THIS Method improved my case interview success rate by 90% | McKinsey consultant tip sharing

i remember back when i was first practicing for case interviews during my junior year i was to be honest pretty terrible at it i tried really hard i mean i spent the time practicing tons of cases try to memorize all the frameworks that are out there but somehow despite all that practice i just feel like i just didn't get it and all of my case interviews turned out to be pretty terrible well that changed when i tried this method hello hello hello welcome back to the channel this is angie well it's consulting recruiting season again it is the most fun and stressful time of the year probably for a lot of you who are looking for a job in consulting i've got a lot of you asking ngng can you do a video that talks about the tips that you had about preparing for consulting interviews absolutely here is the video for it a quick introduction for those who don't know me or have never been to my channel before so i worked at mckenzie out of the chicago office from 2016-2019 during my time at mckinsey i was also a trend interviewer so i can tell you that one of the most important part about doing well in a case interview is its initial framework or the structure why is framework of the structure the most important part well it's almost like opening a lock if you got the wrong key to start with it almost doesn't even matter how much force you apply the lock will not open also based on my own experience and during conversations with a lot of you framework or the case structure is actually the most difficult part about the case interview um you gotta be messy which is mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive but at the same time we also don't like when we just blindly apply any pre-existing framework and trust me interviewers will know immediately if you're doing that or not and you would definitely get penalized for that well this may sound tough but it also makes sense because the most important skill for a consultant right is the problem solving skill we need to make sure that because every business case or business problems is so unique consultants need flexible who can adapt who can customize and bring the best solution to our client so this exercise that i'm going to share is super effective i can contribute probably 90 of my improvement on my kids interviews especially the framework structure to this exercise it's also great because it is something that you can do on your own anytime anywhere it doesn't actually require you to have a partner or case buddy so without further ado let me introduce the exercise the imp exercise the it's my problem thought exercise well what exactly is imp it is actually a thought process where you can make up any business problem and pretend that you are the business owner in charge of solving the problem so try to figure out what is the structure that i'm going to have to approach this problem it is great because the thought exercise so you can literally do it anywhere anytime whether it's you know when you're walking on the street for a quick stroll or when you're on your commute let me give you an example during the pandemic rafe and i were very sad to hear that one of our favorite fusion restaurant actually had to close down we were really really sad so in this case the thought exercise would be if i were that restaurant owner what could i do to actually turn that around so in this first example we want to solve is how to turn the restaurant around that is the key question and if i were to think about it as restaurant owner i would look into two areas from external as in what are the different policies things that are out of my control that i can take advantage of and the internal you know things that i will be able to make a decision oral so when it comes to external it's more about the policies the government benefits or any sort of like tax credit that i can take advantage while the pandemic's still going on and then when it comes to internal we actually are concerned more about the profitability of it so what is profitability profitability is revenue minus cost so i want to both improve my revenue and decrease my cost and then when it comes to revenue right i can look into both our existing revenue or explore if there's any actually any new revenue stream from the existing revenue perspective we are you know in the restaurant business so the existing revenue will mainly be from eaters and from you know orders so for the existing revenue we can break it down into you know the number of customers that can support us and or the price right of the item the price of the food um when it comes to you know try to increase the number of customers um or the number of orders there's a bunch of things that we can actually do which include you know delivery we can work with platforms such as uber delivery uber eats to actually do more delivery and we can also work with other platforms to encourage people to actually come and pick it up or we can also work with meal plan type of services such as hellofresh to actually include it there or we can also try to get community support try to encourage people in the neighborhood to come and order food i want to say that on the price area it probably is going to be a bit difficult to actually increase the price however what we can do is that we can try to decrease the price to encourage more orders and as a result still promotes more revenue streams and on their new revenue side right we can think about what are the other type of business that we can potentially expand to to get new revenues um so as an example we can probably pair up with other restaurants or wine bars or whatever so then you know if you order from another restaurant you can also come and pick up from our restaurant which will also encourage people to spend more we can do cooking classes right because it is a very nice restaurant so i'm sure there's going to be tons of people who want to learn how to do asian asian fusion maybe i can do a youtube channel and try to make some ad revenues from that as well or extend it from that i can do cookbooks right um and then or guys to sell it to people um or we can also as i mentioned before i think it's along the same line of the meal plan delivery service we can sell special ingredients to people who actually want to recreate the dishes at home so all of this are ways where we can actually improve the increase the revenue so when it comes to cost side of things we actually want to decrease cost costs typically are in you know variable cost or your fixed cost so what are the costs that you can think of that are relevant to operating a restaurant so definitely a rent is going to be a big part of it because the restaurant that we really loved is situated in a very busy street so the rent is probably not going to be very cheap there's also the staff cost you know our waiter waitress our cook you know all the supporting staff maybe our furnitures because you uh you know we're a restaurant so we have tons of furnitures right that we have already bought um and then final piece is you know the utilities cost right like you know we incur electricity water anything like that so those are the general bucket that i can think of so when it comes to rent right because it's pandemic so we can probably try to negotiate with our landlord to decrease rent or we can just get rid of our restaurant so no restaurant we can probably try to do the whole ghost kitchen concept where we only need a kitchen which will decrease our rent costs significantly when it comes to staff we probably will have to unfortunately remove some of our weight staff maybe because you know we don't really have customers in our restaurant so unfortunately maybe on a temporary base we won't be able to work with them anymore which would also decrease our cost on the furniture side you know it really depends on what we want to do with the rent if we are going to go with the ghost kitchen model then we can sell furniture and then we can probably get some of the uh the cost back to our pocket um utility you know when we are not operating we can just be more mindful to decrease the utility cost for example like you know turn off all the lights when we are not around um stuff like that so there are tons of things that we can do when it comes to cost so this very easily was you know just the thought exercise that i had it's very simple to carry out it's very easy to do and really make sure that you know whatever problem you solve you can immediately bringing in your own experience your own knowledge and just really making sure that you know solving a problem with the structure becomes your nature here is another example recently i'm in china i've been using this service called iflight tag to actually turn my audios into captions which i love i absolutely love this product it's super cheap it's super fast and it seems that the currently available market is in china so if i were the ceo of ifly tech should i actually expand the service to outside of china to international market all right another example that i mentioned before was the ifly tech whether we should do an international expansion as the ceo so if you're the ceo what are the different aspect or criterias that you have to think about right off the bat i think you know there are five general buckets that we should consider first of all which is you know is the market of converting audios or videos into text whether it's for captions or for transcript is it actually um profitable enough right do we have a future in this market and then the second piece that i want to look into is the competition i want to really understand the competitive landscape when it comes to the audio video converting text market right how competitive it is would really determine you know how difficult it is to actually break into the market the third piece is our uh competitive advantage i want to know um as i apply tag you know how are we compared to our competitors do we actually have a significant competitive advantage to ensure that we will be successful and then the last piece is actually um actually the fourth piece is the success criteria right how do we measure success what are the different things that we need to look at and then lastly with any major international expansion there are going to be risks so what are the risks that we have to think about ahead of time so first deep dive into market um so when it comes to market potential what we really want to focus on is probably a quick market size we want to know exactly how big is the current market when it comes to converting you know audio and video into transcript or for captions and we also want to know probably a little bit more about the future right um of this market do we have a big future because i think right now two things are actually fueling the growth of the market one is the content creator economy there are more and more content creators that are out there and therefore fueling the need for this and then the second piece is actually the increased frequency of having online meetings because of those online meetings it's actually also important to have to have the transcriptions available so are these trends actually going to continue in the next years or decades it's something that we have to think about the next piece is competition because i fly tech is currently in china so we want to know whether they are other uh competitors that are out there that are in other market right um are they new how long have have they been in the market also uh is this something that can be relatively easy for us to or for others to enter our our entry right because if it's easy then it probably means that we're going to have tons of other competitors in a very short amount of time the market is going to be very fragment all right net then the next step is our competitive advantage so if i were to think about you know what i care the most when it comes to choosing a service uh for transcription or caption service as a user i would think about speed i would think about accuracy i would think about cost i would think about payment right how would i pay so i want to know then um between you know comparing ifi tag with our other competitors for example rep.com is something else that i've used you know how are we comparing against all the different aspects right is our transcription service fast how accurate is it right how much additional work do i have to do as a user how much does it cost which is very important and then how do i pay the one thing that i know with ifly tech is that right now it seems that only payment options are wechat or alipay so it's more focused in china versus you know when you're going through international expansion a lot of people might not have those options so if that is something that we definitely have to think about then the fourth piece you know how do we measure success what do we consider as successful and i think when it comes to success um a lot of people will immediately think about profitability right how profitable can we get um and then how long can we get profitable because it can be quite costly to have the international expansion so we definitely wanted to think about the time horizon there as well and then the second piece is probably going to be the market cap right like how long would it take actually for us to get um to attract the number of users that we want which is also going to be really important and then last but not least we want to also think about the risk risk is quite important as with any business decisions there is going to be a ton of risk so number one is going to be the cost right um international expansion is very expensive so how much are we willing to spend on international expansion um and then the second piece is you know the the the environment the context because you know the chinese market is going to be very different from for example the european market or the north american market so how can we make sure that you know we also step the right people to do this and i think another piece that could be quite interesting is going to be the regulations around it because after all when you are a transcription service um you know users are actually uploading information onto your platforms right so when it comes to regulations about privacy about protection all this sort of stuff like you know the chinese government may have a completely different privacy law as compared to for example the us government or the canadian government so to actually be able to have a product that is compliant with the local market regulations is also going to be extremely important so as you probably have noticed when i was going through my thought exercise i wasn't just blindly trying to apply any front work to my case i also brought in tons of my own perspectives and my knowledge about the market this interview um you know at its core it's actually testing your problem solving skill it is more about whether you're logical whether you are structured whether you can actually break down a big problem into smaller pieces so just learn and enjoy the process don't stress over too much about it and good luck until next time bye

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Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 15 2021