Business acumen: how your buyer's company actually works

What you’ll learn

• Revenue, cost of sales, gross margin and operating profit — and why profit is not cash, worked through a company earning £300k of profit while its bank balance falls £300k.
• Capex versus opex, why "can we make it opex?" is a genuine lever, and why leasing no longer converts capital spend to revenue spend in the NHS.
• How to research a target company in forty minutes — Companies House, strategic reports, NHS board papers, job adverts.
• The SaaS model from the investor's side: ARR/MRR, margin norms, CAC payback, the rule of 40 (defined honestly), why churn compounds, and how your deal's terms move numbers finance watches.
• How budgets work: planning cycles, budget holders versus approvers, capital versus revenue, use-it-or-lose-it (and where that folklore is wrong), the NHS April–March year, pharma's calendar, and the 1 January 2026 procurement thresholds.
• The business case your buyer must write, who signs it, and payback, ROI and NPV on one shared example.
• The vocabulary and questions that make you sound commercial — and the three sentences that expose you.
• How NHS trusts, pharma and pre-revenue biotech differ financially: cost versus profit centres, cash-releasing savings, burn and runway, grant cycles.