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Category: consulting-abroad-program

Published on
Blog post written by Jessica Goodman

 

This week we had the pleasure of visiting Beechworth Honey in the town of Beechworth, Australia. What a great opportunity it was for us to visit a small business that is the second largest player in the honey industry with close to 15 percent market share. We talked with the CEO, Sara Quon. Sara has a fascinating background, having worked as Marketing Director & CEO of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and in New Zealand’s dairy industry prior to joining Beechworth. Beechworth Honey is a family-owned business, Steven and Jodie Goldsworthy come from four generations of beekeepers in northeast Victoria, and their family has been selling honey to Aussies for about 120 years!

 

Photo (credit, Natalie May): Sara Quon speaking to CAP Australia about Beechworth

I really admire how committed Beechworth Honey is to its core values, giving back to the community, and safeguarding Australia’s biodiversity. Beechworth Honey regularly advocates to the community about the role that honeybees play in food production and participates in a number of other sustainable initiatives with local partners.

 

Sara told us some alarming statistics during her presentation to our group. Sixty-five percent of Australia’s agricultural produce is pollinated by honeybees (such as avocados and kiwifruit). Yet, Australia faces the constant threat of a varroa mite infestation through their shipping ports. These mites transmit dangerous diseases to honeybees. Once a population of honeybees is infected, it needs the help of beekeepers to survive. Infected honeybees cannot live in the wild. Honeybee populations in the United States and other nations around the world have already been infested with varroa mites.

 

Photo (credit, Natalie May): Scenery on our way to Wodonga and Beechworth.

To further complicate the situation, the number of beekeepers in Australia has declined by 30% since 2008. And, unlike some of their competitors, Beechworth Honey products are produced exclusively in Australia. This presents a unique threat to the company. When Australia faced a drought a few years ago, the event significantly reduced the amount of products that Beechworth Honey was able to sell. At the time, the company chose to diversify the products it sold to customers while holding true to its core values. Beechworth Honey chose the socially responsible path, which is certainly commendable. Sara told us that many Australian consumers are unaware that the honey they purchase from their competitors may not actually be honey at all.

 

Our time at Beechworth Honey with Sara, in my mind, really underscores the importance of being an active and engaged consumer. It is important to understand how the goods we purchase are made – especially the ingredients that go into the food we eat. The visit certainly gave us a lot to think about, and we were sure to stop by the shop to buy some honey on our way out of town!

 

Published on
Blog post written by Jennifer Swartz

 

We are finally here! The entire semester has been building up to these two weeks in Vietnam, and our agenda has been non-stop in the best of ways. Given that, we did not have time to fully develop expectations for our first meeting with our client, Cinestar, a local Vietnamese movie theater. To best prepare, we sent off an email outlining a tentative agenda – review our project with the Cinestar team, address any questions or concerns, and visit a few local Vietnamese theaters. When we finally met, every aspect of our meeting exceeded our expectations.

 

For one thing, Cinestar dedicated the entire day to meet with us – from 8:30am until 6:30pm (the original time was 8:30am-12:30pm). Secondly, they were so invested in our project, truly illustrating time and time again that they wanted to be a part of it. And lastly, they were so immensely kind and generous throughout the day.

Our day began with a comprehensive review of our presentation. We went through each slide, with both our team and Cinestar’s team asked clarifying questions along the way. Cinestar provided constructive criticism, for example nixing elaborate technological enhancements that did not coincide with the needs of their consumer base. Such feedback was not only helpful, but also exciting because it highlighted that the Cinestar team is ultimately striving to implement our recommendations. Our in-depth discussions ensured that everyone was on the same page and that our next steps accurately reflected any changes. Overall, it was incredibly rewarding to see how much our presentation resonated with the Cinestar team.

 

Throughout our meeting, the Cinestar team showered us with kindness and generosity, providing refreshing iced coffees and sodas, as well as delicious Chicago-style popcorn. Following our morning meeting, they treated us to a delectably authentic Vietnamese lunch and visits to all of their key competitors in Ho Chi Minh. For our site visits, we assessed every aspect of their competitors from their purchasing process to facility aesthetics to moviegoer viewing experience. At each theater, we purchased tickets to Deadpool 2 and 11, a Vietnamese romantic comedy. We popped in for parts of both movies equipped with a fresh batch of popcorn each time, as we obviously needed to ascertain which theater provided the best (it was Cinestar). We ended our day around 6:30pm with a fun photo session at one of their competitor’s photo booths.

We went in thinking we would get some questions answered, but we came out getting an immersive education as to how Cinestar operates at both a strategic level in their office and a granular level in their theaters. We were also able to get first-hand look at the typical Vietnamese moviegoing experience, which will be essential to our final project presentation. And most importantly, we got delicious popcorn all. day. long.

Published on
Blog post written by Jennifer Swartz

 

“Congratulations on your placement in the Consulting Abroad Program to Vietnam!” I still remember the feeling of pure joy and excitement upon reading the email that would dictate that the next six months of my life. I would be going to Vietnam, a country that I had long been vying to visit. However, the journey to get there was just beginning.

 

Shortly after receiving our CAP placements, I was put on the Cinestar team with three other amazing classmates. Our task was to work together to identify how we could assist Cinestar, a local Vietnamese movie theater, with expanding their market share in Vietnam. Our first line of business was to establish team norms – everything from expectations to communication to division of labor. This proved to be exponentially helpful and allowed us to operate efficiently and effectively throughout the semester. Our next task was to establish norms with our client.

 

There were many factors to take into consideration when approaching our client. While our contact does speak English, there is definitely a language barrier. On top of that, they are from a completely different culture and time zone. Given all of this, we wanted to utilize technology to the best of our ability to ensure that all parties were on the same page throughout our project.

 

Because of the time zone difference (originally 12 hours, but eventually 11 hours with daylight savings), we opted to have a limited number of phone calls via Skype. Any phone calls we did have were to fully talk through the project, such as when we first were trying to understand the issue at hand, and when we wanted to review our project’s final recommendations. We would follow up all phone calls with a comprehensive recap email. This included a brief summary of what was discussed, as well as next steps and any upcoming deadlines.

 

Our main form of communication thus became emails. To avoid any gaps in communication, we established an email schedule where we would send a project update email every other week. This reassured our client that we were diligently working on our project and provided our team with some structure to go about our project. It also paved the way for an easy platform to ask questions and get further clarification for all parties.

 

One way in which technology was not as beneficial as we would have liked was in our research. Because of the government restrictions in Vietnam, there was a lack of information about the Vietnamese movie industry on traditional search engines. However, we were and still are working closely with our client to determine the best ways to find pertinent pieces of information we need to provide substantial recommendations.

 

Overall, technology has been the crux of getting us through our CAP experience. It has provided a way to develop a solid relationship with our client, as well as allowed us to maintain that initial feeling of pure joy and excitement.

Published on
Blog written by Visola Shukhrat

 

I am one week away from visiting my dream country and presenting my team’s brainchild, Reputational Risk Framework, in front of the most prominent investment group Peru.  Four months of continuous teamwork, 120 busy days and sleepless nights of research, dozens of hours of discussions, minutes of hesitation, and seconds of frustration… This much effort was put forth to produce a final product that we will present in Peru as a part of Consulting Abroad Project (CAP) in our Global MBA Program.

The motivation that kept me awake at nights during this semester was knowing that at the end I will successfully present a unique project, become a world-class leader, and check another exotic country off my bucket list.

 

My teammates and I were chosen among other highly competitive students to work on one of the most ambiguous yet interesting projects – identifying reputational risks in the mining industry in Peru, and creating an index to measure, assess and monitor them. We were very excited about the project and thought it would be no challenge to create a simple index. HA!!!

 

As we had our first meeting with our client contact, Mariana, who is a head of Institutional Affairs at the corporate center for the Breca Group, we realized that we were looking at the project through “rose-colored glasses”. The project required us to do in-depth research on internal operations and external stakeholders relationships of the mining industry. Using that research, we needed to come up with the reputational risk index. The challenges around this project included a lack of resources on this topic in the world, difficulty in quantifying reputational risks, and simply not being able to find corporate documents in English, as all of them were in Spanish.

 

The project was a huge learning curve for the team, as we not only learned all about mining process and operations in this industry, but also experienced working in teams with different types of people and personalities. As a group leader, I personally learned a lot from the process of coordinating the whole project, allocating responsibilities, and delivering the message to the team properly. I realized that not all people absorb information equally and not everyone has the same priorities. As a team, we went through several stages of misunderstanding and miscommunication, which ultimately lead to an unsuccessful presentation in front of internal judges. This experience gave me the courage to pick up extra responsibilities, allocate work more productively, and start having an open conversation with teammates. One of the main takeaways from this stage was that it is essential to keep calm, even when you feel that everything is falling apart, and most importantly, to address issues when they arise and discuss it with everyone openly.

 

Professor Giridharadas gave me guidance on how to approach this type of problem, and I’m working to overcome them. I am looking forward to travelling to Peru and working on the final presentation stage.

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