Christina Shim ’12
My Experience
This summer, we created and completed a business case that will help Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE) raise funding for specific strategic initiatives, growth and expansion. We also researched and identified potential business development opportunities for SHE, conducted primary market research, and created financial models and business plans for the selected opportunities, which were presented to the CEO, and concluded by identifying potential private stakeholders to partner with SHE to ensure long-term sustainability of its programs.
As Sustainable Health Enterprises aims to assist women in developing countries have access to sanitary products and better feminine hygiene and increase female entrepreneurship, identifying growth and development opportunities for it is critical in creating a self-sustainable model to further its mission globally.
The MBA program taught me how to evaluate market entry opportunities through commercial due diligence and financial modeling. Both of these skills were critical for our analysis and overall recommendation, as we investigated the overall feminine hygiene market, competitive landscape, potential product choices, sales channels, business models, branding for the organization, customer engagement, and pricing. Additionally, there was little guidance on how we should conduct our research or perform our analysis; knowing how we should structure our process was essential and I would have never known how to do so without the strategy and independent project courses I took at CBS.
The main challenge we faced was that there were many unknown variables that we had difficulty getting information on. This included breakouts of sales and competitive landscapes for various feminine hygiene products, overall supply chain processes and pricing for those products, and distribution options and requirements. Even when we were able to obtain bits and pieces of information, the relationships between the variables were quite complex and it took awhile to get our heads around the operational and business landscape of the feminine hygiene market. Thus, it was initially difficult to feel comfortable making conclusive analyses and providing recommendations, though by the end, we triangulated as much of the information we had as possible to corroborate what we thought and had.
We learned an incredible amount about the industry, but more importantly about women and their consumption habits, feminine hygiene, start-ups, operations, and the US market environment. My two main takeaways from this experience were both personal and professional: (1) It was fascinating to learn that while women are extremely conscious of their bodies, how they exercise, and what they eat, drink, etc., the mainstream female was extremely ignorant and almost apathetic as to what the feminine hygiene products they were using were made of and how that might affect their bodies. This was eye-opening, considering how personal these choices are and how intimate the products are with their bodies; (2) This was my first experience working with a small start-up and the environment and work structure was completely different from anything I had ever experienced. My career thus far was mainly with larger organizations (both public and private) and I greatly appreciated how much leeway we were given with our project and knowing how much of an impact our work would make in the trajectory of the organization’s strategy. It also, however, made me appreciate the resources that a larger organization has and the constraints with which the smaller start-ups/NGOs must work within.
