I recently found out about the Seventh Annual Deloitte Case Challenge at Stern, and decided to participate in it just for the challenge (if not at bschool, then when?). The competition was held last Thursday, and what follows is the sweat and tear-filled saga of the trials and tribulations of 5 classmates in search of glory and fame. Or something.
12 teams (out of 16 teams that applied) were selected at random using a lottery. Each team consisted of 5 members (thankfully, there was no random assignment of teams - we got to pick our own before the competition). We were given the case on Thursday night, and had till Friday 8am to prepare the presentation. What followed was a fun and challenging experience.
The case was about a men's wallet company looking to expand into the women's handbag market; we had to come up with an analysis on the soundness of the plan as well as recommendations for the next 5 years for the company. There was a lot of data provided alongwith the case, and one of the challenges was trying to sift out the relevant data. We took about an hour to read through the case and some of the materials in order to internalize the information, and another hour coming up with the right framework to use to evaluate the case. Since this was a market entry case, we decided to analyze it using the 4Ps (Product, Pricing, Placement and Promotion) and Porter's Five Forces. We then spent a good two hours talking about the case and brainstorming different ideas.
At around 10:30pm, we were finally ready to divide the case up and attack the components in teams of one or two. Broadly, we split this up into target market/placement, promotion, supply and manufacturing, financials and competitive landscape. In addition to the manufacturing and supply-chain research, I opted to do the financials alongwith another teammate, and this was probably the most challenging part of the case (and according to the judges, what really set us apart from the other teams). The financials were challenging because the company is private and the only financial data we were provided was an estimated income statement for 2006. The est. IS had entries for Sales Revenue, Cost of Revenue, Interest Expense and SG&A, and we had to make a ton of assumptions about expected revenues from the handbag business, cost of advertising, cost of capital and operating costs in order to do the requisite DCF valuations (thank you, Gode and Silber!!). What I found somewhat surprising was that none of the other teams did a DCF valuation (I guess it pays to have two finance geeks on the team! :-)).
After working on our individual slides for the next 4 hours, we put everything together and went over the deck a couple of times to check for accuracy and typos. At 4am, we decided to call it a night, and went home to get a couple of hours of sleep (apparently, we were one of two teams that got some sleep that night!). We were back in school at 8am to hand in 12 hardcopies of our slides. During our first round presentation at 9am, we presented for 30 minutes to a panel of 3 judges (just us and them in the room); there were about 4 or 5 questions at the end during the 5-minute Q&A session, a couple of which were quite challenging. After our presentation, we headed to the Starbucks lounge to get some shut-eye before lunch.
During lunch, the three finalist teams were announced, and somewhat to our surprise, we happened to be one of the teams!
The final round presentations followed a slightly different format. The room was open to all the other participants as well as the 4 teams who got eliminated by the lottery on the first day (overall, around 60-70 people). Each team was alloted 40 minutes to present to the audience and a panel of 9 judges, each of whom could interrupt us at any time to ask questions. Our team was the second to go. Our first teammate spoke of target market and placement, and was only asked one question, right at the end. This gave us a sense of hope that was quickly extinguished as we witnessed our second teammate get interrupted every 30 seconds during the course of her 4 minute speech. However, she held herself with amazing confidence and answered all the questions extremely well. I was the next to face the firing squad.
There are times in life when we surprise ourselves. I had no idea I could be so poised under pressure, or that I could "wing it" so well when required (I'm usually all about preparation, preparation, preparation!). I was barely 30 seconds into my speech when bang! came the first question. Next thing I knew, I was barely following my original speech format, having been forced to modify it in order to answer the questions that kept coming up. Luckily, I had done enough research on the topic (supply-chain and offshoring/outsourcing) to be able to answer most of the questions. A couple of questions threw me off a bit, but we had all agreed as a team that should we be asked for research or data that we didn't have, our answer should be "we'll have to research it some more and get back to you", which was a lifesaver!
Anyway, the rest of the presentation went off relatively smoothly, and we all heaved a huge sigh of relief and proceeded to the cocktail event to get some much needed alcohol-therapy. By this time, most of us had gone almost 36 hours without sleep (not counting the 2 hr nap in the morning), and were hardly in a mood to network with the Deloitte executives or with one another. The Deloitte guys probably saw this, and decided to announce the winner fairly early on and put us out of our collective misery.
For lack of a good segue, I shall put it quite bluntly - WE WON!!!!!!
We were awarded one of the ridiculously big cardboard checks (RBCC) for $2500 and somewhat smaller, individual carboard checks $500 each (and a wallet from the company that the case was based on). Much squealing, giggling and hugging (did I mention our team had 4 women? GIRL POWER!!) later, we posed for photos with our checks and some of the senior partners. After some more networking, we decided to drop the check off in front of our strategy professor's office (did I mention all of us are in the same block? GO BLOCK 3!!!), and head home for some overdue R&R.
1 comment:
ahh... j. fold :).
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