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Week 1 · Module overview

Week 1 — The Idea and Its Environment

Introduction to Business Free sample edition

Welcome to your Week 1 Start Here page.

Why this matters

Whether you drive for a ride-share app, volunteer at a food bank, or dream of opening a shop of your own, this week shows who has a stake in an organization and which changes around it could help or hurt.

In plain language

This week is about what a business is and about the world around it. A business (any organization that sells goods or services and aims to take in more money than it spends) keeps track of two sides: revenue (the money coming in) and expenses (the money going out). The people who care how a business does are its stakeholders (everyone who can affect it or is affected by it), and there are far more of them than its owners. You will also learn to scan the forces outside a business that it cannot control. Then you will build a SWOT (a grid that sorts what helps and hurts a business, inside it and outside it) for the coffee cart this course follows all term.

  • This week: what a business is, the not-for-profit contrast, stakeholders, the factors of production, a PESTEL scan, and the coffee cart's first SWOT.
  • How they connect: this is the foundation for every later week.
  • Where we're going next: Week 2, The Market It Sells Into: Economics for Business.

Focus

What is a business, who has a stake in it, and what is going on around it that it cannot control?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

  • [ ] tell revenue from profit
  • [ ] map a business's stakeholders
  • [ ] scan the outside world with PESTEL
  • [ ] build a SWOT, inside versus outside

To-do

Plan your week

  1. Read Chapter 1 (about 35 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
  2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
  3. Do the Business Case Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
  4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: sort a fact about a business as a strength, weakness, opportunity, or threat, and say why it sits inside or outside.

You've got this

Take it in order, and ask your instructor if a step snags.

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