Abstract
Background
The case offers a unique situation of an entrepreneurial family. The couple was well-settled in corporate life at Mumbai. They thought about shifting base and starting a new business of a cafe, and moved from Mumbai to Goa. They offered unique quality products (cake and other baked items) and services to customers and opted for several classic employee engagement programmes to retain and engage employees. To expand business, customers need and requirements were captured through a research-based systematic approach, and then the findings were applied to increase the customer base.
The case has been analysed from the following two different perspectives.
What Should be the Strategy for Carasid for Future Growth and Development?
The first question can be analysed by plotting Carasid’s growth strategy on the Ansoff product/market expansion matrix (Ansoff, 1957; Watts, Cope, & Hulme, 1998). The grid or matrix offers four quadrants: market penetration, market development, product development and diversification, on two axes, namely, existing and new markets and existing and new products or services.
Diversification: When an organization uses this strategy to expand, it tries to offer completely different product and services to different customers. Carasid has not ventured into this quadrant. A glimpse of it is seen when owner Mr Sunil said that they are catering to North Indian tourists by offering chola bhatura and to Maharashtrian tourists by offering a variant of vada pav. This strategy has largely remained unexplored by Carasid.
Market penetration: This quadrant indicates that the organization is selling the same product and services to the same target audience. If an organization operates from this quadrant, they can offer loyalty schemes and price competitiveness. Carasid enjoyed this quadrant for many years, and while maintaining their basic cake and pastry business in Miramar road location, they are expanding in other locations to offer a variety of products and services.
Product development: In this quadrant, an organization offers different products to the same base of customers. Carasid has moved from being only a café joint to a joint which offers all-day breakfast, which includes hot parathas, sandwiches, etc.
Currently, Carasid is more aggressively looking at market development and in future will look for diversification. The market expansion calls for a similar kind of enthusiastic team base to keep the zeal of the organization alive. Therefore, the next challenge Carasid has is to mitigate the risk of expansion without compromising on the quality of employees.
What Should be the Human Resource Strategy to Match the Growth Plan?
The second question has been analysed using Snell and Bohlander’s Matrix-Mapping Human Capital (Bohlander & Snell, 2007). The matrix has two axes, ‘value to the organization’ and ‘unique to the organization’. The quadrant titled ancillary suggests that the employees in this quadrant would exhibit low uniqueness and low value to the organization. Carasid should not spend time in recruiting such employees, to align with the future growth and strategy. Another quadrant is compulsory—here, employees are valuable (they understand the culture and have learned the way of working) but are not unique (does not offer any distinct skill set). These are traditional loyal employees and would be helpful in market expansion but may not be helpful during opportunities of diversification. The quadrant where the uniqueness of the employees for the organization is high, but they may offer less value to the organization is idiosyncratic. Such employees are usually highly skilled temporary employees. Carasid growth plan indicates the need for idiosyncratic employees to keep offering new products to an existing customer base. If the organization would like to diversify, then they have to opt for the quadrant core where employees offer unique skill sets and high value to the organization. Though the organization has taken several steps to maintain, engage and provide leadership position to employees, the initiatives may not be sufficient. The core nature of employees’ growth prospects should be visible to the employee in the organization.
Conclusion
The case provides an excellent example of following your passion or making your passion your business. The scope of growth seems to be high but tough. The young generation is willing to explore such joints, but a café like Carasid may face fierce competition from emerging competitors.