The Three Sisters and Their Regrowth

Aimee Schulhauser, a serial entrepreneur in Regina, Saskatchewan, was contemplating how best to regrow her original trio of culinary businesses to their pre-COVID profitability levels. Her early successful entrepreneurial business decisions were led by a combination of gut instinct, watching trends, and seizing opportunities, but her more recent start-ups in 2018 and 2020 were more calculated business decisions that ultimately failed. In June 2023, the original trio of “sister businesses,” as she referred to them, were improving in both sales and profitability, but it had not been easy. Customers’ buying behaviours had changed significantly, and with six months before the federal government’s Canada Emergency Business Account loan was due to be paid, Schulhauser’s focus had shifted from growing through new businesses to how best to regrow the core businesses.

This case was written for an introductory course in entrepreneurship to illustrate how entrepreneurs make decisions to start and grow new ventures. It could be used in an undergraduate or graduate initial entrepreneurship course. Given the scarcity of cases on women entrepreneurs, this case fills that gap and highlights entrepreneurial motivations and measures of success. It is best placed after students have been introduced to entrepreneurial thinking and decision-making models, as it aims to illustrate how decision-making logics of successful entrepreneurs are a combination of both causal and effectual approaches. <br><br>By working through the case and assignment questions, students will have the opportunity to do the following:<ul><li>Understand entrepreneurial motivations and measures of success for women entrepreneurs.</li><li>Identify and assess different decision-making logics—specifically, the causal and effectuation models of entrepreneurial action.</li><li>Identify and evaluate recommended strategies of growth for entrepreneurial businesses.</li></ul>

• effectuation decision making
• causal decision making
• entrepreneurship
• corporate strategy
• entrepreneurial motivation