By Brent Pritchard

Twenty-two years is a long time to do anything. That was my tenure in Corporate America, where as a friend says I was able to “find a niche and crawl into it.”

As a commercial real estate finance professional, I remember when Amazon started the big move to develop its last mile delivery infrastructure. Let’s just say that more than one request for financing for a fulfillment center they would occupy crossed by desk.

As a lending platform, we could like Amazon’s credit at the same time as seeking out deals with Amazon-proof tenants. Think retail centers occupied with service companies in the business of nails and the like or with outparcels where people served up McDonald’s.

Here’s an excerpt from my book Would Your Boomerang Return? What Birds, Hurdlers, and Boomerangs Can Teach Us About the Time Value of Money (2023):

Rounding out this new take on the Time Value of Money is a simple and definitive 3-Step Systematic Approach for applying the Mathematics of Finance, which has benefits as it relates to analyzing and evaluating real-world Time Value of Money situations from the classroom to the boardroom and in between.

Brent, you’re saying that finance professionals can also benefit from this content?! That’s right! Before I traded in my office in Corporate America for a classroom, I remember one day when the cat had the tongue of not only a very seasoned finance professional but also everyone else in the room. None could find the words to describe Net Present Value!

I’m not the first, nor will I be the last, to draw a comparison to the world that is arguably better post-internet and what the future of business with AI might hold. I, for one, think the result will be net positive.

What will the “finance professional” who can’t analyze or interpret NPV do for a job? (At some time in the future, somewhere there will be an old MacDonald who has a farm…and on that farm they will have a cat, AI AI Oh….)

Brent Pritchard is an author and college finance lecturer with over two decades of industry experience and cofounder of Boxholm Press, LLC, a family-owned-and-operated publishing company providing educational content, products, and services. He pioneers an innovative and approachable new way of learning and teaching the Time Value of Money as well as thought leadership in other business topics. His most recent book is Would Your Boomerang Return? You can contact him on his website here.