Don't worry about the buzz words--those aren't important. Think more about 1)
what strategy is the business pursuing (i.e. are they trying to achieve low cost? are
they trying to achieve high-margins? are they trying to focus on customer service?
etc...) Although, everyone wants to be low cost and high-margin and customeroriented, it is impossible to be all the of above. So, figure out what their particular
strategy is. Based on that, are their activities in line with their strategy? For
example, if a company is low-cost and they are spending tons of money on winning
over customers in Carribou, Maine, then that activity is not aligned with their
strategy, right?
This might help a bit in framing roughly what to address in your next write-up:
Analysis:
External:
·
Porter’s 5 Forces
o
Competition
o
Barriers to Entry
o
Substitutes
o
Suppliers
o
Buyers
·
Growth of the industry—where do you see this industry going?
·
Costs (both fixed and variable): are they increasing? Decreasing?
**It’s important to keep in mind exactly what you’re analyzing. For example: If you
are analyzing Disneyland and are talking about competition, it’s important to keep
in mind what industry you are associating Disney with. Are they in the amusement
park industry? Or in the movie business? It doesn’t matter what you compare them
to, but be consistent in how you position your company when you analyze the
business.
Internal:
·
What is the company’s strategy? (not asking for what they did—those facts are
in the case—but what strategy are they trying to achieve? E.g. low cost? High
margin? Go into services? Efficient operations? Etc…)
·
What challenges is the company facing?
·
Financial analysis: if possible, look at the company’s financials to determine
their growth—revenue growing? Profits decreasing? COGs rising? Etc… anything
strike you as particularly strange?
·
Lastly, what concrete strategy would you undertake if you were running the
company? Why? What activities align with this strategy? (Note: there are quite a
few right answers for this part. Just make sure your strategy makes sense in the
context of your external analysis and internal challenges.
Based on your analysis, what recommendations would your make?
Recommendations:
E.g. Based on the above analysis, company XYZ is in an industry that is stagnant with
an increasing number of competitors and low barrier to entry. Costs are increasing,
and we can see from their financials their profits are shrinking. Although company
XYZ has been successful in this industry for a while, I would recommend they focus
more on high-margin activities, doing blah blah blah. XYZ can undertake several
activities including:
activity 1 that is a high-margin service
activity 2 that is a high-margin product
activity 3 that targets wealthy people to achieve high-margins
Although all of these would be aligned with my recommended strategy, activity #2
would be the best because of blah blah reason.