I arrived in Cleveland in August 2013, with all the anxiety and fears that an international
student inevitably has. It was just my first week, I was getting used to the
new life, new city, new people, and classes when Carlos Bustamante (MBA 2014) came up to me and said, “hey, I know
that you have a good background in finance, we are competing in the NSHMBA case
competition, would you want to join?”. I had some doubts at first because I had
just arrived but I have always liked these kinds of the challenges so I said yes. The group was also made up of Dominique Vargas (MBA 2014) and Luis
Contreras (MS Finance 2014).
Challenges
NSHMBA Cleveland '13 Winners Dominique Vargas (MBA '14), Sergio De Ilzarbe (MBA '15), Luis Contreras (MSF '14), Carlos Bustamante (MBA '14) |
The case was not
simple, it was a minority owned company in the heavy construction industry that wanted to expand. They had just started a venture with a bigger firm and did
not want to lose their brand. So where to go? How to expand? What industry to
aim for? What was going to be the marketing strategy?
We started
strongly, setting up meetings and working through the case. We had a meeting with Professor Simon
Peck who helped us aim our efforts correctly but according to the
rules was not able to have much more impact on the work. We had our first
talk with the company owner, who was a bit vague about the information he gave
us, we felt a little lost in that situation but still tried to put the work
together. That is when we
made our first mistake. We all had a lot of class presentations to prepare for and soon we only had 20 days to go until our case presentation with only a draft.
Strategy
Strategy
We met on a
Saturday morning, and separated the idea in 2 main parts, Corporate Strategy
and Marketing Strategy which were the main goals of the case. Luis and I took
care of the Corporate Strategy and Dominique and Carlos took charge of the
marketing.
From a Corporate
Strategy Standpoint, we had to decide on what industry the company going to
sell to, having in mind that they did not want to move out of Cleveland and had
good experience selling Sewer projects to the government. Considering the
growing LNG industry was quite straightforward and proving that bigger
companies in the industry were doing that was also easy. The hardest part here
was investigating specifics about the market.
The marketing strategy
had already been put together but we could not estimate costs or sale prices
without specific data. Here I got some outside help. We were able to
compute our cash flows, costs and sales estimates according to a very good
estimation of the market size.
With our work
and presentation put together we had a preliminary presentation with the
Greater Cleveland Partnership. There we received good feedback, good answers and more
information on where to improve the project. I have to say, at that moment, I
was not confident at all.
We came back
from this presentation knowing what to change and had a new meeting with Simon
to see what his view was on this too.
We went back to
work, changed the presentation and the paper according to the feedback we received.
Presentation Day
Presentation Day
After that, it
was just waiting a couple of days for the final presentation. I have to say I
was very nervous, but I was a little more confident than I was after the first
presentation. We had put a lot of work together and we all knew what
we were going to explain during the presentation.
We presented in
front of members of the 3 different companies analyzed, 4 judges, a key manager
at KeyBank, JumpStart and the Cleveland International Fund. I was nervous until the moment that I had to talk, I was so confident in what I was talking
about that all that nervousness just dissipated.
After the
competition we participated in the year end celebration of the NSHMBA Cleveland Chapter and had the chance to listen to a great speaker and had
excellent networking opportunities.
Our Top Tips
- Never let time consume you, we won, but we could have done better if we had not let time consume us.
- Divide the work by leveraging the members' strengths and capabilities.
- Before the presentation, practice, practice, and practice. The only way to beat nervousness if it is the first time you present is by being 110% sure in what you are going to say.
- Case competitions are also great opportunities to do networking; no matter the final result.
- Enjoy! All of these experiences are what make an MBA the best investment of your life. GO FOR THEM!
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