Entrepreneurial Strategy: Acquisition, Commercialization, and Growth

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Strong entrepreneurial leaders do two things well: they recognize value, and they realize it. The first is knowing which opportunity is genuinely worth pursuing. The second is turning that opportunity into a business that lasts, one that holds its value as it grows and changes hands. These skills are usually taught separately and mastered separately, and the leaders who command both are rare. They are also the ones who build companies that outlive the deals that created them.

This course develops both. It brings together the transaction discipline of entrepreneurship through acquisition; the art of finding and buying a business worth owning; and the strategic discipline of commercialization and growth, the work of turning what you own into a venture that keeps creating value. You leave with a rarer and more durable kind of judgment: knowing not only how to win the deal, but how to build something that endures long after it closes.

This course builds the judgment to evaluate, acquire, and grow a business with discipline. By the end, you will be able to:

• Evaluate whether an opportunity deserves deeper pursuit, separating evidence-based prospects from attractive narratives
• Judge where a business’s value comes from and whether it is defensible, monetizable, and transferable to a new owner
• Prepare for seller conversations in ways that build trust and surface what you most need to learn
• Structure offers, work through diligence, and interpret lender and investor requirements in light of the real quality of the business
• Decide when new information calls for clarifying, restructuring, repricing, slowing down, partnering, or walking away
• Connect business model, monetization, and ecosystem choices to long-term value capture
• Lead after the close, making sound decisions about growth, organization, scaling, and exit
• Produce an implementable ETA strategy or technology commercialization strategy you can put to work right away

Faculty

Robert Chalfin, CPA, JD
CEO of The Chalfin Group Inc.; Lecturer in Management, The Wharton School

David Hsu, PhD
Director of the Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology; Jeffrey A. Keswin Professor; Richard A. Sapp Professor, The Wharton School