Entrepreneurship
February 2021
ProMed Ltd
By John Mullins, Robert M Johnson
For Sid Worley, it was decision time. He had spent the last two years courting the management and the family owners of his largest competitor, and finally (and unexpectedly) they had indicated that they would be receptive to “a serious offer” to buy the company. Worley was excited and determined...
February 2021
Valuing Privately Owned Companies: Valuation Techniques – Technical Note
By John Mullins, Robert M Johnson, Steve Pesenti
It is commonly said that the valuation of companies is more of an art than a science. The essence of this statement is that arriving at a valuation is a matter of judgment, balancing the consideration of various factors, rather than the mechanical application of a mathematical formula. This is espec...
February 2021
Finance for Entrepreneurial Companies: Financing Instruments – Technical Note
By John Mullins, Robert M Johnson, Steve Pesenti
Despite today’s growing attention to bootstrapping and the use of customer funding in the financing of new ventures, many new ventures, be they a startup or a plan to grow an existing business, will require some initial injection of capital to finance the fixed assets, working capital, and operati...
January 2021
Pharma UK: The Transdermal Technology – Compact Case
By Julian Birkinshaw
Pharma UK was the UK subsidiary of Pharma, a major international pharmaceuticals company with expertise in oncology, hormone replacement drugs and fertility. Pharma UK was responsible for selling drugs in the local marketplace. However, it also had 50 people in R&D, doing local development work ...
November 2019
BanaPads: To grow or not to grow? That is the question
By Luisa Alemany, Nicholas Andreou, Alma Gutierrez
In the summer of 2018, Richard Bbaale sat in a rural village in Uganda, looking over a banana plantation. He recalled the inspiration behind BanaPads as he contemplated what to do next. It had been 10 years since he had founded the non-governmental organisation (NGO) to help women and girls in rural...
August 2016
ONk: Dining at the Funding Buffet
By Gary Dushnitsky
The idea for ONk originated in 2012 when six-year-old Mike asked his father, Sam Ke, one night, “Can we make a computer that is simple and fun?” Soon afterwards, a team of three – Alex Bell, Joe Costa and Sam Ke – came together to answer the call. The mission: to give young people – and th...
November 2018
Patch: Financing the Entrepreneurial Business
By Gary Dushnitsky
Heading into Old Street Tube station in London on a chilly January day, Freddie’s mind was racing with ideas. He had just come out from another meeting with Forward Partners, a well-known, London-based venture capital firm, and it was clear the conversation had gone well. The team at Forward Partn...
January 2022
Dollar Shave Club: Disrupting the Shaving Industry (Spanish)
By Nader Tavassoli, Karin Kollenz-Quétard, Jamie Anderson
The case describes how Dollar Shave Club proved to be a disruptive force in the shaving industry, one dominated by Gillette for over a Century. It did so without a single patent to its name, and with a direct-to-consumer subscription and a content-based customer engagement model that was new to the ...
March 2019
ENGIE’s GEM business unit: Towards a new way of working
By Julian Birkinshaw, Ken Mark
The case is set in early 2019. Edouard Neviaski is CEO of the Global Energy Markets (GEM) division of Engie, a very large French energy company. He has been pushing a major programme of change over the previous three years and is considering the next steps: how to maintain momentum, what additional ...
November 2019
Trip4real: Negotiating Series A
By Luisa Alemany, Carlos Trenchs, Lourdes Urriolagoitia, Suzanne Jenkins
On 25 March 2014, Trip4real founder Gloria Molins was on her way to Barcelona airport, where she and her small but passionate and audacious team would meet up and fly to San Francisco to pitch Airbnb’s co-founders on a partnership, when her phone buzzed. She had received a term sheet proposal for ...