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Case Study

Eat Me: The world on small plates ®

By Benoit F. Leleux, Vikas Menon, Garrett DeCock and Hoi Wah Ma

15 pages

October 2014

Reference: IMD-7-1573

NOVEMBER 18, 2013, LAUSANNE (SWITZERLAND). As Serena Shamash opened the doors to her newly renovated restaurant, the last thing she was expecting to see was two inches of water covering the floor of the bar. Yet, this was just another day in the life of an entrepreneur. She had overcome many obstacles over the emotionally charged three years it took to give birth to her business dream – Eat Me, The World on Small Plates®. Now that she had achieved this goal, what was next? Her main preoccupation recently was how to extract herself from the day-to-day operations of the restaurant in order to start the next phase of her business. Eat Me was expected to reach operating breakeven at the end of the year, a major milestone in its short life. Did Eat Me still require her full attention? Or was it time to move beyond the first unit and consider scaling up? What about launching a new concept? She had already started developing new ideas and was getting anxious not to get stuck in the daily grind of this industry. But how would she decide on which direction to pursue?

Learning Objective

Entrepreneurial careers
Starting a restaurant
Affinity financing
Managing growth in a service industry
Managing relationships while starting a company
Setting strategy and creating a value proposition in the restaurant industry
Personnel management
Key success factors in hospitality

Keywords

Entrepreneurship, Hospitality, Restaurant, Start-up, Service Business, Growth Management, Career Management, Entrepreneurial Leadership, Effectuation, Value Proposition

Settings

Europe, Switzerland
Eat Me, Travel and Leisure, Hotels and Restaurants
2013

Type

Field Research

Available Languages

English

Related material

Teaching note, Video

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