case library / profitability
Statefield University Football
A hard profitability case, interviewer-led, built for live practice with an AI interviewer that grades like a coach.
- Profitability investment
- interviewer-led
- hard
- ~45 min
- 3 exhibits
Your client is Statefield University, a public university with 20,000 students on the edge of a 1.5-million-person metro in the football-obsessed American South. The board is weighing whether to launch a varsity football program. Their only financial requirement is that the program break even year to year; beyond that they value intangibles, visibility and brand, applications, campus life, alumni engagement. Statefield currently fields 14 varsity sports and has never had football. Longer term, if the program works, the board would like to build an on-campus stadium and use football to help fund the other sports. Should they do it?
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 6 phases, with 3 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 Statefield University Football live, free. About 45 minutes, graded in the same sitting.
Start practicing freefree · no card · graded in minutes