Personal Reflection: Two Weeks of Case Solving
I am not a typical consulting-type person. My bachelors is in financial mathematics and before coming to HSG I had my eyes set solely on trading and quantitative analysis. But talking to other students made me realize it could be interesting after all. I imagined it was going to be quite easy too, with no sophisticated quant stuff, only basic logic and coming up with new business ideas. It sounded nice. So you will understand I was really happy when Adam, a friend of mine with lots of consulting experience, invited me to apply for an international case competition as a member of HSG team. I obviously said yes and the next day I met Istvan, our mentor. He came across as a very sincere guy, smart and easy to talk to, and I was really glad to land a place in the team. Thus our 2-week journey of case study solving began.
Before attending the case competition, the whole team (Adam, Maxim, Istvan, me) decided to meet in Budapest to solve a few cases on our own, as well as attend Case Camp (organized by Case Solvers). Well, I have to tell you, the initial experience was a big shock for me. Istvan believes in “working under pressure” so he gave us quite a long case to solve in roughly 5 hours. It was my first case study ever and my performance wasn’t particularly good. Maxim and Adam were doing fine, but after 3 and a half hours I didn’t have much to show for so we decided to just wrap it up and discuss instead how to do better the next day. To get a taste of how much we should improve, Istvan showed us a short video about Copenhagen Case Competition; the winners were extremely good and that made me slightly nervous. The cases we solved in the following few days and the two cases we solved during the Case Camp were far from what we wanted, but at least I got a feel for it. We came out as a team, we knew what we had to do and we were ready to win the competition.
We arrived at Bled, Slovenia (place where the competition took place) confident. We had the roles set out for us and we also did some prior research on the most probable case topic. It was a 40 hours case; compared to what our mentor had put us through, we were certain we had more than enough time to come up with a good solution. In the end, we came up with a great idea: our business model was holistic, our approach was realistic and we really believed in what we were about to present. Presentation was okay in the end; it could have been much better, but the sleepless nights took their toll. Our 2-week journey ended in the best way possible: we won, took home EUR 2.5k and presented our solution during the opening of Business Strategic Forum (with Sir Suma Chakrabarti, President of the EBRD and Dr Werner Hoyer, President of the EIB among the audience).
Going back to what I wrote in the beginning, consulting turned out to be completely different from what I had expected. Certainly not for the worse though; it was my first case competition ever and I won! But it could have easily turned out differently. We performed as a true team and that’s what it’s all about. Had I been in a different team, I might have given up earlier. Adam and Maxim have shown great patience with me and helped me tremendously throughout the whole journey. Istvan was always there to offer advice, prepared us perfectly for the case competition and brought us many snacks to keep our energy level as high as possible. It was tough at times, but I am very happy I signed up for it and proud of what we’ve achieved. And it’s hard to believe how much I’ve learned in mere two weeks.
Andrej Čop Prek