The 10 Laws of Finance for Business Owners
Event Details
Join us for an exclusive, two-hour in-person workshop designed to transform how you view and manage your company’s financial health: Ten decisions every business leader needs to understand, measure, and improve.
Through real-world benchmarks and practical frameworks, this workshop exposes the hidden variables that separate fragile revenue from sustainable wealth. You will walk away with an actionable blueprint to test your growth stories against reality, identify single points of failure, and accurately price risk before taking on major commitments.
Key topics by law:
1. You Cannot Fix What You Hide – Clean financial inventory: cash, debt, margins, obligations, owner pay, and what the business can actually afford.
2. Displaying Wealth Consumes It – Separate spending that creates strength from spending that signals success: office, vehicles, tools, branding, lifestyle, and unnecessary fixed costs.
3. A Number Alone Will Lie to You – Interpret revenue, growth, headcount, profit, followers, and cash through context: trend, benchmark, margin, risk, and alternative use of capital.
4. Accuracy Emerges from Error – Build a monthly forecast, compare actuals to expectations, and use the variance to improve decisions instead of avoiding uncertainty.
5. Present Decisions Create Exponential Future Impact – Recurring pricing, margin, debt, hiring, churn, customer-quality, and reinvestment decisions compound through the business.
6. Potential Is a Story; Cash Flow Is Reality – Test every growth story against cash timing, working capital, debt service, owner stress, and operating capacity.
7. The Only Worthwhile Risks Command Incremental Expected Rewards – Price major risks before leases, loans, hiring, inventory, product launches, or expansion. Upside must be incremental and downside must be survivable.
8. Concentration Creates Unnecessary Fragility – Identify single points of failure: one customer, one supplier, one platform, one lender, one employee, one owner, or one source of demand.
9. Every Yes Has a Casualty – Use opportunity cost and a hurdle rate before adding customers, products, obligations, marketing channels, hires, or commitments.
10. Success Hardens into Constraints – Review whether old systems, founder habits, informal approvals, legacy pricing, and identity-based decisions are now limiting the next stage.
Additional Resources: Free courses, calculators, templates, guides, and practice materials are available at the course.
Date: November 13th, 2026
Time: 3 PM – 5 PM
Location: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library, SJPL Works (3rd FL)
150 E San Fernando St., San Jose, CA 95112
**Free parking with validation is available at the Fourth Street Garage (44 S 4th St. San Jose, CA 95112)**
ABOUT PRESENTER:
Devon Coombs is a CPA, finance professor, and operator based in San Jose. He’s the Faculty Director of Real Estate Finance and a Teaching Professor of Finance at Santa Clara University, currently serves as an interim VP of Revenue Accounting at RealPage, and advises companies on finance, technical accounting, monetization, and AI-enabled transformation. Earlier in his career, he spent five years at Google Cloud and started at Deloitte.
He built a career across the most complex financial environments in technology – advising on IPOs and M&A at Deloitte and Riveron, then joining Google Cloud as controller for Google Cloud Marketplace and head of the AI Deals Desk. He designed and delivered training programs for over 10,000 finance and operational stakeholders.
