S21E25: Our #1 Episode of 2025: A Live McKinsey-Style M&A Case

I think the takeaways from this are that we're obviously increasing. If it is correct, the revenue that we are taking away is greater and we're equally increasing our profitability and profit, which is good to see or I should say sorry, we're increasing our profit, our profitability is actually going down somewhat as we see a shift slightly towards the proportion of sales coming from the lower profit margin, cool coffee. Heavy holidays and happy new year strategy simplified, we're wrapping up 2025 and we're just reflecting on a great year for the podcast. So not just for a strategy simplified but also for our new market outsiders podcast as well. Thank you for listening, for sharing, for blowing up our feeds, for your questions, your comments and your inspiration, we really appreciate you and needless to say this podcast wouldn't make any sense without you listening along and sharing with your friends. So thank you so much for myself, Jenny Ray, Nemon, Katie and the rest of the management consultant team. Thank you, thank you, thank you. For today's episode, we're throwing it back to the most popular episode of 2025, this was the most listened to episode, it is a live McKinsey style case interview and so we're giving you what you want, what you want more of. In this case, you'll hear how a candidate structures and acquisition decision for a global team chain, really, really interesting McKinsey style case. The interviewer is former McKinsey, Davia Agrawal, who is also a management consultant, he's coach, you can work with her, learn more at the links in the show notes. The candidate actually ended up landing an MBB offer shortly after this case wrapped up. So that shows you hard work pays off, so keep going in 2026. Finally, if you'd like to volunteer yourself for the case hot seat in 2026, just reach out to the team at managementconsulted.com is the, all right, let's run this case. So our client is Yot, Yot is a retail bubble tea chain that competes head to head with other tea and coffee operators. Yot is the third largest tea chain worldwide, measured by the number of stores. Even though Yot owns some of its stores, it mostly operates under the franchising business model, with 90% of its stores owned by franchisees. As part of its growth strategy, Yot has analyzed some potential acquisitions, including cool coffee. Cool coffee is a growing mass coffee retailer with an international presence. Cool coffee also operates predominantly under a franchising business model. How would you determine if Yot should acquire cool coffee? Okay. Thank you. So just getting a few of those final bits down, just to summarize what I've got at the question. So our client is Yot, basically a glibody-positioned bubble tea brand who mainly work via a franchise operating model. And approaching us because they're hoping to drive growth, and they have an acquisition target in mind, which is cool coffee, and they've asked us to assess whether or not that would look like a sensible opportunity for them. Is that a fair summary of the main points in the question? That's great. Okay. Just want to ask a few clarifying questions if that's okay. So I may have jumped the gun a little bit by saying that Yot is looking for growth, but just wanted to clarify if we have any additional goals with this acquisition. So is it strategic or purely driving a revenue growth perspective? Yeah, I would call it strategic and therefore driving revenue growth. We don't have a specific number or target. And any particular time frame in mind in terms of, I suppose, what do we like revenues to begin increasing after X number of years? Yeah, good question. I think we want to make the decision relatively quickly, and hopefully with execution, once the company is fully integrated by year one, we're adding incremental revenue. Okay. By year one. Do we have any information at the moment about the revenues of either company, EOT or cool coffee? Not yet. Not yet. Okay. But we know that EOT is the top three by number of stores globally. Yeah. And we don't have that same information for cool coffee. No. Okay. So I think there may be more questions later, but for now, I feel like I have. I have enough information to come up with an initial approach. So I just take a couple of minutes to structure my thinking on this. That's great. Sounds great. If you run a small or medium-sized business, you know how fast cyber risks are evolving. That's why I use Nord products myself. And for businesses, there's Nord Stellar. It's a threat exposure management platform that helps you spot cyber threats before they become full-blown incidents. Nord Stellar combines data breach and dark web monitoring, attack surface management and cyber squatting protection, all in one platform. It gives you real-time visibility into leaked credentials, exposed assets, and impersonation attempts so you can act before attackers do. Think of it as seeing what hackers see and fixing it first. Right now, you can get an exclusive 10% discount on Nord Stellar with code Simplified-10. Nord Stellar.com/simplified to get started today. So thank you very much for this opportunity again. So just to quickly summarize, we have a global bubble tea retail, a yacht, who is looking to see whether or not they should make an acquisition of cool coffee, a franchise-based global coffee resetter. To summarize, I'd like to approach this problem through remained drivers. So the first is conducting a market analysis of some of the different geographies where each of the two entities are at play. The second would be to look at cool coffee in a little bit more detail and understand its business model. And the third driver would be to look at potential synergies that might be realised through an acquisition by yachty. If that sounds like a sense of an approach, I'm happy to go through each and a little bit more detail. So looking at the market analysis, and again, just to summarize, I'd like to do this across the different geographies where yachty and cool coffee are at play. I'd like to understand the size of each of the markets. I think we have a few different markets here. We're thinking about coffee tea, probably other hot drinks, but also bubble tea, which I imagine is quite a specific market among those. So to see what their size is and how much they're growing in respective geographies, equally looking at consumer needs in each of these geographies. So is there a demand for the different products that yachty and cool coffee have, and link that back to whether or not that demand is growing? And then the third point within the market analysis would be to really look at competitors. So to understand what other players are present in these geographies, so do we have other bubble tea brands, presumably we've got the first and second largest, which I'd imagine are pretty prevalent across some of these different countries. But then looking out of those competitors, what are their product lines, and what were they differentiated with the respect to cool coffee and yachties. So in terms of features, sorry about that, I just turn that off, in terms of product features. So taste and perceived quality, but also price point, and understanding what the market share and what market share growth is for each of those competitors. Moving on to the second driver, which is doing a bit more of a deep dive in due diligence on cool coffee. So I think there are two main points to consider as first looking at the historical financial trends for cool coffee, and then secondly looking at any sort of qualitative sources of competitive advantage. So within financial trends, obviously looking at the revenue trends or cool coffee, is it a growing business, has this cost structure changed over time, and following on from that taking revenue and cost, what is happening to profitability and EBITDA with time, particularly thinking about the fact that we want this to be generating revenue, but also presumably cash within the first few years. The second point, looking at competitive advantage again, this is becoming back to looking at cool coffee's product line, thinking about the perceived quality, the price point, the different market segments within geographies that are being targeted by cool coffee at the moment, and also thinking about their IP, which could be considered as a competitive advantage. So brand equity, are they a well-known brand across some of these different geographies? Moving on to the third and final driver, which is looking at different synergies. So there's a few different ways that we could approach this, but I broadly categorize this into revenue and cost synergies. So thinking about revenue synergies, it would really be thinking about sort of the branding synergies. So for example, a, or presumably EOT is the bigger brand, so is there a sales uplift for a lot of the products acquired from cool coffee by attaching it to the EOT brand? There's then the actual sales channels specifically, they're marketing avenues. So if EOT ad imagine is much stronger when it comes to branding, then a lot of cool coffees, products can also appreciate a sales uplift there, and then also geo expansion. So thinking about whether or not cool coffee is currently present in geographies where EOT isn't, can we use that as a platform to expand and launch a lot of EOT products, but it would also grow the new business as a whole. Moving on to cost synergies, which is the final point within synergies driver, so this is thinking about actual economies of scale. So obviously consolidation of a lot of the fixed costs, so if we think about, for example, the C-suite, but also actual retail locations, whether we consolidate the different shops into, I think, about how this will work with the franchise model, but I think that still applies, whether we can consolidate different stores into larger stores with a shared footprint effectively. I think there's a lot more we could explore within revenue and sales synergies. But with all of that in mind, I think it would be a good place to start if we look at a market analysis. I think you're on mute. Yeah. Yeah, sorry. Great. Let's look at the market. So at the moment, we don't have wide market data. What we do have is just a view of what cannibalization might look like with this integration. So before we talk specifically about what cannibalization could look like, I'd love to get your thoughts, how might you evaluate cannibalization? So let me, the direct question is, as you're talking about synergies, revenue uplift from actually bringing cold coffee into, cool coffee into our YoT stores, how would you assess the profitability of actually starting to sell cool coffee in YoT stores? Okay. So we're thinking about the cannibalization and the profitability at the same time. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I can take just a couple of seconds to think about this plus profitability. So to tackle each of these interns, I think first just to broadly outline how I would start to look at cannibalization. And this is presuming we're not actually doing sort of real world data generation. We're not sending out surveys, for example, but looking at the two businesses, there's two main factors that I want to consider, which is first, their actual products, and then secondly, the market segments that they're currently marketing, marketing to and selling to you. So looking at the products, I'd like to understand how they're differentiated from one another. So is the perceived quality, for example, of YoT coffee, much higher than the perceived quality of cool coffee, and are there potentially different price points that you could sell out there in terms of having a premium blend of coffee versus the everyday blend, for example. If there's a lot of overlap and we don't think there's much scope for branding those products differently, then there will be a degree of cannibalization. In terms of working out the actual share and what that's going to look like quantitatively, I think it'd be helpful to do some consumer research. And sort of on that note, I think it's useful to understand the market segments that we're currently updating to with different products. There might be a completely different demographic of people usually go to cool coffee compared to YoT coffee. There's implications for what will happen with a rebranding there, but there might be some scope to keep some of those market segments separate to prevent cannibalization. But in answer, I think there will be on both fronts, so they're different segments and product differentiation, a lot of overlap and cannibalization. How that impacts profitability is obviously, it's going to potentially reduce the revenue. You have made some cost energies and cost savings there, so it's which one prevails and what happens to profitability. Okay. Great. So lucky you, we actually get to calculate the impact of cannibalization. So I'm going to give you some information. I'm going to ask you to take a screenshot. And the question is simply, what would the financial impact of incremental revenue and cannibalization be? So let me just share my screen. Let me know when you've done the screenshot and then I'll stop sharing. Yeah. Okay. Let me just check that that has actually come up and then I'll let you know, uh, nope. So it's one of those where I've screen shoted it and it's just gone to my desktop somewhere, but no, I've got it. I've got it. Okay. Great. Top sharing. Okay. Um, so as with the last question, I think it's probably helpful if I can just take a couple of seconds just to sort of orientate myself to the data and come up with an approach to determine the financial impact. A couple of clarifying questions, but when we say we want to understand the financial impact, I'm presuming because we have margin here that we're probably going to want to determine sort of a gross margin before and after the acquisition. Is that what we're aiming for? Yeah. And I might just simplify it in your mind to say, ultimately, the question is, should we incorporate cool coffee or not? And so then what would you evaluate to determine? And that's kind of leaving that as my rhetorical question with you. What would you look at to ultimately determine, should we include cool coffee or not? Yeah. Understood. So I'm taking more either total revenue or total profit, uh, profitability. Great. Yeah. Okay. And when we say, yeah, okay, so the cannibalization rate, I think, is fairly self-explanatory. So I'm happy to just outline a brief approach. Great. Obviously, we want to try and determine what the revenue of EOT is in the, in the current status. So units multiplied by the sales price, which would get us revenue multiplied by the margin, which is going to get us to that overall profit, calculating the uplift that we get from all potential uplift to be determined from the acquisition. So I'm then adding on the units of cool coffee. So cool coffee units sold times price times margin, but also taking away a 10% of the units of the ATT. So I'm happy to start fronching the numbers there. And I'll start with, with the current status play. So that would be, and I'm just realizing as well, we've got units past all. So we're, we're assuming that this is going to be the same across stores. Yeah, we can assume this is an average effect, yes, let's do it the first store basis. Cool. Sounds like a plan. So 500,000 units, which are sold per month multiplied by the price point of five would get us to 2.5 million dollars in terms of revenue per month. And then to work out the profitability, so times by 30%, which will be 30. And that would be 750,000 dollars in terms of total profit per month. So I'd like to then compare that to what happens if we acquire cool coffee. So the added revenue that we're going to get is going to be, so 100,000 units of coffee times again by a price point of five dollars equals 500,000 added revenue. But then we've got to work out the cannibalization. So that's 10% of 500,000. So we've got negative 50,000 units times by five, which comes to 250,000. So overall, we've got an uplift of 250,000, and of that 250,000, I've realized that I'm going to have to calculate the margin differently on each, let me just figure out how I'm going to do that. So for the cool coffee, this is redisively straightforward. But tell me, what was your revenue uplift from cool coffee that you calculated? So the revenue uplift overall I got was 250,000, is that sounding a little bit off? What is the calculation you're doing? I'm just curious. Sure. So for that, I've gone with the units of, sorry, that was the revenue uplift minus the cannibalization effect. Yeah, I want to know just without cannibalization effect, you're getting a revenue uplift. Without cannibalization, 500,000. Okay, great. Great. With cannibalization, which I calculated to be 250,000, you just took it out of the cool coffee revenue. Okay. Overall, it's a total of 50,000 uplift. Does that sound about right? Let's see how you do then with margin and let's see what happens from there. Yeah, I was just getting to that stage. So I think this is potentially going to be a little bit more complicated. But what I can do is say, yeah, let's just calculate the overall profit. So we know that there's a 20% margin on cool coffee sales, which are currently at 200, sorry, at 500,000. So 20% margin would be 100,000 in profit from cool coffee. And then at this point, the overall revenue that we're getting from UT is 2.25 million. And we've got to multiply that by the margin for UT, which is 30%. So 2.25 times 0.3, if we a second, just to calculate that, say, okay, 3, 3, I think that gives me to 675,000 for EAT. And then if we add that together, I've got 775,000 in total profit from the combined organizations, which have that combined revenue again to calculate the combined revenue. So as an added revenue of 250, so the combined revenue was 2.75 million. If it is correct, the revenue that we are taking away is greater and we're equally increasing our profitability and profit, which is good to see or I should say, sorry, we're increasing our profit, our profitability is actually going down somewhat. As we see a shift slightly towards the proportion of sales coming from the lower profit margin cool coffee, all of this needs to be taken in light of the acquisition costs, an additional cost that we might experience through this sort of transaction. But so far, it seems like top line and at least ongoing profit, not accounting for the acquisition cost is positive. Yeah. So what was the net change and profitability by bringing in cool coffee? Sure. So I can calculate that. So just to clarify in terms of would you like a margin, so to get to a percentage profitability? I'd like a dollar figure, so net profit is once you account for cannibalization. Like how much is, how much should we make profit wise after we account for cannibalization? So with the figures that I have here, we went from 750,000, which is pre acquisition, 750,000 dollars of profit, to after cannibalization, we, or from my calculations, have 775,000 dollars of profit. Is that got it? So a net, a net 25 K gain, is that fair? Is that what I'm carrying that we are? This integration would be 25,000 positive in terms of profit. Yes. That's what I've calculated. And I misunderstood your question, that's the answer. No, all good. All good. That's great. That's great. Okay. So now that I've heard, it's, I was probably just looking for a specific phrase, what I'm with you. Yeah. So now tell me, reflect on that 25 K and what do you want to do next? And you've already started going there, I'm just going to have you repeat it. Sure. Well, so I think ultimately an increase in profit of 25,000 on a business that's already at 750,000 is relatively marginal, it obviously depends, it depends how much additional growth can be achieved in terms of some of the positive synergies that we spoke about. But I think all of this needs to be tampered in light of what is the acquisition cost. So if we're paying a relatively low price proportionally, and I can't remember off the top of my head what would be a good sort of price to EBITDA multiple, but we need to take into account how much this is going to cost to see whether or not it's a sensible acquisition. Great. Um, really nicely done. I'm going to pause it here because this is a relatively short case and in a way you, that's essentially the recap of the case as well. You're basically saying we might go for this, but we want to look at how much this company's actually going to cost us. Um, so great job. Let's pause here. I'm going to give you a round of applause and everyone on the call please give James a round of applause. Awesome job. So how do you feel? Yeah. Yeah, there were a few bits where slightly tricky, I mean, I hope a rule I've sort of driven the case in broadly the right direction, but there's always more you can say there were definitely bits where I could have been much more structured in my answers. I think the, the synergies part of my structure, I realized I was running out of time, so tried to sort of add that a little bit as you could probably tell, but, um, yeah, hopefully the math's when it goes knowing exactly like you say the, the answer that the interviewer wants you to give, so I probably didn't give you, you did say net, and I think I got confused with sort of net profit versus net change. So I could have been a bit quicker with getting you that answer, um, the overall, uh, a good case. So thank you. Yeah. Great. Um, so here's what I'll say to you and for folks on the call. This was definitely a round one case, I would call this on the easier side of a round one, um, and for what it's worth, I would pass you from round one to round two, James, if this were the case, so let that be a calibration for you and for folks on the call. So let's, I'm just going to go part by part in the case and we'll talk about what went well and a few refinements. I mean, big picture, my refinements are going to be at the margins. There was no red flag I saw that I dramatically want to shift. A few things I'll offer. I hope can just help in delivery and just making it maybe a bit more succinct for you for you. That's it. Sounds good. Um, so the recap really beautifully done. I think you got the big beats of the case again, this wasn't a very complicated prompt. So you captured what you needed to capture. My one pro tip I would offer is anytime you can find an analog like a real life company that is like your client, the better. So you may not be a big bubble tea drinker, but what might do you know any bubble tea companies like international ones or be not international ones. Okay. If you're alone, but no, yeah. So right away, I want you to do some, some way to personalize or relate to the case. So I'm not a big, I'm not a big bubble tea drinker. I do know that cocoa bubble tea or VV bubble tea, I think are big companies. Right away, I want you to just say out loud like, you know, I don't know global companies, but I'm going to actually visualize or imagine the bubble tea that I go to in London here called XYZ looking to make this acquisition. And the reason I'm going to encourage you to do that is when you get to your structure, I want you to make it a bit more real world and imagine that you are actually a customer potentially going into a bubble tea shop and making that decision about coffee versus bubble tea. It'll just make it more real world that's specific. So moving on to your clarifying questions, I thought they were good questions. You delivered them in a clear succinct way. I knew what you were asking and why. And I think the information you were looking for was relatively valuable. A couple of refinements or pro tips I'll offer. Yeah. Candidates, I noticed they kind of dance around the question of what is a financial target? Are there additional goals? I think the question that people really want to ask is what metric matters most to our client in making this decision? And I don't say financial metric. I specifically say metric because you might be dealing with a client that's not a business right that has other outcomes that it's oriented towards. So my recommendation is whenever you want to know like the target, just ask the question some way like what metric matters most. Yeah. My second recommendation is anytime you ask a question, I want you to have a point of view on what you think the answer is. So when you told me when you asked me, is the only target or is it only growth orientation towards revenue maximization, the way you might have phrased it is what metric matters most. My instinct tells me at least, you know, in the first couple of years, they want to make sure they're increasing revenue or maybe they want to be, you know, profitability positive in your one. Yeah. That makes sense. Second pro tip is the franchising models kind of a big deal or big part of this. And I'm going to call the franchising model both a part of their business model, but it's also a part of their operating model, right? Those companies that have 90% of their footprint under the control of individual business owners that might add a little bit of complexity when you think about integration. So my recommendation is, and you might know how franchise models work at a minimum, and this is kind of for everyone on the call, use your clarifying questions to get crystal clear on anything you need to understand for the business model slash operating model of a company. So the question might look something like, you know, I want to just confirm my understanding of what we mean by franchise when we said that 90% of the stores are franchise. What I understand it means is of the stores that are under franchise, you know, owners are running it. We're providing stuff centrally, and there's some sort of profit sharing that's happening. And you get to confirm that. That makes sense. And then I think in any sort of acquisition, like M&A case, I think asking the like, why now or why this target is always interesting if you need a question. So like, what is it about cool coffee beyond maybe the obvious synergies of like them being drinks is interesting to OT. And the reason I want you to start thinking about that is I probably wanted you to explore that a little bit more in your structure. So let's move into your structure now actually, let me pause there any questions, any questions on clarifying questions. That makes sense. It's cool. Cool. Um, on your structure, I'm going to share some just like best practices, take them or leave them. I like four by three structures, which means four bullet, excuse me, four buckets, three buckets, and right away, I'll say a good fort the bucket always is risks. So and it's always nice to think about risks early on in the case because you're probably going to have to talk about them anyway when you come towards the end synthesis. So you know, I can't say to me how am I supposed to think about four buckets. Well, the beauty is you already have your fourth bucket, so you're really only thinking about three. My second, my second just general best practice is no need to be polite and this might be the Brit in you, but at least I would say no need to kind of say these are the lenses I want to look at. How does that sound? Is that sound okay? You just get to kind of jump right into your structure. Cool. Um, and then my third general best practices, once you come out of your structure, there's two sentences I like to close slash transition my structure with sentence one is something like, you know, with this with the early information that we have, my emerging answer, my emerging hypothesis is yes, Yo T should invest, whatever you're emerging hypothesis, but yes, Yo T should invest in or acquire cool coffee because what I think we'll find is the cool coffee market is growing and this energy will make it worth it. That being said, what I want to first investigate to further validate that early answer is the market for cool coffee. So there's basically two sentences, right sentence one is your early answer in the hypothesis. Sentence two then is the data you would want to validate. Cool. Thank you. Yeah, that's really helpful. So now let's talk about your structure overall, I thought the structure was it was the content was good. The delivery was clear. My one like knit is going to be how do we make kind of three clean bullets per bucket because I want it to be consistent and we'll talk about how you might have done that. So under the market analysis, I like that you were specific to basically say, I want to do a market analysis by geography for each of our two entities under the first thing I want to look at is just the size of drinks and bubble tea generally in the growth. The second you told me you want to look at customer needs, which you basically described as demand. What I got curious about is how is that different than the size of the market. So is it me see? Yeah, I guess I was trying to get a little bit more qualitatively, but yeah, I think what you were it's funny because you said customer needs and you said demand and those from your two different metrics. So I think what I what you might have been looking for is what matters or what preferences do customers have, right? What do they care about in their drinks when they go into a coffee shop, what makes them make the purchase? And that's a great question to ask. And then third, you talked about competitors and you had a lot of good sub bullets under competitors right who are the players in the different geographies, what is their product differentiation and price, what is their respective market churn growth. My delivery feedback and again, this is at the margins, you did a fine job. But my delivery feedback to you would be the more that you can frame, let me just put this example in the chat for everyone to see what I wrote down just in case it's useful. The more that you can frame the front part of each of your bullets as what I'm going to call an open ended research question and then give some commentary on specifics the better. And what that does is it'll it cleans up your speaking and it kind of cleans up the analysis. So it might have looked something like this. So under the market analysis, there's three questions I want to understand. What is the size and growth of the drinks and bubble tea market generally over the next or years and are the geographies that we care about? Number two, what do customers value when going into a store and making a purchase and then deciding what they want to what they want in their drink and to figure that out, I'd want to do some customer research in our primary geographies. And finally, what is a competitive landscape specifically? Who are the top three players in the geographies we care about and what is their share and what differentiates their product? So it's like framing an open ended research question then with commentary that's like a sentence. Yep. And that'll, I think, help with the timing of your delivery as well. All right, I'll go thank you. Cool. I'll say a few other things about this structure than we'll move to math and then I want to make sure I leave time for Q&A. So under the company, great, you want to look at just the financial health of cool coffee. I think you get to say it as simply as what is the financial help of this company? For example, what is this profitability in EBITDA and how is that expected to grow? Right? Second, what is this company's competitive advantage in terms of its brand equity, its perceived quality and, you know, just what customer feedback looks like today and the market perception. And third, what else might you want to know about this company? Like, you think about it from an execution standpoint? Like, I think geography, footprint, anything you think of, right? You can just imagine like from an execution standpoint, what do I want to know? Oh, yeah, where are their stores? So you can just get a sense of like, what's the geographic map of cool coffee or, you know, tea and the reason I care is once we actually bring these companies together, the footprints going to matter. Hello. And then finally, synergies, requisition, synergies were great. I think, yeah, I hear I'd have the same feedback of just what are revenue synergies, for example, branding, does cool coffee get the uplift? Do we get more geographic expansion, does cool coffee get more geographic expansion? On cost synergies, I loved your two examples, tea, sweet, essentially people and then retail locations. And third, it's interesting because I would have put cannibalization in risks. So I might call your third, this, this third bucket for me would probably be, yeah, like, yeah, benefits of this acquisition or synergies with the acquisition. I'm trying to think what other qualitative, I'm trying to think for you tea, what the qualitative benefit would be. And this is where a little bit of creativity comes in. There might be just greater like new geographies that you can enter because your menu is not just bubble tea. Because we know that bubble tea, it started as an East Asia phenomenon, and now it's much more global. But having a third benefit would be good. And then I'd want you to have that fourth bucket that definitely talks about cannibalization, which I think was a bit of a miss here. And the other risk that I'd want to make sure that you talk about is this franchise model. How are we integrating partnership agreements, revenue share, all that, because I will be part of it. Okay. Let me jump, let me jump to math. Ultimately, you got the answer right. Yay. And I thought the approach that you laid out to start was great to you. Basically, so there's three things I want to look at. What is revenue today for your tea and profit? What would the revenue uplift and profit uplift look like from cool coffee? And then what would cannibalization look like? The one hack I would do here is the simple cannibalization calculation you could have done is just take the 10%, times all the numbers for your tea, because you would basically say that's the money we're losing with cannibalization. You know what the profit uplift is with cool coffee, which was 100K. And then you do the subtraction, it's you got a 25K lift. And I think that would just make your process simpler. Yeah. I made my life odd with that one. Yeah. But you got there. Your logic was sounds. My two pieces of feedback and then I'm going to open it up. That is when you get the number, I want you to reflect on that number at three levels. So the first thing I want you to look at is just what is the number saying you did a nice shop of that? You're like, well, we're making more money, 25K. It's a small amount of money relative to what we're making, but it's not positive. So then once you've said something about the number, the second thing I want you to do is take a real point of view on what the client should do, which you did. Basically said, yeah, let's go for it. Cool coffee seems net additive. And then that being said, the two pieces of data I'd want to understand to further validate the fact that we should go for a cool coffee or acquisition costs and then a fair multiple. So you had all the right content. I'm just going to add advise, just kind of pit the delivery. Yep. And then the second piece of feedback is, and this will just come as you do more reps again. When you get a math question, I actually want you to start speaking right away and you're speaking can be the recap and the orientation. So you said, let me take a moment to orient the data. I actually want you to just start speaking out loud while you're orienting yourself to the data. So it might have looked something as simple as great. So we want to understand what the cannibalization and profitability impact is of bringing in cool coffee. The graph I have in front of me is basically telling me, you know, number of units, price, margin for OT, same information for cool coffee and we have a metric of 10%, which just conceptually is telling me before once we put cool coffee and we're losing 10% of sales every month and you're just doing kind of a live interpretation of the data. Yep. Okay. Cool. We appreciate you tuning in to the final episode of 2025. We're thrilled to bring you much more great content in 2026, so stay tuned to your podcast, feed, to your social media feeds, go follow us if you're not already on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and all the other places as well. We'd love to have you there. But we're coming straight to you with more great case and recontent, recruiting content, conversations with firms and more. If you get an idea, inspiration, something you love to hear on the podcast, just reach out. Team at management consulta.com is the email we'd love love to hear from you. Thank you again for making 2025 a great, great year for the podcast and we'll see you in 2026 strategy simplified.