For keener business students nothing screams high ROI like a case competition. Four hours of work, a captive audience forced to listen to your divine narrative, and a chance to slap some hardware onto your resume. Good performances pay great dividends: you get a success story to spin in a resume, networking contacts at the event, auxiliary recognition from your school if you rocked hard enough, and for the out of town comps - a paid vacation!
Unfortunately students and schools have caught on. Many schools have incorporated dedicated courses for case competitions into their offering, and they ensure enrollment by dictating that any case participant must have taken the case class. For the big competitions students will be hand picked by faculty many months in advance and will run through around 10-15 practices cases (usually Saturday afternoons ~100 hrs prep time) before attending the comp. The competition is tougher, but the prizes are bigger too. Executive level judging panels, cash prizes, and sometimes internship offers.
Here's a break down of how to approach three styles of case comps, the 3 hour case, the live case, and the topic competition.
The Three Hour Case Competition
Most of these cases only allow for teams of four people, and are the most common and competitive. I'll speak case strategy from the viewpoint of a business general case competition (strategic management mostly) but the same usually applies to the concentration specific comps.
Team Make-up
For the general case comp, if you are self forming your team try to have the two major streams accounted for - finance and marketing. Keep it as senior as possible, 3rd year and 4th year students. Be sure to have at least one boy/girl, and generally value speaking skills over technical skills. Of course optimally the team should be top students, but winning a case comp is 60% sales skills and 40% strategy (give or take a %). Generally this is done for you by the school but if not, that's what I suggest.
Roles & Time Strategy
The three hour case comp gives you three hours to read a case, develop a strategy and create a presentation. You have usually around 20 minutes to present and 10 minutes of Q&A.
When you are practicing you need to standardize several things so that on the day of you don't need to talk about them. One person - usually a marketing student - will create the presentation (deck wizard) and assuming you have more than one laptop, one person will pump graphs and pro-forma's (the quant).
The presentation creation will always be the same and it should ALWAYS start at the same time. Typically when you begin you all sit down and start reading the case, if it's a long case the deck wizard skips the company background and focuses on the meat. At the 30 minute mark, it's deck creation time; all the standard stuff, title page, bread crumbs, sign posts (slides that indicate a topic change), graphics. It's usually good to have one or two general solution layouts. For instance one could be your basic 3 alternative 1 solution layout. Cases are like Hollywood action movies - they follow a formula - and because of this you already have a pretty good idea of how you will present the solution, even before you read the case.
At the 45 minute mark everyone is usually finished the case. As people finish they start writing what they think is important on a whiteboard, chalk board, or flip paper. Resist the temptation to write it on a sheet; many people have the same idea's and its much faster to go right to group think. Write under categories: problems, alternatives, solutions, ect. As your writing start talking strategy, you have about another 45 minutes to boil down to your final solution so its time for a healthy debate. This is where the magic happens, everyone (deck wizard included) pitches idea's, and they are adapted, shot down, researched (within the case, internet is almost always blocked in these things). Thinking outside of the box is good, judges come to these things to see fresh ideas, get creative. One classic alternative is the "status quo", if costs of a different path are significant this should probably be in your option tree. Team dynamics count a lot here. If the team has gelled and everyone knows everyone's strengths and weaknesses, the team will know as they read the case who should be tailoring the solution. There is no time for circular argument, every debate needs to pushing the final solution forward, and if you realize you're wrong 30 minutes in, don't back-peddle, just figure out how to sell it.
Once you have figured out how to turn the whole organization around, feed the poor, and establish world peace, it's time to prove your solution. Something everyone should have in mind as they are filling in gaps in the deck is the rubric. Many case comps show you the scorecard the judges mark on, PLAY TO IT. Make sure you put a check mark beside each deliverable, talk to everything they are looking for. The quant will now need to do something that is totally against their academic training - they need to start making things up. The numbers given in the general cases are usually pretty sparse, but judges want to see return on investment, capital outlay, a 5 year budgeting plan, sensitivity analysis, maybe even Value at Risk (VaR), and you need to produce. It's a fine dance as you assume the needed inputs and you have to do it very quickly. Charts and graphs usually enter the deck in the last hour, and they need to look slick, while telling the story.
At the 2.5hr mark its dry run time. In my experience 75% of the time this never actually happens and when it does its a bit off because you're mind knows it isn't 'game time' so you are still thinking of your back story. But when you do get the chance you end up catching all the spelling and formatting errors and the real deal goes off even smoother than it would have.
The Presentation
When your in the room it's game time. Role play to the max, shake hands, and be the consulting team you're pretending to be. This means have a logo on the slides, and a name - go as legit as you can. Just like before everyone has their roles, someone is always presenting the intro, someone else the alternatives, someone the solution, and someone the risks and implementation. Although you might want to shake it up, by keeping it consistent you will naturally think about your pitch when you are reading the case, giving your mind more time to flesh out the soft aspects of the presentation (humor, timing, emphasis, delivery). If you are not presenting, you are "showing the love", smile, nod, and keep your hands 'quiet'. When you are presenting, its all confidence. Only newbs use notes; make eye contact and let your presentation flow. If you see frowns or puzzled looks, expand upon a point, if you see that they get it move forward. You are not presenting, you are selling. It's like having an argument with your parents for more allowance money when you're a kid; you play off their facial expressions as ques to hard sell or back peddle. Hopefully you were receiving the same 50% wage increase YoY I was, if not, make sure your sell skills are up to par for the task at hand.
The Q&A
This is where you win it. These judges get to see the same problem solved four different ways. As they see solutions that differ they will often ask you why the other groups solution wouldn't work. When answering use the step forward approach. If you know you have the answer to a question while it's being asked step forward to signal to your team you're going to take this one. If nobody steps up by the time the question is done, usually through practice you know who is best at BS'ing it and let them take a crack at it. Sometimes someone is missing an angle in their answer and so before they are done somebody else might choose to step forward. If they do, the answering party should wrap up their point and let the other person drive the other angle. This is risky. Never contradict the previous answer, it makes you look like amateurs. If you are going to flesh it out use words like "Also from the cost perspective...", or "Evidence to support Dan's point is...". Make sure you thank the judge for their question, and generally make them feel like they are gods gift to mankind.
The Financial Live Case Competition
I've only done one of these, but I learned some valuable lessons in the process. The biggest thing is that the private sector sells an opinion to an audience, they don't hand out "maybes". Don't get me wrong, there are hold recommendations, but each recommendation has a central investment theme and you play to it.
Homework
Any live case competition will give the group more time. For those used to pounding through 3 hour cases it seems like a blessing, but you quickly realize a)how long it takes to assemble information that is usually given in a case, and b)with more time, expectation only increase. Grab as much data as you can, and really dig into what industry publications have been saying about where the sub-market is going, and the stance of your business. These are things the judges will know, and it is assumed you will know the territory when you value the company, not knowing can result in some embarrassingly inaccurate assumptions.
Valuation
The street could care less about your DCF. Blasphemy I know, along with CAPM it looks like the Royals Royce of valuation tools. The truth is if you're not valuing coca-cola, DCF's just rely too heavily on forecast assumptions - crap in crap out. Put it in, and talk about it, but your valuation meat should come from your relative valuation.
For the relative valuation (aka peer valuation), go to town. If you can value each distinct revenue driver of the firm against direct competitors - do it. For example when peer valuing Disney instead of doing enterprise value (EV) for the whole company, find the EV over cash flow for it's resorts, hotels, entertainment lines and then use the multiple analysis method against firms who specifically operate in these markets. Solve for each individual EV, sum them up, scrape off debt, divide by S/O and you've got what the market should be valuing them at today. I plan to expand on valuation sometime, but I'm debating on waiting till after I enter the private sector so that I can speak to it from the practitioner perspective instead of the academic viewpoint. If not that long I will at least wait until I get all goods from my MSF before I pontificate the 'right' ways to do it.
Risk
Another place to shine. Sensitivity analysis, VaR, Monte-Carlo simulations, debt analysis; grab your stats package, keep your valuations soft coded, and swing for the fences.
Topic Competition
I'm losing gas, and I know I'm not doing these last two justice, but in lieu of the next post on the subject I'll say this. When you have a choice of what to present in a topic based competition, making the right topic selection is the biggest deciding factor in your ability to bring home the "W". These types of comps are all about owning your topic, being extremely well versed in the area you tackle, and presenting your ideas as though you're a 35 year old inventor pitching his last 15 years of work to a PE firm that will either make all his dreams come true, or turn him into a janitor. In other words you need to have drunk your own Kool Aid, and be ready to make the sales pitch of your degree. It's also important to really be able to be passionate about your topic because as with most things, its the person who does the most work that wins. Be careful in choosing a topic that is shallow, or could ever be "complete". You want something that has a lot of depth and will be interesting to you for at least 50 hours, and extremely interesting to a judge for 30 minutes.
In the end case comps are just simulated business problems. Read the problem, solve the problem, present the problem; what's so hard about that?
No comments:
Post a Comment