Kellogg MBAs Win Big at Wharton Buyout Case Competition
The following article was originally sourced from the piece “Winning Spirit” on Kellogg’s News & Events page.
Kellogg School of Management MBAs Emma Gergen ’14, Garrett Greer ’14, Ben Kaplan ’15, Keith Roux ’14 and Andrew Welch ’14 took first place out of 26 teams from 21 MBA programs in the 14th Annual Wharton Buyout Case Competition.
This year’s competition tasked teams to look at Abercrombie & Fitch and design a 30-minute presentation that detailed a plan to purchase the company.“You’re presented with a company and the question of whether you would invest in that company,” Greer explained. “You don’t get opportunities like this in the real world. This is pretty close to a real scenario.”
Over the course of five-day competition, team members dug deep into Abercrombie’s corporate filings, narrowing their focus on a general business model and brand-specific details for improvement.
“It was a tremendous amount of work. The time absolutely flew by,” Greer explained, noting everyone on the team individually spent 40 to 50 hours on plan development and designing the presentation.
“It’s actually fairly realistic,” Gergen said of the timeframe and scope of the research required to make an investment decision.
The MBAs representing Kellogg all came into the completion well equipped with a variety of real-world experiences in an assortment of fields such as private equity, investment banking, legal and financial consulting.
Greer and Gergen are both enrolled in Kellogg’s one-year accelerated program, said their success at Wharton comes thanks to diverse business offerings that MBAs at Kellogg receive.
“I think that Kellogg has a lot to offer. We need to showcase that,” Gergen said.
