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Maha Research Labs Private Limited was a growing pharmaceutical company. It ended 2016 with sales worth ₹508.4 million at 31.2 per cent growth over the previous year. The company’s ambitious goal was to achieve 38 per cent growth and a net revenue of ₹700 million in 2017. In May 2017, on receiving a call from a friend in Turkey suggesting he explore the Turkish pharmaceutical market, the managing director of the company was considering doing so. However, he had some doubts, and wondered what the best way to enter the market in Turkey would be. Was his product range suitable for the Turkish market? What were the possible risks?

In 2015, the owner and the founder of a restaurant business in Dubai was concerned about the company's future expansion and growth. Although it was doing well in terms of profitability, a financial forecast was required for the following year, particularly in light of tough competition in the restaurant business in Dubai.

Two life-long friends, one a doctor and one a business professional, joined forces to set up Eye-Q Super Specialty Hospitals in 2007. Driven by their shared goal of bringing superior quality eye care to places where such services were desperately needed, the partners chose to operate in the small towns and cities across India. Both men believed in a vision that combined a socially driven business model with a commercially viable enterprise, and they had experienced great success with this model during their first seven years of operation. In January 2014, as they charted out Eye-Q Super Speciality Hospitals’ plans for growth, the partners decided to expand the organization’s reach from 30 to 125 hospitals over the upcoming five years. Was this growth expectation realistic? What strategy would best suit this objective?

By 2017, Beijing Testin Information Technology Co., Ltd. (Testin), had forged partnerships with multiple large multinational companies (e.g., Microsoft, IBM, ARM, Intel). Since it was founded in 2011, Testin had served over 800,000 application developers by conducting more than 150 million quality and security tests on over 2.5 million mobile applications. It had received several rounds of financing totaling over $80 million. Many Chinese Internet companies had tried to acquire Testin, and a well-known MNC asked Testin to sign an exclusive service contract. Wang and his partners resisted such offers and were determined that Testin should <br> maintain its neutrality. But as a five-year old enterprise, Testin’s big concern was how it could “stay hungry and stay foolish.”

On the evening of September 30, 2016, the founder and chief executive officer of Lagom Kitchen + Brewery (Lagom) surveyed his newly opened microbrewery and restaurant with pride. He had put a great deal of hard work, time, and money into this venture; in the past two years, Lagom had required an investment of US$1 million. Yet the business’s Gurgaon location, within India’s Delhi National Capital Region, had failed to deliver the footfall that the founder had expected. Lagom was at the centre of an information technology corporate park where more than 10,000 employees worked, and was surrounded by many business parks and malls. However, fewer companies had moved into these spaces than anticipated, which was affecting Lagom’s sales. Should the founder alter Lagom’s product offerings or increase the price of the menu items? Should he increase the focus on corporate customers by undertaking exclusive tie-ups, or should he increase Lagom’s social marketing efforts to attract customers from nearby condominiums? Lagom’s founder had only two weeks to act before the restaurant’s financial situation became critical.

In 2016, Ambuja Cements Limited (Ambuja Cement) was one of the largest cement companies in India. Company operations required the use of water for cooling, dust suppression, and domestic needs, but the use of water stressed the water resources at some of the company’s locations. Ambuja Cement thus identified the availability of water as a risk area for the organization and made water conservation a key element of their sustainability agenda. By virtue of its sustainability initiatives, Ambuja Cement became one of the first cement companies in the world to be certified as water positive. The company wanted to account for both the social and economic value its water conservation efforts generated. However, valuing water was a complex task involving many considerations, such as water sources and uses, the social value of water, water scarcity, and exchange rates.

Club Sportif MAA (the MAA) was an iconic fitness club and athletic institution in Montreal and the oldest fitness facility in Canada. In early 2017, the club’s president and general manager faced a changing market and pressure to ensure that the club evolved and remained competitive. Consumer and fitness trends had increasingly fragmented the market in this area, and the MAA membership declined since 2016. The MAA, which traditionally served a fairly exclusive clientele, needed to examine its fitness, health, and social offerings to determine how to meet the evolving needs of a wider and increasingly diverse customer base without sacrificing the character of the brand. The president needed to decide how to preserve the MAA’s upmarket image while expanding its appeal. He needed to determine which market segments to target and how best to communicate the MAA’s offerings to these specific groups.

In 2016, the owners of Styles Inc. (Styles), a bespoke tailoring company in Toronto, Canada, needed to decide whether to discontinue the least profitable of the company's seven clothing lines or to increase that clothing line’s retail selling price. Over the previous six years, Styles had been financially successful, and customer retention was a major factor in this success. However, competition was increasing and profits were shrinking. Should the owners drop the clothing line that had the lowest margin or increase its retail selling price? If they chose to increase the price, they would need to decide on the amount of the price increase. The owners wondered whether increasing the price would still enable them to meet their target contribution margin.

Shirdi Infratech Pvt. Ltd. was in the wooden furniture manufacturing business and dealt with a wide range of diversified products such as modular kitchens, furniture, and doors. With its normal profit margin, the firm was growing, but not at a rate that satisfied the owner. At the same time, the business faced personnel management issues. The dilemma began in 2015 when the owner learned that one of his top performers had potentially leaked confidential information to a competitor and was offered employment by them. The owner recognized this employee’s importance, as well as the critical timing of the project he was working on. In light of this, would the best option be to retain that employee or let him go? The owner was also concerned about social capital management, and how to use the employee’s intellectual skills to develop others in the organization.

In January 2015, the chief executive officer (CEO) of the Canaan Group, a privately owned logistics conglomerate of businesses in Vancouver, Canada, was considering how to capitalize on opportunities in the freight forwarding industry. The first thing he needed to do was stabilize the Export Cargo Specialist (ECS) division. The ECS division focused on ocean freight forwarding—helping customers coordinate and ship goods from origin to destination. To counter a glut of shipping capacity and fall in demand over the past few years, the CEO had restructured the roles and assignments in the division. He attempted to create a cross-trained workforce capable of performing a range of functions for clients. However, issues emerged with the restructuring, leading to employee departures and, along with the industry changes, a net loss in operations. The CEO was looking to turn things around and avoid further mistakes. He wondered if he should give his restructuring experiment more time, bring in an experienced project manager, or promote a current ECS staff member to find a solution.

In August 2016, the director of UdaipurTimes.com, a hyperlocal news website, and his partner were faced with a problem. Their start-up venture had thus far grown without any explicit strategy. Despite a steady readership of nearly 200,000, achieving further revenue growth and sustained profitability were ongoing issues. UdaipurTimes.com needed to come up with a comprehensive strategy by evaluating various alternatives (such as creating a mobile app and soliciting user-generated content) to increase the frequency of customer visits and attract new readers to the website. Given its limited financial strength and its focus on speedily growing its customer base while leveraging current resources and capabilities, what strategy should UdaipurTimes.com choose?

In 2016, Dalmia Bharat Cement Limited (Dalmia Cement) and its agency, the Dalmia Bharat Foundation, worked in the areas of sustainability and corporate social responsibility. It worked with communities in the neighbourhoods of its plants and with rural communities in many other areas, focusing on soil and water conservation. In 2016 there was a growing concern that its water harvesting structures and methods of soil protection and improvement were no longer good enough. A measure that valued water in financial terms was required to help justify the foundation’s targets and funding. The company tasked interns from a well-known management institute with searching for such a measure.

In 2017, Ivey Publishing, a publisher and distributor of cases for the academic market, struggled with widespread copyright infringement, which affected its revenue stream. The digital revolution, which had an impact on so many other creative industries, including music, film, and computer software, had also affected the publisher.<br><br>Ivey Publishing’s sales team leader made a call to a business professor to elicit his support in encouraging his students to purchase cases from Ivey Publishing (rather than copying them from other students). Having failed to persuade this professor and others, the sales team leader reflected on what else she could do to strengthen Ivey Publishing’s financial performance.

In 2016, the founder and chief executive officer of Red Star Macalline, China’s largest furniture shopping mall operator, was finalizing the company’s new growth plan—the “1001 Strategy.” The plan was to be implemented in two phases: first, building 1,000 brick-and-mortar shopping malls, focused on home improvement products, and then integrating the malls into a seamless ecosystem through a single overarching Internet platform. The company faced challenges in being the first in the Chinese home improvement industry to forge such a path. Could the chief executive officer sustain the company’s first-mover advantage? Would his overall strategy work? Did he need a reality check for the execution plan?

AquaSafi Purification Systems Pvt. Ltd. (AquaSafi) was a social enterprise that aimed to provide clean water to people in the developing world. The organization assembled and sold its water purification technology, at cost, to villages and non-governmental organizations in rural India. Before deciding to change AquaSafi’s current operating model, the executive director thought it would be useful to perform a cost/benefit analysis to see how the company’s cash flow would differ at a new water filtration plant under the current and proposed operating models. He also wondered whether it made sense for AquaSafi to change its operating model as it expanded its operations, since the company’s current operating model had been well received in the villages.

In 2016, the managing director of Eco Tasar Silk Private Ltd., an organization that sold handloom Tasar silk products created by low-income artisans in rural, underdeveloped areas of India, faced issues with his sales team. The managing director’s dedication and perseverance, coupled with his past experience in a non-governmental organization in a similar field, had helped his company grow quickly over a short period of time. However, as the company scaled up operations, members of the sales team appeared to be either unconvinced of the company's business model or insufficiently competitive to ensure the business’s sustainability. How could the managing director identify and recruit sales professionals who both understood and supported the business’s unique value proposition and were sufficiently sales-oriented to ensure the business’s longevity?

In January 2017, a Canadian farmer and entrepreneur faced a challenging decision about the future of his two businesses: a farming operation and a trucking operation. After the hectic 2016 farming and trucking season, he began to compare his 2016 and 2015 financial statements for the farming business, Meakin Farms Inc., and the trucking business, Meakin Industrial Ag Corp. While both organizations remained viable, he wondered what he should do for 2017 and beyond, given the unique structure of the businesses and the vast uncertainty of the agricultural industry. Should he pursue an expansion, a contraction, or should he maintain the current levels of business? He needed to identify a strategic direction that would balance the size and scope of his businesses while accounting for environmental risks.

Founded by an entrepreneur in 2007, Hillberg & Berk was a successful Canadian company in the affordable designer jewellery industry. After being funded through the Dragons’ Den television show in 2009, the entrepreneur and her team grew the company to achieving more than $10 million in annual sales. The company had focused its growth in its home province of Saskatchewan and into the neighbouring province of Alberta, but in late 2016, it faced a turning point. The entrepreneur wanted to capitalize on the success of the company’s signature Sparkle Collection and grow its other product lines by building customer loyalty. As Hillberg & Berk was no longer a small company and not yet a large company, the entrepreneur knew that how she managed her company’s strategy would have significant implications for its ability to maintain sustainable growth.

Ramco Systems Limited (Ramco) was a leading information technology (IT) product company and a pioneer in India, where the majority of IT companies were focused on services. It created three world-class products that drove its growth: a cloud-based enterprise resource planning system, a human capital management system, and aviation software. In 2016, the company was enjoying impressive growth, making profits, and acquiring new clients from around the world. At this point, the chief executive officer had to decide how to balance more rapid innovation with product stabilization. He needed to build structures, processes, and a corporate culture that would enable Ramco to continue to grow. At the same time, he needed to consider the ways new technologies were changing clients’ requirements for newer product features—such as the use of mobility or cloud computing. Should the company adopt a mobile-only or mobile-also strategy? Should it incorporate features from social-media platforms as product features? Should it provide its products via software installed at clients’ premises, or should products be available on the cloud, via software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscriptions?

Next India Traveler (NIT) was a travel and tour operator based in Chandigarh, India. The young start-up had been in business since 2012. It offered both inbound and outbound tour and travel packages that covered all the major tourist destinations in India and the Asia-Pacific region. NIT’s motto was to provide its clients with best-in-class services for all aspects of travel and tourism, all under one roof. <br><br>An upcoming meeting with a venture capitalist firm was crucial to NIT’s future plans for growth, and the investors would certainly want to have a clear idea of the company’s value. Thus, before making his pitch to the venture capital firm, NIT’s owner wanted to perform a valuation of his start-up. Unfortunately, the lack of long-term data and a proven methodology for valuing relatively new companies meant the owner faced a considerable challenge in terms of identifying the most appropriate model for the task.