Speaker 1: 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, tried to memorize all the frameworks that are out there. But somehow, despite all that practice, I just felt 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 consultant 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, Angie, Angie, can you do a video that talks about the tips that you had about preparing for consultant 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 McKinsey out of the Chicago office from 2016 to 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 or 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. You got to be measy, which is mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. But at the same time, we also don't like only just blindly apply any preexisting 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 case 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 a 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 it's a 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 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 on our own. 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 in the restaurant business. So the existing revenue will mainly be from eaters and from 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. When it comes to, you know, try to increase the number of customers 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, Deliveroo, 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 wanna 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 the 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. So as 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 gonna be tons of people who wants to learn how to do Asian fusion. Maybe I can do a YouTube channel and try to make some ad revenues from that as well. Or extended from that, I can do cookbooks, right? And then, or guides to sell it to people. 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. Cost typically are in, you know, variable costs or your fixed cost. So what are the costs that you can think of that are relevant to operating a restaurant? So definitely 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, you know, we're a restaurant, so we have tons of furnitures, right? That we have already bought. 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 cost significantly. When it comes to staff, we probably will have to unfortunately remove some of our wait 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 cost back to our pocket. 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, 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 it really makes sure that, you know, whatever problem you solve, you can immediately bring 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 iFlight Tag, should I actually expand the service to outside of China, to international market? All right, another example that I mentioned before was the iFlight Tag, whether we should do an international expansion as the CEO. So if you're the CEO, what are the different aspect or criteria 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 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 competitive advantage. I want to know as iFlight 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, 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. So when it comes to market potential, what we really want to focus on, it's 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, 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 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 iFlight Tech is currently in China, so we want to know whether there are other competitors that are out there that are in other market, right? Are they new? How long have they been in the market? Also, is this something that can be relatively easy for us to, or for others to enter 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, then the next step is our competitive advantage. So if I were to think about what I care the most when it comes to choosing a service 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, how would I pay? So I want to know then between comparing iFlight Tech with our other competitors, for example, Rep.com is something else that I've used. How are we comparing against all the different aspect, 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 iFlight Tech is that right now it seems that the only payment options are WeChat or Alipay, so it's more focused in China, versus when you're going through international expansion, a lot of people might not have those options. So that is something that we definitely have to think about. Then the fourth piece, how do we measure success? What do we consider as successful? And I think when it comes to success, a lot of people will immediately think about profitability, right? How profitable can we get? 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, 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's going to be a ton of risk. So number one is going to be the cost, right? International expansion is very expensive, so how much are we willing to spend on international expansion? And then the second piece is the environment, the context, because 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 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, 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 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. Case interview, at its core, it's actually testing your problem-solving skills. 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.