Question

Read the case study and answer the following questions

1. Describe Amy's entrepreneurial style. What are the strengths and weaknesses of Amy's style? How does her style impact an expansion decision?

2. Identify Amy's mission and key goals and objectives for the company

3. What internal strengths and weaknesses exist? What are the external opportunities and threats facing Amy's Bread?

4. Who are Amy's customers? Should Amy concentrate on just retail or wholesale business?

5. What would you do if you were Amy? Some options include:

• expand,

• stay put,

• expand with wholesale only,

• expand with retail only,

• expand with wholesale and retail,

• two locations or one.

Answer 1

1. Amy's entrepreneurial style is of a Researcher as she spent time, energy and effort to learn the craft of bread-making in Europe. Only after getting the complete knowledge and understanding of the process, she decided to start Amy's Bakery.

Strengths of Researcher Style:

• Detailed planning and focus on the smallest of details
• Focus on information and data, rather than a gut feeling
• Chances of failure are low as they have planned for most of the contingencies

Weaknesses of Researcher Style:

• Low risk-takers and over-thinking about plans and expansions
• As it is a thought out business, the expansion is sometimes slow

Researcher style is a low-risk taking style of entrepreneurship, which makes it difficult for the owner to take quick decisions making the growth slow which also affects the expansion process.

2. Amy's mission is to become "famous for making a great product with creating a good place to work."

Goals and Objectives of Amy' Bakery:

• Provide quality products made from quality ingredients.
• Focus on wholesale customers with retailers on the side.
• To be a sustainable business rather than getting rich.
• Well paid and happy staff.

3. Internal Strengths of Amy's Bakery:

• Happy and dedicated owner and staff.
• Use of quality ingredients and products
• Detailed knowledge of the product acquired from months of research

Internal Weaknesses:

• Long working hours of the owner.
• Small space with increasing demand.
• The major part of sales goes in employee remunerations.
• Decision taking time from the owner.

External Opportunities:

• A lot of wholesale buyers want the product from Amy's Bakery
• Famous for making quality products has built a good market for the business
• Offered to open the bakery in a shared space where retail income may rise multi-fold.

External Threats:

• New smaller bakeries opening on a regular basis.
• Well established older businesses were expanding with multiple chains and catering to a large retail population

4. Amy's customers are majorly contributed by wholesale buyers like restaurants and hotels. She gets only about 25% of sales from retailers who walk up to her bakery to check it out.

Amy should focus more on retail to increase the profits and should seriously think about the offer she received from a developer to open the bakery in a block-long warehouse renovation. She can run the wholesale business from the existing location and move the retail to the new warehouse. It would a little financial risk, but given her reputation in the market it should be a profitable expansion.