My Journey…

… My first case competition is done. It has been a long past 24 hours. We were given a case at 8:00 AM, the case dealt with a small family company in the beer brewing business, they are faced with a shrinking market for Lager in which they are an established regional player and a growing market for light beer in which they have no presence. Now should they go forward with launching the light beer and take the risk of hurting their core brand of Lager in pursuit of higher profits in a growing market segment or stay put and leverage there core brand attributes to increase the slice of pie in a shrinking Lager market.

… There is no right answer, just alternatives that need to be supported with cogent data and arguments.

So we begin, we need to turn in the case on 8:30 AM the next day.

Day 1

8:30 AM to 10:00 AM : Me and my team mates read the case. Highlighters in full swing.

10:00 AM to 12:00 AM : A hotch potch of ideas are thrown around, no patterns emerge, somehow agree on the direction to take in the case… Lunch time…

1:00 PM to 5:00 PM : The brainstorming exercise into the chosen approach begins and quickly devolves, individual differences surface, the financial calculations go haywire and hypothesis that sounded well founded earlier, now under scrutiny of break-even, NPV and EMV analysis seem shaky. It is 5 PM and we are no way near the place where we aught to be.

5:00PM to 7:00 PM: After a cup of coffee and coke we get back to work, two people begin work on the powerpoint slides, one is digging into research papers that could support our hypothesis and I begin work on the financial & sales projections… pie charts, trend lines… the whole package…

7:00PM to 8:30 PM: We begin putting the whole presentation together, the slides, charts and embed the excel sheets showing the forecasts and financials. Things are looking good, then just then we realize that the forecasts are not in line with one of our hypothesis. We work on it, augment the hypothesis and recast the forecast and it just about fits… We call it a day

Day 2

7:30 AM – 8:30 AM: We burn the powerpoint presentation onto the CD and turn it in.

9:00 AM – 9:30 AM: Our case presentations. It goes well, we rush a bit but we feel that we answered the questions well, one of my teammate has a concern that we did not spend much time in the presentation on the financial and forecast number projection and the process used to arrive at them and it might hurt us…. His concern is overshadowed by a self confident feeling of the team… However his concern turns out to be prophetic.

12:45 PM – 1:30 PM : Results are declared, we do not win.

1:45 PM – 2:00 PM : Feedback session for the presentation – I am usually very skeptical about the feedback session, but this was very informative and extremely beneficial. These 15 minutes were the best part of the past 36 hours.

We lost, but it was great fun! I wanted to write more in this post about what we did wrong and what we did well, the feedback we got… but i am tired. The 14 hrs of intense mental workout are making we feel a bit tired and sleepy. I will write about it, some later day.