Specialty Paper Manufacturer (B)
今天的case：Your client is a leading manufacturer and distributor of specialty papers sold to commercial printers. The company’s main line of business is self-adhesive sheeted papers that are ultimately used in a variety of labeling applications – including the labeling of consumer goods and the printing of self-adhesive signs. The client is headquartered in the US and sells to the US only. Currently the client has been profitable, but the business has failed to deliver any growth over the past few years. The client would like to invest additional capital in the business and you have been asked to identify opportunities for growth. How would you go about it?
请注意，我们目前这种形式，其实只允许我们做case的开头，所以在看这个case时候，请模拟做三件事情，一是，你听了这个case后，会怎样对面试者summarize这个case；二是，你在开始structure前，会问哪几个clarifying questions；三是，你打算怎样structure这个case。
Hello all, today's case is a case about "growth". When I talk about growth, it's about growing revenue, and naturally, cost is not a concern in these cases. It's worth to note that, having the word "growth" in the case itself doesn't necessarily mean it's a growth case, and vice versa. For example, the case may be about the growth of profits, then it's not a growth case by my definition.
My planned approach to teach casing in this group is to mix principles and actual practices together versus giving you a list of principles up front. I do this for two reasons: first, it's useless to have you read about principles when you have no idea what I'm talking about. Second, giving you the answer before you solve the question is worse than having you solve the question and then revealing the answer because the latter approach make you remember. However, please don't think that I don't have a plan and am just giving you random cases. Periodically, I will walk you through key principles we have been practicing, and I'm sure you will have established a vivid understanding when principles are revealed to you.
Back to growth cases, before I dig into today's case, I also want to talk a little about categorizing cases. I like categorizing cases into different business scenarios. I do this not because I design and recite frameworks for each type of cases. In fact, reciting frameworks is one of the worst enemies of good casing performance because it deprives you the opportunity to develop a "business mind", which is the real engine of good casing. I plan to give you three growth cases in a roll before I switch to another type of cases.
Doing this is helpful because you can concentrate on understanding some of the business intuition behind each type of cases while practicing key casing skills like structuring.
Before we talk specifically about today's case. Let's do a mental exercise of what are the possible reasons why a company's growth is stagnant? I always do an issue free when doing these mental exercises. These trees resemble structures but they are not.
The upper half of this tree says that growth is stagnant because a company is not doing its best extracting revenue from its existing customers using its existing products. The lower half of this tree says a company's growth is stagnant because it's not at the right place where industry-wise growth is taking place.
Using the growth cases I have read, 80% of the growth scenario is about the lower half and 20% is about the upper half.
What's the key to growth? That's the question that keeps CEOs, including Xi Dada awake at night.Consulting cases come from the real business world. So when a consulting case is about growth, it's usually not about improving the pricing of a current product, or convincing existing customers to buy more, because it's just not the case in the real world (the reason it's not the case is because a company usually cannot extract enough growth momentum from an existing base). This is the reason why stellar growth usually comes from switching into another product domain or entering into a new industry through capital investment, merger, and acquisition, and etc.
Now I'm not saying that you should bet that the case is about manufacturing new products. I'm just saying it's a key intuition to establish for growth cases. Remember, when delivering your structure, you still need to be MECE.
Here is a McK article that talks about growth. It's helpful to read it for better business intuition.
http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/employment-and-growth/the-granularity-of-growth
Now, coming to the actual structuring of a growth case. You may have seen the following structure somewhere in some case book.
t's not a bad structure but it's not my preferred structure. My preferred structure is the business situation framework by Victor Cheng(customer, product, company and competition) because the business situation framework is the most flexible one to use. However, I use the above framework to keep me on track of MECEness when delivering my structure using the business situation framework. In the end, what I do is to present a structure that talk about all of the above four options without actually using the above structure.
This would be the structure I open the case with. Note that I won't write this much when I'm actually being interviewed. I wrote a lot out to show case you my intentions. Moreover, the questions I wrote on the structure are all very generic and that's also just to showcase you my intention not what I would actually say to the interviewer.What I do is that I encompass all the possibilities but giving growth by expanding to new segments priority.
听完case后第一件事情是向面试官summarize一下这个case，然后问clarifying questions。最后一步是structure。summarize的原则是简单扼要，除非你有没听清的内容，可以问一下，要不然不要把这个case原样重复回去给面试官。可以参考的Sample response如下：
Interviewee: thank you very much for the case. Would you mind I briefly summarize the case?
Interviewer: yes go ahead.
Interviewee: thank you. It seems that our client manufactures and distributes specialty papers. The business is profitable but lacks growth. Our client has capitals to invest and we are hired to help our them find opportunities to grow. Is that a good summary?
Interviewer: yes, sounds good.
请注意在summarize的时候，不要加入过多细节，除非你没有听清楚。下面第二步是问clarifying question啦，这个环节我之前讨论过一次，问问题的原则是“如果问了这个问题，会改变你的structure，那就需要问”，如果问与不问对你structure都没有影响，那就不要问。这个case推荐的sample response：
Interviewee: before I begin, would you mind I ask a few clarifying questions?
Interviewer: of course.
Interviewee: first of all, I'm not sure I can immediately visualize the products our client manufactures, would you mind describe it a bit more?
Interviewer: sure. Imagine, the labels on coke bottles, and the labels on roadside advertisement signs are both printed and adhere to the bottle or the sign board. Your client manufactures those papers and sell them to commercial printers to have pattern printed.
Interviewee: that's very clear thank you very much. My next question is, does our client have a quantifiable growth target?
Interviewer: that's a good question. Your client would like to grow annual revenue by 10% in one year.
Interviewee: thank you very much. That's great to know. Can I assume that profits are not a major concern here?
Interviewer: yes you can.
Interviewee: great. I'm ready now.
请注意，第一个问题是产品类问题。很多时候你case里的产品究竟是什么，你根本不懂，尤其是工业产品而非日常消费品。这个时候，问一个产品类问题是非常恰当的。这个问题还有一个好处，就是会solicit很多有用的信息。比如以上的对话里，你就可以发现，其实面试官给了你两个截然不同的例子，这些是关键的product segmentation。不过请千万不要上来就问，what is the segmentation of our client's product? 这不是一个应该在clarifying时候问的问题。 其实case interview是一个对现实中与客户交互的一个非常好的模拟。问clarifying questions这个阶段就好比你第一次和客户见面，聊天，你会开始就让客户把产品类别给你列一下嘛，肯定不会。这个阶段就是非常qualitative的非常感性的聊一些产品的话题，让你有个大体概念。
第二个问题是quantify the objective类问题。这个问题非常关键，因为作为consultant，我们要尽量量化目标。这个问题其实是在绝大多数case里都需要问的。这个目标也是你一直要keep in mind的，因为你下面的解题基本上就是围着这个转。
第三个问题是clarify objective的问题，即使你知道客户的目标是growth，也不能就直接假设你可以在structure的时候完全不考虑profits。这个时候就需要你和面试官确认一下。要不然你的structure可能会被判定为不MECE。
我一般不推荐在clarifying的阶段问过多问题，一是这会占用你的宝贵时间，二是问很多问题会给面试官留下你拖延时间的印象。
第三步就是要structure啦。MECE是structuring的一个重要概念。我第一次接触MECE是在Victor Cheng的书里面，之后在和所有consultants接触的时候，大家都有谈MECE。在这里我不打算去讲MECE的基本定义，我想讲的是MECE在现实case里的application。100% MECEness doesn't exist. 所以在用这个概念的时候大家不必追求完美，而是要灵活。
昨天给了大家出个两structure，一个是四个分支（1）existing customer + existing products (2) existing customer + new products (3) new customer + existing products (4) new customer + new products. 这个structure在第一层上绝对是MECE的，不过从我个人的偏好上来讲，我觉得这个structure在你的deliver的时候难度比较高，因为它不是很intuitive，而且容易在deliver的时候发生很多重合。昨天给的第二个structure是Victor Cheng的business situation framework，也是四个分支(1) customer (2) product (3) company (4) competition。这个structure看起来就没那么很明显的MECE，不过我个人比较喜欢，因为比较符合business intuition. 下面我就用business situation这个framework来demo一下我会怎么structure这个case。
Interviewee:
Thank you very much for the time. To help our client grow its revenue by 10% in a year, I'd like to examine four areas: our client's customer, its products, our client's company itself and its competitions.
Let me start with customers first. What I'd like to know is who the customers are that buy adhesive papers. I want to understand how big each customer groups are in terms of revenue potential and how fast they are growing. For example, given road signs are not as prevalent as before, I'm imagining its growth may not be stellar. Moreover, I want to understand how much shares we have in each customer group. What we want to do is to serve the customer groups that have the highest revenue growth potentials given our goal here is revenue growth.
Next, I want to move on to products. Now this is very closely related to customers. I'm guessing different customers may demand different products and we may specialize in the products that serve our existing customers the best. However, I want to know what are the other products in the entire product domain and whether we can invest in the capacity of manufacturing new products to sell to high growth customer segments as a way to grow revenue. There can be potential in current products too so I want to understand better the characteristics, pricing, marketing and distribution strategies of our existing products and see if we can sell more of them to both existing and potential new customers.
After products, I want to understand our client's company better in three dimensions: capacity, operations, and cost structure. For capacity and operations, my goal is two-fold. I want to see whether capacity and operation bottle necks are suppressing revenue growth. I also want to see how our client can invest in additional capital into the current system to accommodate any growth plan like serving new customers with new products. For cost, I want to examine it because reducing pricing through reducing cost can be a way to boosts revenue.
Lastly, I want to understand the competitive landscape better. I want to know how each competitors are represented in the customer and products domain, which is important because we may not be able to move to a high growth customer or product segment if entering means a price war. I also want to make projections on competitors' capacity expansion and revenue growth strategy in order to have a better estimate of our revenue growth potential. Third, competitive analysis may help our client identify M&A opportunities to help our growth goal.
To summertime, I want to look at customer, products, our client's company and its competitions. Thank you.
Structuring要（1）避免sound generic (2) incorporate the information you've got as much as possible (3) show that you are keeping the key objective in mind and (4) have priorities
structuring完毕后，McK是面试官问你下一个问题，BCG和Bain是你开始从第一个sub brunch开始问问题，要信息，往下开展。
hypothesis driven是个在BCG和Bain style中比较重要的点，因为它们是interviewee driven的case，这点以后我会但拉出来讲，你可以在case structure的开头，加上一句，就像你说的，然后structure可以不变，只是重点放在说customer那个branch上面。