About This Course
The Entrepreneur Lab forms students into wise, adaptive, and competent leaders who can bring renewal to any context. This term focuses on Business Model Design & Financial Strategy — examining how ventures create, deliver, and sustain value, and what it means to make financial decisions in service of mission, people, and the common good.
You will leave this term with a complete Business Model Canvas, a financial model, a forward-looking pro forma, and a body of analytical and reflective writing — all applied to a venture, project, or portfolio context that is genuinely yours. Along the way you will engage field-defining texts, real company cases, practitioner conversations, and a coaching structure designed to help you think more clearly and build more honestly.
This course meets in a rhythm of Sprints, Workshops, Group Coaching, and 1x1 Coaching sessions across sixteen weeks. Each session type asks something different of you, and together they create an experience that is more intensive and more integrated than a traditional classroom course.
Course Components
View AllHow to Engage with this course
This course works best when you treat it as one integrated experience rather than two separate classes. The reading and reflection you do in Principles should inform what you bring to the Sprint table. The model you're building in Practice should generate the questions you bring to Group Coaching. The 1x1 coaching sessions are for your hardest problems — the places where your model creates pressure on itself, where your numbers reveal something you didn't expect, or where your values and your strategy aren't yet aligned.
Come to every session with your current thinking in hand — a draft, a question, a tension you're working through. The artifacts in this course are living documents. Expect to revise them. Expect the revision to be the point.
Use this course site to access reading materials, find assignment prompts, submit your work, and track where you are in the semester. The chapters are organized by thematic unit — move through them in sequence alongside the semester schedule posted in the Start Here chapter.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Explain and apply core frameworks of business model design and financial strategy, including the Business Model Canvas, Business Model Navigator, and foundational financial modeling tools
- Analyze business models and financial decisions through ethical, social, and formational lenses — evaluating who benefits, who bears cost, and what values are embedded in the design
- Interpret how mission, values, and vocation shape entrepreneurial choices around revenue, funding, growth, and sustainability
- Design and articulate a coherent, iterated business model applied to a specific venture context and audience
- Develop and defend financial models and projections with named assumptions, honest uncertainty, and narrative commentary
- Evaluate entrepreneurial tradeoffs and construct a principled position on questions of profitability, generosity, risk, and long-term impact
- Demonstrate adaptive leadership through sustained experimentation, iteration, and reflection across the full arc of the semester
Your Instructor
Jonathon Murillo
Director of PSR Collective