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Payton McGriff, founder of the nonprofit S H E (Style Her Empowered) must decide on a plan to meet S H E's goal of sponsoring one million girls in primary schools in sub-Saharan Africa by 2030. The COVID pandemic has created a renewed sense of urgency for McGriff and her board. The specific decision McGriff must make is whether to continue to produce the innovative Dress that Grows in-house combined with the production and sale of fair-trade goods to fund operations or to outsource the production of school uniforms, relying on fundraising to generate the funds needed. Key to this decision is the fit with the multi-mission of S H E: 1. to educate girls, 2. to employ women, and 3. to practice environmental sustainability.

Tom White, President of Wildcat Solutions (WS), a student run business and for-credit experiential learning class at the Inland Empire University must decide if they should keep secret shops, a challenging and unpopular product among the student associates that is nevertheless an important source of revenue for the class. To make this decision, White must wrestle with the multiple missions that WS has adopted. The case can be used in a later undergraduate Business or Marketing Strategy class when discussing corporate missions or when evaluating dual/multi mission organizations and social enterprises because the case hinges on evaluating the organization mission in the context of WS revenues sources. WS is a dual/multi mission organization, which are popular with students today, and the case highlights the natural tension or contradiction such organizations have within their mission statements.

In the fall of 2016, the Pleasant Ridge Habitat for Humanity Second Chance Home Supply (SCHS) store added an assistant manager in order to expand the hours the store was open and increase the store's presence on social media. The store, which sold donated building materials and some household items, was operated to generate funds for the organization's core mission of building homes for those in need in the local area. The case is set in July of 2017. The organization's executive director and the store's manager and assistant manager have reviewed the store's financial performance and discovered that both the store's sales and contribution to the organization have declined over the past year despite being open significantly longer hours. Students are placed in the shoes of the store's managers and must wrestle with why sales and contribution have declined and what they should do in response.

Student spreadsheet for case NA0554

This case focuses on what an entrepreneur who has developed and marketed a soccer board game (KickShot), should do next. The case lays out the approach of the entrepreneur, who at age 59 had considerable previous experience with tech startups, and highlights some of the challenges faced. The focal point of the case is for students to recommend future courses of actions. Specifically, should the entrepreneur continue to market the game in hopes of increasing sales and profitability or should he accept one of the two buyout offers in front of him? Students will need to link these recommended actions to the entrepreneurs' goals and objectives, including his personality. Within this context, the case highlights the need for an entrepreneur to have an exit, or harvest strategy from the very start. Given that the entrepreneur has realized his initial exit strategy by having before him two buyout offers, the case allows students to evaluate two distinct exit strategies that in many ways mirror those common for any startup, a pure cash buyout versus an offer with a smaller amount up front but a royalty on future sales. Finally, the case provides an opportunity for students to wrestle with the margin structure of online retailing via Amazon.com.

This case focuses on how Johan Pienaar, Valent Biosciences Corporation (VBC) Global Business Manager for Plant Growth Regulators, should manage growth of one of the company's most successful products - ReTain. When applied to apples, ReTain reduces fruit drop, provides more consistent premium fruit, and aids in harvest and storage management. Large, sophisticated orchards realized a five to twenty-fold return on their use of ReTain, and as a result ReTain had a market share of roughly 65% of the Total Available Market in the U.S. apple industry. Further, ReTain could be applied to other fruit crops to aid growers. Johan's challenge was how to prioritize the various opportunities to grow revenues from the ReTain technology based on its application to other fruit where ReTain was known to be effective (e.g., peaches, pineapples, almonds) and in international markets (e.g., China, Europe). At the same time, he sought to defend ReTain from several threats (e.g., a much cheaper legacy technology, disagreements about its classification as organic) to its strong market position in the U.S. apple industry. Johan must also decide whether to invest some of these limited resources into R&D in an effort to establish whether ReTain could be effective on a heretofore untested crop.