Business Fundamentals

Business Fundamentals is a practical introduction to how businesses actually work — not how to start one, but how to understand one. This course is for anyone who wants real business literacy: employees, job seekers, students, community leaders, or anyone who deals with businesses and wants to understand the language and logic behind them.

You will learn what a business is and why it exists, how the core functions of a business (operations, marketing, finance, and people) fit together, how money actually moves through a business, and how businesses compete for and keep customers. By the end, you will be able to read a simple business model and explain, in plain language, how a real business makes money and where its risks are.

This course is intentionally distinct from Business & Entrepreneurship Fundamentals, which focuses on the practical steps of starting and running your own small business. Business Fundamentals instead builds the underlying concepts and vocabulary that apply whether you plan to start a business, work inside one, or simply want to understand the businesses around you.