Good Enough to Eat
New York really is the city that doesn’t sleep, though I’ve managed to get a couple of hours anyway. We’re in New York City with the program and we’ve heard a great deal of speakers, seen the city, been challenged, and also have had a great time relaxing, slowly sipping our drinks, savoring every mouthful. Of course, you drink slowly when it’s $16 for a Manhattan – it’s your only drink for the night.
Thursday morning we broke up into teams and will be working with a number of companies doing a case analysis sort of thing. (You can’t get out of any MBA program without doing a copious amount of activities such as these). The reality is, though, I was really sort of excited about it. Thursday morning was really our chance to “do business” in a small sort of way in the city. Up to that point, we’d simply been visitors or tourists. Here, we joined forces with companies to accomplish a very particular goal.
I worked with the group looking at the restaurant called Good Enough to Eat. The owner, Carrie Levin, was looking at possible exit strategies as her relationship with a corporate sponsor had gone sour. I wasn’t expecting a case like this; in fact, another one of the MBA students had worked with this same company the year prior and was very excited. I thought we were going to get to do some real Gordon Ramsey kind of stuff. In reality my thought process went from shock, to surprise, to anger at how this corporate sponsor had treated the owner, to determination to recommend the best course of action for the owner.
We did our work, our valuations. We built our model and talked to the owner. We came up with a good option. Thought I walked away from the scenario with a couple of thoughts:
- The business world needs men and women who are willing to fight for those who cannot defend themselves from the 800 pound gorillas
- There’s a clear distinction between people who open their own companies because it’s their passion and those who simply want to make money.
- Never take anything for granted because you never know when it might be taken away from you
We all left the case upset a little at the situation of the owner. However, our debrief conversation taught us a lot about ourselves and further instilled the determination to have excellent character but to also be exceptional at business.