Case Interview Secrets Quotes

“Based on this, my working hypothesis is that Omega & Omega must participate more effectively in this market segment if it wants to grow.”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“Candidate: Well, this is really interesting. So far we’ve established that digital advertising is the spending category that’s growing, and the most recent information shows us that the big companies spend the most on advertising. My hypothesis is that the big companies are the ones shifting toward digital advertising in their marketing plans. To test this, I need to see a breakdown of advertising spending for the big companies over the past three years. Are the big companies the ones driving spending in digital advertising?”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“Candidate: Because digital advertising is the only segment that’s growing, we need to understand more about what’s going on with customers, so I’m going to switch gears and analyze customers next. Interviewer: That sounds like a reasonable plan. Why don’t you go ahead and do that. Candidate: I’d like to know who these customers are. What are the key customer segments? What’s the growth rate of each segment? Interviewer: Well, the customers are Fortune 500 brand managers such as Procter & Gamble, midmarket-size clients, and small-business clients.”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“Candidate: Given this circumstance, my revised hypothesis is that to jump-start growth, Omega & Omega has to find some way to participate in the only market segment that’s growing: digital advertising. To test this hypothesis, we have to figure out what’s driving growth for digital agencies and determine if it’s a long-term trend or just a temporary one. And we need to figure out if the client can find a way to benefit from this trend.”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“Candidate: Aha! Interesting. So industry growth is really being driven by a single segment that is offsetting flat and declining sales in other segments. (Note the effective use of a mini-synthesis.)”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“Candidate: OK, so a few big players control half the market, and a bunch of smaller players participate in the other half of the market. Next, given my hypothesis that our client is missing out on some segment of the market, I’d like to better understand which types of competitors are growing—the global ad agencies, media-buying agencies, direct response agencies, or digital agencies.”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“Candidate: To better understand what’s going on for Omega & Omega and its industry, we need to look at four key areas: the customers, the products, the company itself, and the competitors.”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“Because the profitability framework won’t give me the additional information I need about customers and competitors, I’ve officially exhausted its usefulness. My working hypothesis has evolved and the current framework doesn’t cover the data needed to test that hypothesis,”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“Candidate: I sense we’re just missing something critical. Something is causing this to happen. Either customers have changed in a way that has benefited our competitors but not our client, or competitors have changed in a way that attracts new business but we haven’t. (Note how I framed the issue in concrete terms: Either competitors or customers have changed. Laying out an issue in this structured way makes it easier for the interviewer to follow your logic. I could just as easily have said, “I think we need to look into the customers themselves,” or I could have started asking questions about customers. The problem with diving in this way is that it doesn’t give the interviewer any insight into the organization of your thought process. Are you asking questions like a reporter would, or are you asking questions for a specific purpose?”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“the rest of the industry is experiencing some kind of growth—either more accounts or more billings per account. Is comparable data for the rest of the industry available? Interviewer: Yes, it is. The number of large advertisers has not changed for the rest of the industry. The aggregate spending of each advertiser across all agencies has increased”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“I’d like to know the components of revenue. For example, do we know if there’s a change in revenue per account or in the number of accounts? Interviewer: The number of accounts has remained constant, and the average billings per account has remained unchanged. Candidate: That’s interesting. No real change, huh? Our client seems to be maintaining the status quo.”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“I was able to get to this much more specific point in a minute or two just by asking some of the right questions. Also, notice that I asked each question for a specific reason. Some candidates, unfortunately, ask dozens of questions without a concrete objective in mind.)”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“Our goal now is to figure out what the rest of the industry is doing that our client isn’t to grow sales.”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“The rest of the industry appears to have grown sales by 10 percent, with profits growing proportionally. This indicates that the industry-wide profit margin percentages have remained unchanged and that the primary driver of increased profits is sales growth. It also suggests the rest of the industry has not undertaken any major cost-reduction initiatives. If we solve the sales problem for the client, the data suggests that the profit problem will solve itself.”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“Candidate: OK, things have remained flat during this time. I wonder if this is an industry-wide problem or a company-specific problem. Is comparable data for the rest of the industry available?”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“Candidate: This is a pretty broad problem, so I’d like to start with an arbitrary hypothesis. Because the client wants both sales and profits to increase, let’s hypothesize that the client has a sales growth problem. To test that hypothesis, I’d like to break down the client’s profits into its component parts: sales and costs. Specifically, I’d like to understand how each has changed in the past three years, because we know that’s the duration in which sales and profits have remained flat.”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“Candidates commonly and mistakenly interchange sales with profits. A company that wants to grow profits wants something completely different than does one that cares only about growing sales. Many candidates hear the word grow and automatically assume the client wants to grow only sales or only profits. Never assume. Always listen carefully and always double-check that you heard correctly.)”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“The most common M&A cases center on either strategic value or cost savings. The premise of a strategic value deal is that the combination of the two companies creates something more than either company could achieve on its own. A classic example of such a transaction is when Company A, a huge company with the biggest sales force on Earth, wants to acquire Company B, a small company that has a hot, brand-new product but very limited sales distribution. The rationale is that you move the product from Company B to Company A, let the large sales force work its magic, and boom! The new company has the hottest product on the market and the best distribution. In the cost savings deal, the new company combines the two companies in order to “eliminate” a negative (in this case, costs).”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“After you analyze each company independently, you’ll run a third analysis of the two companies combined, which will provide you with qualitative insights about the benefits of such a transaction. Once you run all the analyses, you would use the qualitative data to refine your hypothesis and then analyze the potential benefits quantitatively (e.g., estimate the magnitude of financial benefit).”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“(sometimes it makes sense to buy a competitor in order to shut it down) as a way to boost industry prices.”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“Once this happens, no matter where I am in the framework, I immediately synthesize, revise my hypothesis, and determine what is the least amount of information I need to test my revised hypothesis.”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“About 50 percent of the time, I don’t finish the entire business situation framework. By the time I’ve worked through part of the framework, I usually discover some key insight that gives me a feel for what’s really going on in a case.”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“If your client can’t beat the competitor in its area of strength, one strategic option is to refocus your client’s business on a competitor’s weakness. If the competitor sells at the lowest prices, has the lowest cost structure, and is realistically unbeatable at the low-price game, you could position your client as the high-priced, highest-quality provider instead.”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“If your client isn’t winning in the marketplace, ask, “What is the competitor doing that we aren’t?”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“Competitor Behaviors Answer these questions: What strategic choices do key competitors make? Who are their customers? What products do they offer? What distribution channels do they use?”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“The more concentrated the competition, the more you have to worry about it. If you don’t realize when a case involves high competitor concentration, you could easily make a strategic recommendation that’s flat-out wrong. The easiest way to assess competitor concentration is to ask the following questions: How many competitors are there? How big are they (in terms of sales or market share)?”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“If you understand the revenue concentration in a few key competitors (or the lack thereof), you get a sense of how much power these competitors possess. Power typically comes from two places: (1) a dramatically lower cost structure that can support lowering prices while maintaining profitability, and (2) a concentration so high that customers have no alternatives (competitor can raise prices and “force” customers to buy because they have few or no other choices).”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“Competitor behaviors (customer segments, products, pricing strategy, distribution strategy, brand loyalty)”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“organizational structure can be useful to analyze in cases that involve an execution aspect. Most cases deal with a big strategic decision—not the execution of a previously made decision—so you likely won’t need to consider this topic during the case interview. As a working consultant, however, you would be wise to analyze the company’s organizational structure to identify any conflicts between the structure and the strategy. We can refer again to the Fortune 500 CIO for this topic: If the CIO will deal with only one point of contact, he will not want to work with a company organized into five divisions, each with its own sales force.”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

“consider whether intangible assets such as brand names, reputation, and culture are relevant in testing the hypothesis. For example, if a no-name company and Coca-Cola introduced the exact same beverage, which one would do better in the marketplace? Similarly, much of Apple’s fanatical customer following is due to the company’s expertise in and reputation for product design.”
― Victor Cheng, Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting