The Ledger Building: how business actually works, in forty six rooms.
You have been left a company you do not understand, inside a building that will not let you out. Each room teaches one part of how a business works, then locks the door until you prove you have it. Learn the floor, pick the lock, take the fragment. Every fragment is a piece of the master key, and the master key opens the boardroom.
Free, no registration, nothing installed. Your progress is kept in your own browser and nothing is sent anywhere.
Each floor takes one part of a business end to end. Rooms unlock in order, so the ground floor is open and the rest of the building is sealed until you have earned it.
Who owns the thing and who pays when it goes wrong. The six legal forms and what each one costs you. Crossing a border. Six species of start-up and the plan that is supposed to describe them. Buying companies and why most of it disappoints. Boards, hierarchies and stakeholders. Culture as what actually gets rewarded. Five organisational shapes. Hiring, motivating and judging people. Leadership against situation. Projects and negotiation.
Double entry and the conventions that decide the numbers. Two sets of accounts, both honest. The three statements and what each one refuses to tell you. Depreciation. Why profitable companies run out of money. Budgets flexed before they are judged. Fixed and variable cost, break-even, and six ways to set a price. The four families of ratio. What a published target does to the people it measures. How money actually leaves a business. Debt against equity, and what a share is a claim on.
The four decisions of the mix and why they cannot be set separately. What a name is worth. How to find out what people want, and how asking badly guarantees a confident wrong answer. Cutting a market. Place: how the product physically reaches the buyer and what every intermediary takes. Paid, owned and earned attention. Being found. The funnel and where it leaks. Buying below the level of argument. Attribution, and how each model lies. What a customer is worth. What scale does and does not buy you. One number, one owner, one definition.
Four ways to make something and the point where economies of scale reverse. Research against development, and how to stop anyone copying the part that works. Invention against innovation. Waste as anything the customer would not pay for. The four costs of quality. The bottleneck that decides everything. The supply chain, the value chain, and make against buy. The chain running backwards. Responsibility priced as a cost curve rather than printed as a poster.
One company in trouble, diagnosed using all four floors at once. It opens only when every fragment is in.
Four stages, in the same order every time.
Clear all forty six and the building issues a certificate you can print, recording what you scored floor by floor.