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Excel spreadsheet for students.

The semester-long small business management class at Southern New Hampshire University had incorporated into the course a food truck under the brand name “Munchiez” as a catalyst for students to integrate and apply the concepts they learned about in various business classes. As such, Munchiez was a vital teaching tool at the school. However, with an 80 per cent turnover rate each semester, knowledge transfer and financial stability quickly became critical issues for the Munchiez team to assess. As of December 2016, Munchiez was operating at a deficit. Some team members suggested that Munchiez may need a general manager. In order to continue receiving financial support from the university, Munchiez’s management had to answer some difficult questions: How should Munchiez increase the transfer of knowledge from semester to semester? What strategies should be used in order to break even? Would the business benefit from a general manager? If so, how could the team find the right person for this position?

In late 2016, the executive director of Free Geek Toronto faced a challenge. Free Geek Toronto was a social enterprise based in Toronto, Ontario. It focused on recycling electronics waste and aimed to use its business profits to expand its scope of operations and deliver on its social mission of both reducing electronics waste going to landfill and employing at-risk and marginalized individuals. As a result, the executive director purposely hired individuals who had severe physical or mental disabilities, or both, and who had recently received, or were currently receiving, disability benefits, had poor health, or experienced general struggles with regular employment. The executive director’s challenges included juggling the financial and social goals of running a work integration social enterprise. In view of the constraints he faced, the executive director began considering whether to call on the assistance of volunteers—people who, despite their well-meaning intentions, might unwittingly disrupt the operation of the enterprise. Should he move forward with recruiting volunteers? If so, how could he ensure that doing so would not adversely affect the organization’s current culture or demoralize the current employees?

BY-HEALTH Co., Ltd. (BY-HEALTH), a Chinese dietary supplement company founded in 1995, had a first-mover advantage as a contemporary health supplement provider in Mainland China. It had successfully utilized this advantage to conquer a significant portion of the market. However, by early 2017, maintaining this leadership position in the market had become increasingly difficult, largely due to deteriorating public perception of consumables originating in China. BY-HEALTH had sought to differentiate itself by actively making its sourcing and production processes fully transparent to stakeholders, most notably by opening a transparent factory in Guangdong Province.<br><br>While BY-HEALTH’s transparent factory and corporate social responsibility activities developed consumer trust and positively contributed to the environment within which the company operated, they were also prohibitively expensive to maintain. It was also difficult to determine how they affected the company’s bottom line. As he prepared for a company shareholders’ meeting in January 2017, the company’s chief operating officer was faced with difficult questions. What programs should the company continue to invest in for the future? Should some of these initiatives have an end date? If they were ended, what effect would this have on the community? How could he communicate the value of the transparent factory to consumers and shareholders?

In late 2014, Dropbox, the San Francisco-based pioneering cloud-based file storage service, was at an important stage of its growth. Its user base had expanded into hundreds of millions of users globally, and the company was expanding its service offerings to organizations. At the heart of this expansion was the ever-increasing acquisition of customers in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. As Dropbox targeted larger customers, it needed to carefully allocate its limited resources and continually evaluate the appropriate sales approach because of the highly competitive nature of the cloud storage market. The head of the Strategic Finance team needed to recommend how Dropbox could most effectively invest its limited resources. Should it invest in the self-serve, inbound approach, or opt for the more proactive and costlier outbound approach?

Excel spreadsheet for instructors.

In early 2017, the directors at Protospace, a makerspace in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, faced some challenges. The nine-year-old member-run organization operated as a “do-ocracy,” with a minimum of official oversight. However, the directors and some of the membership wondered whether Protospace could and should scale its growth by recruiting and accepting new members. Would a larger membership help or hinder the membership-driven makerspace? Should the organization hire a staff member so that members would have more time to work on their projects? What would be the implications of a having larger membership and a paid staff member?

In 2016, Pepperfry.com (Pepperfry) was India’s leading online retailer of furniture and home products. As a pioneer in the online furniture and furnishings space, Pepperfry had a first-mover advantage that led to the achievement of significant milestones within a short period. Online marketing, however, involved distinct challenges compared with traditional marketing practices. Improving customer experience at the different stages of a consumer’s purchase could be the foundational strategy to resolve these challenges. How could Pepperfry’s service design further enhance the customer experience and achieve a competitive advantage?

In January 2016, two entrepreneurial brothers attended an academic conference on small business and entrepreneurship to sell their product, the Online Venture Challenge, a web-based software-as-a-service retail simulation system. The brothers also hoped to demonstrate their second product idea, Launchboard, an interactive product that enabled users to make development plans and record their progress. Both products were intended as tools for entrepreneurship educators. The brothers did not have much success selling their first product during the conference, but two professors wanted to use Launchboard that semester. The brothers needed to decide how to position their product line. Should the Online Venture Challenge be promoted as one primary product that offered multiple complementary features? Or should their two products be positioned as two separate but complementary products? Or was it better to have two stand-alone products and two corresponding businesses? The brothers needed to better understand their own business ideas to determine the approach they should take. Fittingly, Launchboard, the new tool they had created, might actually help them to do just that.

Supplement for product 9B17M050.

In 2015, the Indian retail industry contributed around 10 per cent to India’s gross domestic product, and online retail had a growth rate of 85 per cent. In the same year, food and grocery made up 60 per cent of the Indian retail market, and the online grocery segment was estimated at US$600,000. To capture its share of this market, Amazon India launched its own online grocery arm, KiranaNow, with a marketplace model. As it set out to carve out a space for itself in the online grocery market, KiranaNow faced challenges related to merchandising, managing human resources, customer perceptions, and technology hurdles, including the question of whether its chosen business model was sustainable. The company needed to overcome these challenges to find success in the Indian online grocery market.

In May 2015, the new director at Schneider Electric’s plant in Rudrapur, India, faced a challenging situation. The company had an ongoing struggle with quality issues and consistently missed its production targets. From a human relations perspective, employee engagement and morale were low and the shop-floor workers had very little respect for the plant’s management team. The new director quickly launched a program of human resource initiatives aimed to turn the plant around, but in the midst of his efforts, a sister plant submitted a high-volume order that seemed well beyond Rudrapur’s production capabilities. Against the advice of his superiors, and in the face of some resistance from his staff at the plant, the plant director accepted the order and used an adaptive leadership approach to implement several plant-level changes in the production processes at Rudrapur. While the team had made a lot of progress in improving the overall function of the Rudrapur plant, there was still a long way to go and a huge production hurdle to be crossed. Were the director’s interventions likely to succeed? Should he adopt a different approach to meet the challenges?

Impex, a division of the South Indian firm KCM Appliances, dealt with kitchen, household, and home entertainment appliances. KCM’s managing director needed to decide on a year-end sales promotion for Impex. One option was direct-response advertising in the Times of India newspaper, which could potentially help Impex expand its reach in India. This option was in contrast to the previous year’s promotion, which involved collaboration with distributors and retailers in the Kerala region of South India. Deciding between the two options required a quantitative analysis to estimate the incremental volume and sales revenue gained from the previous year’s promotion. Those gains could then be compared with the break-even volumes required to cover the costs of the promotion with the Times of India. Impex also needed to consider a qualitative analysis by examining the tensions created by the two options, including channel relations versus brand awareness, an existing market focus versus a future market focus, and product management versus sales management. Should Impex repeat the previous year’s tried-and-tested promotion, or pursue the Times of India offer, whereby it could sidestep its local channel partners and directly sell to consumers?

Instructor spreadsheet for product 8B17A010.

Student spreadsheet for product 9B17A010. The easy template is to be used when students are not very proficient in writing equations in Excel or when students already know the equations and more time is to be dedicated for discussion of qualitative factors.

Student spreadsheet for product 9B17A010. The hard template is to be used when students are comfortable with Excel and the instructor wants the students to understand how to arrive at the numbers of break-even/profitability analysis and to gain knowledge about the associated equations.

Black Friday, the day after American Thanksgiving, marked the official start of the Christmas shopping season in the United States. It was a day that generally brought smiles to the executives of retailing giant Nordstrom, Inc. (Nordstrom). However, on November 28, 2014, Nordstrom had to deal with the tragic loss of a seasonal worker at a Nordstrom store in downtown Chicago. She had been killed in a workplace violence incident involving her former boyfriend. The event was a reminder of an earlier incident involving an Indianapolis-based employee who was terminated in November 2013. Even though Nordstrom had been a strong advocate for workplace safety, the retailer had endured public scrutiny after terminating the employee, who was victimized by her ex-boyfriend. These two workplace violence incidents made it necessary for Nordstrom’s management to determine how best to protect all Nordstrom stakeholders in the future.

Audio Advice was a brick-and-mortar audio specialty retailer with two stores in North Carolina. Traditionally, audiophile components were only sold through specialty stores. However, this practice was shifting, with a growing portion of sales occurring online. Audio Advice wanted to capture a portion of this growing channel, so started online as an Amazon Marketplace seller. Though this channel resulted in quick revenue growth without a great deal of initial investment, it was not suitable long term. Audio Advice’s management had a bigger vision. In planning their transition to their own e-commerce site, Audio Advice needed to consider branding: should they extend their existing brand, use a sub-brand, or develop a new one? How would each option affect in-store sales, Audio Advice’s reputation, and the willingness of audiophile brands to allow online sales of their products?

In late 2015, Apigee, a fast-growing technology firm, faced competitive pressures. It needed to scale up rapidly, which included hiring additional staff. At the regional office in India, some members of the senior leadership team wondered whether the company would need to modify its human resources practices. The firm had been operating in a unique organizational culture that encouraged employees’ openness and freedom, in keeping with its core values of passion, a bias for action, and respect. How could Apigee integrate its unique culture with the organization’s growth plans? The senior leadership team needed to decide how Apigee could retain its personalized approach, culture of freedom, and high levels of employee empowerment, as the company expanded both in size and scope.

In 2016, India witnessed an intense war for talent acquisition in consulting when Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India LLP (Deloitte) poached 20 partners and their teams—around 300 people in total—from KPMG India (KPMG). Deloitte offered a higher compensation to attract KPMG executives and lured partners with a salary jump in proportion to the number of team members they could bring from KPMG. The rivalry between the firms was fuelled by their desire to challenge Ernst & Young Global Limited, the market leader, which had 125 partners in its advisory vertical. This was the biggest poaching attempt in the industry since 2011 and the third time in the span of a year that KPMG partners had quit to join rival companies. For KPMG, it was a big blow, as the company lost many partners from the vertical that was leading its growth globally. KPMG management was now confronted with the challenge of defending against any such future poaching attempts by its competitors and retaining existing employees. The firm needed to engage its existing employees and boost their motivation to avoid further damage.