — Management Lessons from Unilever [Business]
Swipe to Unlock [Business]
The Intelligent Investor [Finance]
Mind without fear [Business]

Disclosure: Putting this together took a lot of time. This post is a culmination of what has worked for me over the years and a lot of insights from people who’ve mentored/helped me and I’ve interacted with. While I’ve tried to cover the relatively less talked about topics of building business acumen and the “hows”, I must admit that I’m no expert (rather slightly above average). Hence, please use it at your own risk, and no intentional harm is intended to enterprises, human beings, and/or living things. However, if there’s something different that you did to get the results and are comfortable sharing it, please do. I’d be happy to learn from you. Also, if you feel I’ve made any mistakes, please do not hesitate to let me know.

It’s been a very long post and I hope the detour was worth it. Please feel free to share it with people who you feel can benefit from this. :) Also, if this helped you, I’d appreciate if you can leave behind an applause. It’d just help a larger audience discover this article. :)

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