For this portion of the Case Study, you will use the company and industry information available from the Ready Ratios websiteLinks to an external site. and analyze at least 3 selected years of financial data from your company. The years and the financial indicators you choose should be based on the significant findings from your earlier report on the company and its competitor. Further assignment details are below in the Overview.
Overview:
Imagine you’re a candidate for the CEO position of a Fortune 1000 company. The position’s starting base salary is expected to be in the $800K to $1.3M range and you’ve passed the initial screening, so congratulations! As part of upcoming interviews with the prior CEO (now Chairman of the Board), the CFO, and the Board of Directors, you need to be ready to answer questions as to what you see in the company financials, why those items are significant and then articulate your plans to improve the company’s standing. You are expected to have both financial literacy and effective analytical skills. This is what this portion of the project will help you develop.
For your project, the years you choose for your own company should be guided by your prior research which indicated their particular challenges. So, if the company went through some difficult times during the 2007 recession, you might look at a financial snapshot from 2004 and another from 2008 or 2009 to see the impact of the down cycle in the business environment and maybe another from 2018 to see how and if they recovered. You should also compare this performance to a competitor during the same periods (and if you want to impress the instructor, compare how your company did against the industry average).
As another example, if one of the challenges you found was your company has lagging sales performance relative to its industry rivals, a smart action on your part would be to look up the data for at least one sample year of the rival, choosing also the data for the same year for your company to give an “apples-to-apples” comparison. A follow-up analysis would be to see how your company recovered a few years afterward to strengthen its competitive position (i.e. how effective was their strategic response?). How well management can get the company to bounce back after a tough time speaks to their competency.
What makes the above comparisons meaningful is you will see how different companies, in the same industry and subjected to the same broad PESTEL factors performed against one another, just like professional sports teams do in the same season.
The value of this assignment for you as a senior student is you will have better analytic ability that you can use to prepare for a real-life job interview. Using the same process, you can sit across your interviewer and talk about their past performance and issues and have some ideas about their industry and where they might be headed.
