case library / profitability
BrewNorth Coffee
A easy to medium profitability case, candidate-led, built for live practice with an AI interviewer that grades like a coach.
- Profitability
- candidate-led
- easy to medium
- ~30 min
- 2 exhibits
Our client is BrewNorth, a chain of 120 company-owned coffee shops across Canada. Over the last two years, revenue has stayed flat at roughly $400M, but operating profit has fallen from $36M to $4M. The CEO has asked us to diagnose what's driving the decline and recommend how to restore profitability. How would you approach this?
What happens when you run it live
Your interviewer holds answers to 5 clarifying questions candidates usually ask, so opening the case correctly gets rewarded. The case unfolds over 4 phases, with 2 exhibits handed to you at the right moments. You structure, do the math out loud, and close with a recommendation. Then you get a graded report across structure, quant, insight, synthesis, and communication, with the specific moments that cost you points. The exhibits, numbers, and answer key stay inside the live session, the way a real interviewer keeps the case packet on their side of the table.
How to approach a profitability case
Profitability cases are the most common first-round case type. The client's profits are down, flat, or below plan, and your job is to find out why and what to do about it. Nearly every strong approach starts from the same identity: profit equals revenue minus cost, revenue splits into price and volume, and costs split into fixed and variable.
What separates strong candidates is not the tree itself but how they drive it: segmenting before averaging, asking whether the problem is company-specific or market-wide, and moving from diagnosis to a quantified recommendation. Interviewers listen for a candidate who isolates the driver quickly instead of touring every branch.
Run BrewNorth Coffee live, free. About 30 minutes, graded in the same sitting.
Start practicing freefree · no card · graded in minutes