5 Tactics To Stand Out In Your Profitability Case Interviews
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 พ.ค. 2024
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If you're doing case interviews at McKinsey, Bain, BCG or any other top consulting firm, you WILL have to solve profitability cases.
In both interviewer-led and candidate-led profitability cases, there are a few things you can do that will drastically improve your interviewer's perception of your performance.
In this video, I go through 5 specific tactics you can use to dramatically improve your performance and stand out in your case interviews.
Also, check our website for in-depth articles on case interviews: www.craftingcases.com/
Please subscribe to our channel and leave a comment below!
Table of Contents:
00:50 - Tactic #1 - Acknowledge business model on your issue tree
04:26 - Tactic #2 - Create a step-by-step plan
07:09 - Tactic #3 - Get to the root cause
10:01 - Tactic #4 - Quantify
12:50 - Tactic #5 - Get strategic - แนวปฏิบัติและการใช้ชีวิต
1. Make your issue tree client business specific.
2. Show your roadmap to solve the case
3. Find the root cause both in numbers and in operations
4.Quantify the impact on profitability
5. Develop strategic insights based on the analysis
wow... this summarizes everything.Thank you for helping
SPOILER!
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This is by far the best case interview channel. Thanks!
Im preparing for a case study coming up soon and these videos are really useful in helping me get into shape. Thank you !
Was prepping for an interview soon..and you guys have all done a fantastic job. These insights have changed how I look at casing problems
Thanks for this great video, Bruno! I can say that the first tactic is something one McK senior consultant told me, and i already applied it in my practicing - makes a huge difference. Keep on with making the videos please - at the moment the best thing to watch while preparing :-)
Bruno you're hands down the best. Thanks for the help mate!
Great video! Very clear and straight forward. Thank you!
That's great CraftingCases, thank you. Also, a good alternative for analyzing the change in profits, revenue, and costs would be to break down these metrics by months or business units instead of doing by customers. Telecom providers have millions of customers, which would be hard to analyze. Branching into periods or segments first would make it easier to identify which one of these has been affected by the change.
This is SO useful! Thank you so much!!!
Perfect work. Very useful tips!
Super insightful!! after weeks of trying to find the best case interview guru, i finally landed in! thank you!
Thank you so much for this video. Was really good. Love the free course
Great Video, really comprehensive approach. Thank you so much.
Hats off to you Sir for sharing such great content!! It really help us progessing in our career
Thanks, this is a GOAT education. GREATLY helpful
Thank you, this is a super useful video!
Great work, thanks for sharing
Thank you, Bruno, this has given some serious insights to proceed. Appreciate it
Hey Mohammed, glad to be of help!
The getting strategic tactic is one of the most helpful tips I got by watching case interview videos on youtube. Thank you so much!
You're welcome!
Very inspiring! Thanks!
I appreciate your content alot! Keep it up
Hey guys,
Let me know how these tactics will help you improve your performance on your next profitability case interview. Also, let me know what's the #1 case interview concern that's been on your mind so we can make a video addressing that concern.
I love to be of help :)
Bruno
Please do a video on all the important ratios..and please do a finance focused case involving designing an investment portfolio
Thank you Bruno for sharing with us the right approach, i m following the online course and is very instructive
#1 concern: how to present my insights well in a structured way not using too much time
Super helpful! Thanks
This is very helpful!!!! I am starting to do independent consulting without any experience working in any MBB-esque firms before though I have a good experience in commercial & strategy role in my previous company (left already). I was wondering if you could also create a content for people like me cuz Im sure there are a lot out there. Thanks Bruno.
It may be useful to initially consider the industry structure that the client belongs to. This can help in many ways like delineating profit potential, pricing products and other actions that the company can actually undertake which may help them to grow profitably.
Anyone noticed he spent nearly 3 hours shooting this video. (Clock on top right corner)
Awesome tips, thanks heaps for sharing!
Very useful and insightful，thx！
You guys are amazing, I also watched your crafting case videos (can't believe its free!!!).I think beyond the videos, the articles are really worth reading. Eespecially the MECE series, I learnt so much insights from this article . THAN YOU!
Hey Andrea, super glad you liked it! Best luck in your interviews.
Only half way through your online course, but already now convinced that you guys have the best methodology out there. Thank you so much!! At some point or other and in one way or another I will make sure money flows from my pocket to your pockets. You guys absolutely deserve it.
Hey Janno, glad the free course is helping you out! I'd love to hear more about your experience going through it.
@@CraftingCases I have a Political Science background so I'm quite used to thinking in terms of your landscape technique, i.e. in very generic categories like "actors", "structures" and "interfaces". You recommend to have them in the back of one's mind for all cases, private and public sector ones alike. So I guess one might have expected me to benefit less from your course than someone with a business background, for whom thinking in these categories is less common. But i still benefited incredibly, because in a way you guys gave me the "permission" to think in a way that I was already used to thinking in, and you showed me how this thinking can be incredibly powerful also in consulting. This is why I would recommend your course to anyone, people with and people without a business background.
This video is awesome 👏
Well explained.
Hey Bruno! That's great material, as everything Crafting do :-)
I can't wait to do a new profitability case and apply these tactics, they make a lot of sense, specially #2! It is acctualy a good thing to do to a lot of other types of cases and I'll definetely incorporate it in my approach.
Happy that it helped!
I really think #2 is important because it forces you to step back and see the big picture before jumping into the problem and solving the nitty-gritty (which is important but when done without the big picture first may hamper you from seeing other potential aspects of the case).
Hi Bruno and thanks for the video ! I'd like to know how to be better in finding strategic elements to add !
Very helpful!
Very insightful and useful. Thanks for the content.
You're welcome, Uday!
Thanks Bruno!
Really good!
Nice case study. Could you please give case study on healthcare, how to increase sales of drugs
This was common thing to me . When i started doing strategy consulting on the side , i get amazed that executives with big corporate cant do this !
Thanks for nicely made course .
Hey Bader, indeed some executives in big corporations can't do simple profit analysis. I mean, I guess they could but it's not intuitive to them. I think that happens especially when you have executives who are superstars in their specialty (be it operation, sales, marketing, etc) but have little to no skill in other areas.
Of course, this is happening less and less as people realize they can't thrive on silos.
Hi team, any advice on how to land interviews with no prior consulting experience? only experience in operations departments
How to get better at reccomendations after identifying the root cause and how do you quantify impact on profitability?
Thanks Bruno! I hope you've managed to catch more sleep since 2018.
Hey, Bruno!
Nice video again! You and Julio have been helping me a lot in my prep.
I have a doubt based on two cases I've done recently. They were both related to Profitability, but not focused on solving a problem the client has, they were focused on improving the client's results in the middle/long term (5 years). The main question of the case was something like that: "Our client wants to increase its revenues/decrease its costs in 5 years, how would you help them?"
How would you structure this type of case? (They are both from Ross Casebook 2013 - Case #5 and #11, if you wanna check)
I taught a simple Issue Tree wouldn't address everything that is needed for this type of case, I would miss a lot of elements that would be important, such as the competitors and customers/demand ("How will they behave in the next 5 years?" "Is there any specific trend/focus they are following?", ... ). But, only using a Conceptual Framework wouldn't, as well, address the problem very well, in my opinion.
The best solution I found was to structure my approach in 3 steps:
(1) Gather strategic context --> A conceptual framework to gather broad/general data on how this market/industry will behave in the next years
(2) Finding solutions --> Using an issue tree and data from last step; prioritizing the most relevent options
(3) Defining the best ones (considering implementation and risks)
What do you think about that?
You're right about this problem Luis. You do need both types of structures, one to generate options/solutions and another as "criteria" to see if the strategy matches what the context requires.
And the approach you've laid out works.
There are other approaches that work as well (e.g. options first, criteria second to eliminate options), and one is not better than the other. If you're comfortable with the one you're doing, go with that because it does work!
Very insightful from you to realize that, by the way.
Thanks for the answer, Bruno! That will help me a lot!
What would be a possible solution to an industry wide problem? For eg: fall in price per unit being an industry wide issue
very nice video.
Glad you liked it Vivek!
Hi Bruno! Thank you for the great content as always! I have a question about the third tactic and I hope you can help me with that.
When you say that we have to find the real root cause, is still not clear to me one thing, in what moment in the case interview should I do that? I don't know if is after I find out what the numerical problem is, I ask for time and try to make hypothesis, for example.
Also, should I ask the why questions for myself and try to draw some hypothesis and check them with the interviewer, or should I ask them to the interviewer straight If its not clear in the case yet?
Thanks a lot!!
Hey Daniel,
Finding the root cause is the #1 thing you should do. You just structure the case and find the numerical cause first because those are the necessary steps to find the real root cause as efficiently as possible. Those things are only there so you can guarantee you'll find the root cause quickly enough.
As for the why questions, you can ask directly to your interviewer. What many do is to throw the question back to you and ask you "why do you think?". If they do that, you should draw hypothesis in a structured way (a structured brainstorming of hypotheses), which will either prompt them to tell you why or have them ask you how would you test those hypos.
If you want to see more videos than the ones that are on TH-cam, you'll like to know that our free course has 30+ of our BEST videos organized in a way that will help you SYSTEMATICALLY improve your case solving. It's 100% free. You can learn more get instant access to it at www.craftingcases.com/freecourse
Is the example at 8:37 the issue tree?
Hey guys, I have a question: at which point should you consider if the problem is industry wide or is related just to the company? should you do that at the beginning or at the moment you find the root cause?
Thanks!
This is great material
Regardless of the problem being internal or external, it HAS TO reflect in a number on the P&L. That means you can find the NUMERICAL root cause without having to worry about the source of the problem.
Then, of course, to find the REAL root cause of the change in that number, you'll need to go qualitative and think of hypotheses that are both internal and external to the company.
(One thing you can do at the beginning of the drill-down to anticipate this a little bit is to benchmark if the competitors had the same problem - this is an indication (though not a guarantee) that the problem is industry-wide).
Hi Bruno,
In the video, you mentioned “Ticket per sale”. Do you mind to elaborate more on the meaning of it please? Thank you very much.
Hey Chakkaphan,
What I meant is the average transaction size, or how many dollars (or whatever currency) per transaction, per sale. There are different names for that and they vary by industry, but you can think of it as "# of transactions * avg. $ per transaction"
CraftingCases Hi Bruno,
Thank you so much for your reply. I now fully understand that. I have just purchased your courses and really looking forward to get myself into it.
You're welcome!
I did notice that you've purchased our course. Let me know if it's helping you and if there's anything else we can do for you :)
Hi Bruno, I really like those tactics and I've been using them in profitability cases with great success. However, I realised they work best for the type of profitability case that mentions that there's a problem to solve and asks you how to solve it. For example " Profits are dropping, client wants to know why and what to do about it". Faced with such a question, the 3 steps approach works great.
However, when faced with a profitability question like "Client has hired you to increase profits of this business", there's no more "root cause" so what steps would you recommend here ? Would it be enough to say " Step 1 im going to break down profitabily into its main levers, and step2 i'm gonna look at what can be done at each lever to increase profitability" ? I tried that step approach in case practice and people thought i'm not MECE cause i'm looking at the same things twice.
There are also some elements that are important to mention in some profitabiliy cases like "Capabilities" (Can the company actually put in the place those solutions) and "Risks", would you actually mention those in the framework ?
Long story short, you outline the drivers of profitability and find the key driver(s) you want to work on, then what's the best 1-3 things to do to improve that driver.
Some times it works out to be a little bit more complex than that because one driver/action influences the others, but if you go to the "boil the ocean" approach of looking at capabilities and market conditions and etc. without first considering even if you want to focus on revenue generation or cost cutting, you're likely to be dead.
impressing
Good video! Better on 2x speed xD
How would we go about figuring out how much % of the problem the solution solves??
In these types of case studies, can we take the approach of reducing operating expenses? Let me explain...can we suggest we reduce the cost of entertainment expense, move to another building with lower rent or create vacant space in our builsing and rent it to othwr businesses? Xan we refinance our loans? Focus on recovering bad debts and restructure or reduce the cresit cycle of accounts receivable? Reduce energy expense fr businesses by introducing work from home? I hope you understand what i am talking about. Further, we can reduce bonuses, dividen payout, if any, close loss making projects, assign idle assets as for-sale to eliminate depreciation expense, re look at liabilty provisions...ww can look at their financial statements and sww the expense side and try to figure out what we can eliminate.
Yes, but first you need to determine that operating expenses are the root cause of the problem OR the best solution to the problem among all other solutions.
Then you have to determine WHICH expense(s) are the one(s) you should address again through a process of elimination.
If you just list stuff that cones to your head, you’ll fail. Not because you’re (necessarily) wrong but because the process of coming to the solution wasn’t sound and methodical.
Great example. Im working i telco ind. and we dont do this things , finding solutions for revenue dropping.
Hey Edin, I'm glad you liked the example!
Hello, I would like to ask about how we know that the root cause from revenue or cost?
I see that is one of them will be the root cause, but I don't know how to find or decide it.
You should just ask for the data. How much were revenues before and how much are they now; how much were costs before and how much are they now.
You don't have to guess, just to ask for the right data and find your conclusions.
should I be telling the interviewer about the step by step process plan that I have planned?
Sure!
Is this management or financial consulting?
Management
Hey Bruno, where are you from? Haha! :)
And what are your plans post McKinsey? What do consultants do afterwards in their career?
Hey Nothingnessinreturn!
I am from Brazil :)
My plans after McKinsey are to teach people how to think in a structured, hypothesis-driven way to solve business problems. I love to teach and I feel too many people teach concepts and theories and too few people teach how to apply those and think through a problem.
Been doing this with Julio for a few years and loving it!
How about you? Where are you from and what are your plans?
6:30 Wahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha XD