The Commerce school held a capstone case competition for COMM 4660 April 22. “Advice Business: The Basics of Strategic Consulting” is comprised of 60 third-year Commerce students.
The students were given the task of presenting a new market entry recommendation to a panel of University alumni judges who currently work at top consulting firms.
“I think the objective was to give many of these firm representatives exposure to students in a setting where it is not a networking event and they get an opportunity to see the students in action,” Commerce Asst. Prof. Brendan Boler said. “It also gives the students a real work feel.”
The case provided for the students was developed by David Jacobs, chief strategy officer of Dollar Tree. He recently led Dollar Tree through an $8.5 billion acquisition of Family Dollar in July 2014.
“The case was a market entry analysis, and our job was to determine how Dollar Tree should continue, if at all, its international expansion strategy beyond Canada,” third-year Commerce student Osama Saleem said in an email statement.
The judges of the competition were representatives from top consulting firms such as Bain & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte, McKinsey & Company and Oliver Wyman. PricewaterhouseCoopers not only had a representative as a judge at the event, but they also sponsored the competition.
“The judges were all consultants working for various firms,” Saleem said. “It was important to have real-life consultants as judges because they had the best insight about how arguments, presentations and analyses should be structured. We were able to compare our presentations to those of real-life consultants.”
Virginia football coach Bronco Mendenhall accompanied the case competition and gave a final round keynote speech to discuss how strategic thinking has informed his coaching.
“Mendenhall came to speak to our consulting class on the topic of how he leverages business strategy and philosophy to foster competitive football teams,” Saleem said. “It showed how the principles and skills we learned in the classroom could be translated across various fields and disciplines depending on the approach and mindset.”
The final round was the best cases from both brackets of the competition and were presented to the panel of judges. A winner was then declared.
“They received a certificate and they will probably get a good grade as well because it was part of of an academic course,” Boler said. “They can also put it on their resume.”
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