This was my first time practicing a M&A case but I found it really hard.
How are you meant to know that you're supposed to go down the route of calculating wine production and costs to run, are there any pointers in the case prompt?
As a beginner I started going down:
M&A framework: market attractiveness (for wine), company attractiveness (ability for vineyard to produce more), synergies (buyers skills/employees skills) and finances (cost to buy more equipment/resources/employees, profit of wine vs grapes
AND
Marketing: product, distributing, branding
I managed to “ask” some right questions to gain access to the additional interviewer-provided info, but my structure was very different to the solutions provided
This is so true!!! Unfortunately many "peers" (I've been there, on the same spot, getting cases from others) act a bit like robots, waiting for that very specific question that will "open the doors" like magic to an exhibit or piece of information. Fortunately an interview doesn't work like that. It is a conversation, and there is ALWAYS some ammount of steering. There may be a hint, or a question posed by the interviewer that will (hopefully) prompt the candidate to ask for the right piece of data. Or the candidate asks a good question, but that's not the information the interviewer has, so some re-framing is needed. This is where coaching sometimes helps, because it can show candidates "what good looks like" and how an interviewer will behave in real life.