Got stuck during an interview - Working capital reduction

Hello!

Precisely for the high amount of questions (1) asked by my coachees and students and (2) present in this Q&A, I created the “Economic and Financial concepts for MBB interviews”, recently published in PrepLounge’s shop (https://www.preplounge.com/en/shop/prep-guide/economic_and_financial_concepts_for_mbb_interviews).

After +5 years of candidate coaching and university teaching, and after having seen hundreds of cases, I realized that the economic-related knowledge needed to master case interviews is not much, and not complex. However, you need to know where to focus! Hence, I created the guide that I wish I could have had, summarizing the most important economic and financial concepts needed to solve consulting cases, combining key concepts theorical reviews and a hands-on methodology with examples and ad-hoc practice cases.

It focuses on 4 core topics, divided in chapters (each of them ranked in scale of importance, to help you maximize your time in short preparations):

·        Economic concepts: Profitability equation, Break even, Valuation methods (economic, market and asset), Payback period, NPV and IRR, + 3 practice cases to put it all together in a practical way.

·        Financial concepts: Balance sheet, Income statement/P&L and Performance ratios (based on sales and based on investment), +1 practice case

·        Market structure & pricing: Market types, Perfect competition markets (demand and supply), Willingness to pay, Pricing approaches, Market segmentation and Price elasticity of demand, +1 practice case

·        Marketing and Customer Acquisition: Sales funnel, Key marketing metrics (CAC and CLV) and Churn, +1 practice case

Feel free to PM me for disccount codes for the guide, and I hope it helps you rock your interviews!

You can easily approach this question by looking at the different elements of working capital:

Working Capital (WC) = Current Assets - Current Liabilities

Current Assets = Inventories + Accounts Receivables

Current Liabilities = Accounts Payables (short term debt)

1. To get an understanding of the levels of working capital that are required to run a business in the given industry, benchmark with competition
2. Prioritize an area to optimize WC to reach targeted level - i.e. inventories
3. To improve inventory levels, do an ABC analysis and try to identify slow movers (i.e. by apply stock level formulas like stock/average turnover) - you should reduce stock products, which bind lots of capital and sell slowly = if not much room to optimize inventories, look into accounts receivables (here you can try to make customers pay fasterby sending out reminders, hiring debt collectors or instead get faster liquidity by selling your claims to factoring firms)

(edited)