Case centre

Photographers mob and tear at the clothes of Paul Thompson and Steve Franks as they leave
a conference they have just presented at in one of China’s major industrial cities. They are not
rock stars, however; they are the founder and CEO respectively of Water Babies, a UK based
franchise that has developed an innovative business model delivering unique swimming and
water leisure activities for babies and parents. Little could Paul have known that when he took
his baby daughter swimming for the first time that the seed of an international franchise had
been sown. Today, 57 franchisees teach 50,000 babies weekly in the UK, with further
franchises operating out of Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Germany and China. Having
risen to the top of the list of UK franchises, Paul and Steve were beginning to ask questions on
how could they sustain the success of their unique swimming and leisure services model in
what was previously a blue ocean? How could they coordinate an international franchise
network as well as maintain quality of service? What challenges might they encounter when
entering a large and complex market such as China, and potentially even the USA?

ACWA Power is a desalinated water and energy company with a difference. While its
competitors seek to maximise profit by securing contracts with the most-generous possible
margins, the Saudi Arabian developer, owner and operator of power and water plants defies
market pricing to win – a strategy that has earned it a success rate of two out of three tenders,
as well as a growing international footprint. With ACWA’s bids on solar developments reaching
record lows, Paddy Padmanathan (CEO) was coming under increasing scrutiny from analysts
and media pundits, who could not understand how they could sustain these record-breaking
prices. In the latest auction on 5th June 2017, the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA)
announced it had received four bids from consortiums for the tender of a 200 MW Concentrated
Solar Power (CSP) tower project. The ACWA consortium submitted a price of USD 9.45
cents/kWh, nearly 40% below the previous world-record low price for electricity generated from
this technology. The three other bids ranged from USD 10.58 to 17.35 cents/kWh. As analysts
struggled to replicate this price in their own models, Paddy put his own team to work to
demonstrate to the world how ACWA Power’s unique financing structure could make the
improbable possible.

I have never seen a Patek Philippe watch ‘in the flesh’, only ever through glass. I have never held or touched a Patek Philippe. I have certainly never worn or owned one, and nor have my friends. I therefore have no direct personal experience from which I can evaluate their product, yet I am convinced it is the most desirable watch in the world. My only actual interaction with the brand has been through their marketing – and it has led me to want one more than any other luxury good.

As he did every day, Andrea Rasca, founder and Chief Executive Dreamer (CED) of Mercato Metropolitano (MM) was walking along the River Thames to get to work. But it wasn’t just any other day. That day, Andrea was going to sign off on a deal with a venture capitalist – a deal which would take his innovative marketplace to Tokyo, New York, Dubai, Miami, Rio de Janeiro, and other strategic locations around the world. Andrea’s dream to disrupt food retail and food hospitality was becoming a reality: “Our approach is to draw on the basic principles of ‘small is beautiful’ and ‘natural is good’. MM is a manifesto which goes against the Nestlé and Unilever-type of business. MM revolves around individuals: small-scale farmers, local producers and members of the local community”. However, the big question surrounding Mercato in the months to follow was: Could Andrea prove he had a sustainable business model that was ready to scale globally?

Katie had been working on the deal team at Forward Partners for little over three months. In her role as investor, she was granted a huge amount of autonomy sourcing and executing deals from day one. Forward Partners is a London-based venture capital firm making its primary investments across the pre-Series A spectrum, from solo-founders to late-seed. Being on their deal team required aptitude on a number of axes. VCs have little information to analyse – which can be uncomfortable – and there was a certain amount of skill required in getting to the right reasons to say ‘yes’ to a deal. Katie had identified a potential target in the nascent ‘modelling and simulation as a service’ (MSaaS) space, where Korzan Systems was at the cutting edge. Despite the limited information available, ahead of her next meeting with the partners, Katie was required to research the market and develop her own thesis on Korzan as a potential investment by preparing a memo that could offer a balanced assessment on the opportunity with relatively little information to go on. During the next partners meeting, she would need to be ready to present her thoughts, analysis and findings on whether this was a go or no-go investment.

In 2005, Henry Goodman was head of the Protein Structure Group at Novartis. He had just finished reading an email from Brian Johnson who had a similar position at GlaxoSmithKline, one of Novartis’ main competitors. Brian had approached Henry with an invitation to join the ‘Structural Genomics Consortium’ (SGC), an academic-industrial collaboration in the areas of structural genomics. GlaxoSmithKline was one of the founders of the Consortium and at this time its only corporate member, but the organization was now looking to sign up further pharma companies to take part in this joint venture.

Guy Mucklow (CEO) and Jamie Turner (CTO) set up Postcode Anywhere (PCA) in 2001. Their data technology has made them one of the leading providers of cloud-based address management services, processing over four million transactions per day through their platform. With over 8,000 customers ranging from government departments and FTSE 500 companies to self-service SMEs, PCA accounts for roughly 50% of all addresses captured through UK ecommerce websites. This case examines the background and rationale for how a business, which has grown at a relatively healthy rate of 30% annually on 30%-plus pre-tax margins, is looking to change its focus to a more aggressive growth target of 50% annual growth over the next 5 years to a £50 million turnover. It will explore the implications for how that might be achieved in a domestic market for the company’s current services which are both competitive and relatively mature, as well as the organisational and strategic challenges to their current business model.

Today, Ellen is not only a great comedian that makes America laugh and dream every day with her humour, but she is also the ambassador of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual (LGBT) community. Ellen is also involved in a number of charites, which got her to raise over $50 million over the years. As a result of her involvement in social causes, Ellen is deemed by many as an “advocate for change” (Seacrest, 2014). Let’s briefly explore why Ellen is admired by so many, examining how she enables, entices, and enriches people. Let’s explore how she manages to enhance people’s happiness offering these three kinds of benefits. Finally, let’s explore how Ellen was able to build and leverage an admired brand for herself. Although each of these concepts would deserve a deeper analysis to be fully understood, they are strictly related to each other and they are instrumental to show Ellen DeGeneres’s brand building process.

It was late in the autumn of 2010, and William Makant, CEO of Plumis Ltd., was sitting in his cramped London office asking himself what he and his co-founders could do to ramp up sales and reverse a flagging cash position. The company, which had started in 2008 with a £25k prize from a business plan competition and later raised £80k from an incubator programme, now had a cash balance of just £2,365. This would not go far even in the low-rent offices the company had taken, on a decommissioned battleship moored on the River Thames. Since launching its product Automist, a hassle-free fire safety device for the kitchen, onto the market early in the year, Plumis had sold just 3 demonstration units at an average price of £400 for a total revenue of £1,200, as compared with a sales plan of 27 units, in a price range of £500- £800 per unit, targeted for the year. The latter was the sales target announced to a group of angel investors who had agreed two months earlier to invest £100k, but the cash hadn’t yet arrived, and it looked as though more would be needed, sooner than planned.