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Mumbai-based Entropy Innovations Private Limited (Entropy) was incorporated by three friends who hoped to revolutionize the motorcycle and scooter washing industry in India through their technological solution, an automatic bike washing machine. Starting with one city in 2014, Entropy expanded gradually and aimed to become a ₹500 million company by 2020. But as 2019 drew to an end, the company was not gaining the traction the founders had expected. Although many options were available, the choices and their implications were unclear. What was the appropriate business model for the growth phase of their firm? How should they stabilize the company in the Indian market? Should they focus on the two-wheeler washing industry, or should they diversify into the four-wheeler all-terrain vehicle (ATV) market?

Holding a massive beer festival brought the Chinese city of Qingdao and Tsingtao Beer Co. Ltd., China’s most famous beer brand, direct economic benefits and public awareness. However, through the Qingdao International Beer Festival—a natural advertising opportunity—foreign beers benefited as well. To date, Chinese beer brands held less than half of the high-end Chinese beer market. China levied no tariffs on beer imports, which increased the market competition. Were the objectives of Tsingtao Beer and the local government fully aligned with regard to the annual festival? Was the beer festival helping one more than it helped the other? Did it help Tsingtao Beer’s competitors? Should the Qingdao International Beer Festival work to recapture or emphasize some of its own cultural uniqueness?

In April 2018, the owner of Express Bike Works (EBW), an Indian start-up that provided automated motorcycle washing, among other services, was planning to expand his business to various locations in South India, such as Udupi, Chennai, and Bangalore. He needed to decide whether to expand through self-owned stores or franchise stores and wondered how to select appropriate store locations. His objective was to come up with an expansion strategy that would maximize his payoff.

Pamela Jeffery, founder and chief executive officer of The Pamela Jeffery Group and the Canadian Board Diversity Council (CBDC), had worked diligently for nine years to improve diversity at the board level. While the CBDC aimed at improving diversity in general at the board level, its key focus was to improve the representation of women on corporate boards in Canada. Jeffery and the CBDC methodically carried out plans to involve stakeholders, establish processes, and deliver progress on their goals. Yet they faced a new set of challenges in 2019: while Canadian boards now included more women overall, and most board directors felt that their boards were diverse enough, men and women were still not equally represented at the board level. Jeffery’s challenge was to determine what the next steps could be in what seemed like a long journey of transformation at the board level.

In April 2019, the chief executive officer of Dubai-based Diamond Developers, reflected on his company’s progress in developing a business model based on sustainable living. In December 2015, The Sustainable City in Dubai had welcomed its first residents. The project had become a success story, both commercially and in terms of building a vibrant community of 3,000 residents from 60 countries, who were living a lifestyle characterized by social, environmental, and economic sustainability. After this initial and significant success, the chief executive officer wondered how to replicate the concept, both locally and internationally, to grow the company and to maximize the company's contribution to sustainability and to the fight against climate change.

In mid-2018, the president and chief executive officer of Siemens Canada was examining his options in executing Vision 2020+, a growth plan developed by the company's headquarters in Germany. One of the cornerstones of the plan was digitalization, both internally, among the company's sprawling manufacturing operations, and externally, among the company's industrial customers. How could Siemens Canada, as a North American subsidiary of a large multinational enterprise, add value to the global plan? And to do so, what skills and competencies would Siemens Canada need to acquire locally?

In mid 2019, Mobiuspace, a Chinese Internet company, faced a new challenge. As a result of declining revenues from domestic mobile Internet markets, overseas markets offered new opportunities. In 2009, Snaptube, a short video aggregation and distribution platform that Mobiuspace offered as its main product, seized the opportunity to grow in emerging markets by creating localized and personalized video content. Despite the company’s initial success with its expansion strategy, Mobiuspace’s chief executive officer still needed to figure out how to achieve sustainable profitability and long term growth. In particular, he had to enhance users’ engagement and diversify the company’s sources of revenue. How would he achieve all of his objectives?

In July 2019, the owner of Basmati House Supermart (BHS), a grocery store, entered into a six-month agreement to become a partner outlet of a large online grocery retailer in India. During the first two months, BHS acquired many new customers and also increased its customers’ monthly purchase. However, the steep discounts and promotions used to attract customers to the business drove down the margins, while the customer churn rate increased. The store owner was particularly concerned about the continued use of discounts to attract new consumers, which could potentially transform his own loyal customer base into deal-seeking, less loyal, and online-promotion-driven buyers, thereby leaving BHS terminally dependent on the large online retailer to maintain its sales. The owner wondered whether he should renew his contract with the online retailer in January 2020, and if he did not, what his best course of action would be.

Established in 2014 by a group of five friends in the Czech Republic, Behavio Labs was a consumer behaviour analytics company that launched the popular product Minute. The Minute digital application accurately measured respondent views and expanded employee engagement to help companies make the right decisions when launching new products, or to improve employee working conditions. By 2018, Behavio Labs had achieved considerable success in the Czech Republic with this product, but it wanted to expand globally. The company developed built-in scalability in the fully digital Minute product for international application. To determine which markets to enter, the founders planned to evaluate 29 countries across Europe, as well as the United States. It had to develop criteria to assess the most suitable countries for market entry, identify the most attractive customer segments in these countries based on revenue potential, develop a strategy for entry, and determine the typology of potential partnerships.

Windmill Microlending, was established in 2004 by a group of community activists who saw the need to help Canadian newcomers restart their careers. The organization offered microloans to help pay the costs of reaccreditation and training. The organization’s first chief executive officer was hired in February 2017, and by September 2017, she had formulated a new vision for the organization that would address three goals: growing the number of clients and the number of loans, increasing clients’ success and their job placements, and maintaining the loan repayment rate. She also needed to address whether Windmill Microlending should expand into other cities and provinces and how to diversify the organization’s funding sources and revenue streams to generate more operating revenue and loan capital to support the required growth. She needed to present her vision and strategy at the next board meeting and ensure the board was onside.

Serge Belamant was the founder and chief executive officer of Net1 UEPS Technologies (Net1), a US$600-million company that had a contract with the South Africa government to pay social grants to the poor. The contract was controversial from the start and was under scrutiny through multiple legal challenges and three different investigations, including by the US Securities Exchange Commission and the US Department of Justice. When Belamant discovered a paper describing a conspiracy theory alleging that he and Net1 were involved in a form of corruption known as state capture, he believed he could be the victim of a disinformation campaign and wondered what to do.

In early 2019, the general manager of Little Short Stop Stores, a chain of local, family-owned convenience stores in southwestern Ontario, Canada, was projecting a loss for that year. The loss was due in part to a provincial minimum wage increase to CA$14.00 that came into effect on January 1, 2018, increased from $11.60 in 2017 and $11.40 in 2016. Before this change, the store chain had been exceeding the average industry growth rate by 5 per cent for the previous five years. The general manager had to determine how to respond to mitigate the revenue loss and to ensure the company remained competitive in the future. The company was already operating efficiently and competitively, so the focus would be on increasing revenues. The company was further constrained by its revenue mix. Two-thirds of its revenue was generated by tobacco products and lottery tickets, which had prices set by regulatory bodies. The general manager was open to considering all options for future growth. However, he was constrained by the family firm’s preference to avoid long-term debt and expansion beyond its current geographic boundary.

In January 2020, the co-founder of Alpha Advantech LLP (Alpha Advantech), an agricultural and gardening products company based in Karnal, Haryana, India, had to decide whether to drive an organic growth strategy and utilize his resources to expand the company’s operations, or stick to consolidation and market penetration with the current range of products. Alpha Advantech had performed well since its inception in 2016, and the co-founder aimed to make it a ₹600 million company by 2022. However, the current team size and scale limitations of the company were potential impediments to achieving this target. The co-founder could not decide whether to let Alpha Advantech stay niche in the business or to expand it both geographically and in terms of its range of offerings. He realized that if he were to choose expansion over consolidation, he would need to devise a strategic plan for Alpha Advantech’s growth, assess the technical and digital capabilities that his company would require, and anticipate the scalability issues it was likely to face.

Shubam Goldiee Masale Private Limited was a family business established by two childhood friends in 1980 in Kanpur, northern India. In 2004, second-generation family members began joining the business. With the arrival of the new generation, the company started renewing its business operations. The two founders divided specific management roles and responsibilities of key departments among second-generation family members, although control of the company’s overall operations remained with the founders. By January 2019, the company had grown steadily to employ over 4,000 people and become associated with more than 1,500 distributors, selling its products across various locations across India. The management team, which consisted of all family members, wanted to make the company a leading brand in the Indian spice market by taking advantage of new growth opportunities. However, the founders wondered if the company should consolidate its position in the existing products and markets, or venture into uncharted territories.

Pacari was the flagship brand of SKS Farms, a small agricultural products company in Ecuador that specialized in high quality chocolate. Carla Barbotó and Santiago Peralta were the co proprietors of this family owned and operated company, which was originally created in order to promote Ecuadorean fine aroma chocolate, while also promoting social development, and preserving biodiversity. In 2018, Carla Barbotó read through the report from her company’s recent successful bid to become a certified ‘B’ (benefits) company. While the company had easily surpassed the minimum score for certification, the report contained suggestions that were new, and in a few cases somewhat unexpected. Now Barbotó wondered how to use the thorough and very detailed feedback to prioritize initiatives in order to ensure Pacari brought even greater benefits to its many stakeholders.

In April 2016, the board of directors at an Indian housing finance company, PNB Housing Finance Limited (PNB), was considering the company’s recent organizational transformation and looking ahead to a planned initial public offering. The case examines how business process re-engineering helped PNB grow its small loan portfolio and shed its image as a minor player with little commitment to customer service to become a profitable, solid solution provider. A discussion of specific strategies and interventions that occurred at PNB explain the organizational transformation at the structural, technical, and behavioural levels. The question for the board now is whether the transformation has sufficiently matured the company and prepared it for the next step in its growth—the IPO.

In early January 2018, the chief executive officer and co-founder of Tamul Plates Marketing Private Limited had just confirmed the next round of much-needed funding. Having accomplished this goal, he was reassured that funding was taken care of until 2020. The funds would drive a long-awaited expansion and take the company to its next phase of growth. Although he had worked hard to refine the company’s business model over the previous six to seven years, the co-founder was still working on fine tuning the company’s distribution strategy. One challenge was how to expand distribution channels across India. Historically, more than 70 per cent of sales came from wholesalers. However, with increasing attention on building the brand, the co-founder worried that this approach might not work in the future.

On June 30, 2018, the founders of Mkhiwa Trust, Johannesburg, South Africa, considered their dilemma of deepening their impact in South Africa, using education as a key vehicle to bring about systemic change. The case highlights the evolution of their mutual support throughout their careers. The tragic death of their young son had far-reaching implications for the couple and their business interests, their career aspirations and the focus of many of their future business and philanthropic initiatives. It also defined a number of choices taken by the couple since then. The story of these individual leaders, who support each other in their businesses, illustrates the power of a couple as servant leaders.

In June 2018, Lena Koke, the co-founder of Axess Law Professional Corporation, a legal services enterprise in Toronto, Ontario, was examining how to take the firm to the next level of growth. Koke had to determine what legal products and services the firm could expand and diversify into, how the firm should leverage information technology to reinforce its low-cost positioning, and how the firm should finance growth. The co-founder must evaluate the road map that she chose, and develop a long-term strategic plan for the firm.

On October 15, 2019, the Doc32 office was celebrating its achievement of month-end revenue goals. Doc32 was an online management and marketing platform for dental health care based in Pune, Maharashtra, India. The company was dedicated to helping its partner dentists find clients and reduce operational costs. The Doc32 platform provided optimized solutions, innovative marketing techniques, and dentistry supplies at a discounted rate. The Doc32 founders were pleased with the online platform’s success to date and saw it as validation of their chosen business model. However, they were wondering how to replicate that success across the entire country. What growth strategies could the new venture adopt to achieve its goals for growth, diversification, product development, market penetration, and market development?