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Case Study

Beekeeper: From pivoting startup to disrupting scaleup

By Benoit F. Leleux and Marc Chauvet

15 pages

March 2019

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Reference: IMD-7-2027

ZURICH (SWITZERLAND), MAY 2018 – Cristian Grossmann arrived early in the office that day. It had not been a breeze for Beekeeper to reach its current situation: a quickly expanding company with over 130 employees across the world, with a plethora of large clients. It was not so long ago that he had started a side-project with a university friend to develop an anonymous flirting platform for students. Several pivots later, the project had started getting a lot of traction and disrupting the hospitality industry’s way of working. The last 12 months had been much more turbulent than expected, and Grossmann was mulling over how the next 12 months would look like. It was crucial for Beekeeper to continue growing, yet there were more and more indications of the organization’s rapid growth leading to overwhelming complexity. So how could Grossmann steer the company towards even more growth while staying agile and exciting?

Learning Objective

From start up to scale up
Managing growth and complexity
Human resource management in hospitality industry
Professionalization
Strategic pivots
Crossing the chasm
Growth as objective
Team dynamics
Motivation
Deskless employees

Keywords

Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Growth Management, Expansion, Disruption, Agility, Lean Management, Human Resource Management, Hospitality, Professionalization, Deskless Workforce, Scale-up

Settings

World/global, Switzerland
Beekeeper, Travel and Leisure, Hospitality
2014-2018

Type

Field Research

Available Languages

English

Related material

Teaching note, Video

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