I had the opportunity to spend some great time with one of our manufacturing clients at a General Manager Business Acumen training program in Shanghai last week. The purpose of the program was to develop their strategic leadership and business acumen skills further so that they could address another challenging year in 2025.

In our program, we utilize a highly customized business simulation to present the participants with the chance to learn by doing and take their key learnings right back to the job in terms of “bridge-backs.” One of the most important concepts we focused on was free cash flow.

I am pleased to share some of the learnings and takeaways in the blog as a way of sharing with our Advantexe community. Here are five key reasons why free cash flow is going to matter a lot more in 2025:

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Last weekend my wife asked me to fix something wrong with the plumbing. Between you and me, probably not the best idea. I can manage a wrench… a little bit, but before you know it, I had water spraying everywhere, and I was Googling "how to undo ...." It’s safe to say, by the end, we’d called a professional and were dealing with way more costs (and frustration) than if we’d just done that in the first place.

Now, let’s think about your business. Every day, businesses around the world are asking employees at all levels to navigate their roles without an understanding of how to drive the business. That’s why Business Acumen Training should be a priority for any organization that is focused on growth and long-term success.

In our experience working with over 250 global companies here are five critical reasons why investing in Business Acumen Training should be a priority:

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We just finished a Business Acumen workshop for one of our heavy manufacturing clients. During the 3^rd round of their customized business simulation, we had prepared a “wobbler” for the purpose of having the senior leaders feel and discuss the impact of a significant interest rate cut after a full year of near recession cooling down. We wanted the conversation and the actions to focus on “saving” the business year in terms of the guidance the simulated teams had provided to their simulated shareholders and board of directors.

After the round, we processed what happened and had a nice 45-minute “bridge-back” discussion to plan actions to take the key learnings back to the real world.

I took a lot of notes and am pleased to share some of the interesting findings and insights.

Here are five thoughts on, “Can cutting interest rates significantly impact Q3 and Q4 performance?”:

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Advantexe delivers many business acumen training programs for our clients in the automobile industry including clients who manufacture cars, clients who manufacture tires, and clients who supply the paint to new and refurbished cars.

Overall, the automotive industry has been volatile as it is still recovering from the pandemic and all the issues surrounding it. One of the more interesting aspects of where the market is right now is the deliberate and intentional choice of manufacturers to scale back on the production and forecasts for electronic vehicles.

For the last decade automakers such as Tesla, General Motors, Ford, and Toyota have been spending billions of dollars in the race to develop electric vehicles and build factories to produce them, with expectations that consumers would flock to these cars.

However, during the past 12 months, the growth rate of electric vehicle sales has slowed sharply as some car buyers have hesitated at the high prices of electric cars and trucks and the hassles of charging them, especially on long trips.

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I had the pleasure of facilitating a great Business Leadership workshop for an organization adapting to a new strategy after a major merger of two equally sized enterprises. The workshop focuses on lifting up and developing business acumen and business leadership skills.

We spent some really good time introducing and discussing strategic frameworks and how to choose the right value proposition to offer customers.

After that discussion, we turned our attention to the execution of the strategy. As I have shared for many years, at Advantexe we define business leadership as the execution of your strategy through people. In discussing and learning about execution, one of the best ways to explore what works is to discuss and understand what doesn’t work. As part of an exercise, I asked participants working in teams of 5 (we had teams) to discuss and list out their top reasons why they feel strategy execution doesn’t work in their organization.

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