Alvarez & Marsal Manager Interview Questions and Answers

Interview preparation tips for other job seekers - Please brush-up on your technical and auditing skills

Interview preparation tips for other job seekers - Accounting principles must be clear

Round: Case Study Interview
Experience: I started by asking clarifying questions : 1) The purpose + Does client have anything specific in mind (wrt retail format, target segment, products to be sold, location etc) 2) What exactly is meant by attracting maximum number of people (footfalls? Purchase conversion?) At this stage itself I got information about the target segment : It is primarily income based and Delhi and Mumbai are two cities which have large % of population as set of people who can be attracted. Then I split the issue in two aspects that could attract/ bring people to store: a) Awareness b) the in-store experience/ value from shopping He said awareness is not an issue. Hence, I looked at experience aspects – (1) Proximity (2) product mix available (3) Value for Money in shopping (low price vs product differentiation) He told me to look at it as a case of Food Retailing. During this conversation the scope boiled down to identifying the parameters to maximize profits. I started considering Revenue and Cost as two aspects of profit. Revenue is driven from Quantity (Footfalls* conversion) and Price. Price dint come out as something to be considered as fixed. Hence quantity was to be maximized. Considering that Mumbai and Delhi were target cities, I asked if I needed to estimate the revenue. He told me to proceed and I estimated revenue using population -. Households (HH) -> HH greater than and less than 2 lpa of income (more than 2 lpa expected to visit stores). I asked about average usage of food by such a HH and Kaustub gave me certain numbers. He then asked me to proceed to other parameters in Food Retail. Having covered Revenue as the first part, I moved to Cost. He directly asked me to focus on location/ proximity. I said food retail (especially in Indian context, considering the mobility issue, vehicle ownership, road infra etc) is something that needs to have close proximity. The areas to be focused on would however be determined by per square foot cost. The high-end areas may not be a feasible option. However, emerging areas present a case to be considered. I asked if there was any data available on property rates. He told the rates were 200/sqft/month in high-end areas vs 100/sqft/month in emerging areas. Hence client should focus on Profit/sqft/month as primary metric for deciding where and how many stores to open. He asked me to end the case here. In the end (time for me to ask questions) I asked him about his views of Reliance’s strategy in retailing (they are entering many formats in retailing) and had a discussion around certain viewpoints.
Tips: Be confident and persistent even though the cases may seem kind of undefined or large in scope.

Round: Case Study Interview
Experience: I started by asking clarifying questions : 1) What is exactly meant by commercialization – business/ profits/ practical usage 2) Is it general poetry or my poetry 3) Is there any time frame I need to consider for this. He said the purpose would be to make money from my own poetry and there is no specific time frame. I took a customary minute to think. I used MECE classification to consider two aspects of poetry usage/applications: (1) Academic usage (in text books etc) (2) Non Academic (NA) usage. I further classified NA usage into three areas – NGOs, Corporate(s) and Other commercial applications (namely lyrics for movie songs, advertisements etc. I told him that I had written a poem taking inspiration from a Cadbury’s advertisement) At this stage I said that for any further consideration one important parameter is the FIT of the product (my poetry) to these application areas. I defined FIT in terms of language (I write in Hindi, at time English) and content vs the actual need in respective areas (I gave a coupel of examples – my poems published in magazine by an NGO, couple of Hindi ads etc). I also said I can write for all of the identified application areas. In order to commercialize I assessed each usage area in terms of following parameters (a) Profit Margin (I stated here that the cost = my effort would be nearly same for all kinds of poetry) (b) Capability (FIT) c) Market Size (d) Access (my access to identified market) I made a matrix for assessment along these parameters and rated each on scale of Low, Medium and High. He asked me to focus on How to go about commercializing Other commercial applications. I said our of two areas - namely movie songs and advertisement, I should focus first on Advertisements first (as I have better access to this market). I also looked at another metric - % of advertisements/songs needing my poetry while defining the approach. I further looked at Access to Advertisements in terms of existing and New 148i.e. existing is through my past organizations and through my friends’ network. New means developing contacts through mails and agencies. He asked me to stop at this point and said ‘why don’t you start it right away’. In the end I asked him about his experience at McKinsey and his happiest moment while working there.
Tips: Be prepared to solve such cases based/ customized to your personal interest areas. I got two such cases (one in McKinsey and another one, related to Ball Dancing, in some other interview)

Round: Case Study Interview
Experience: Asked some questions to understand the problem better: 1) Something more about the client- location, which part of value chain does it operate in? 2) Is there any time frame in mind 3) By what magnitude does the client want market capitalization to increase He said time frame would be 4- 5 years. I drew the value chain of steel industry: RM (Iron ore, coal etc) -> Manufacturing of steel -> Distribution. He said client is currently operating in all. He also provided some information on location – the client had made acquisitions for Iron ore (worth 3 million USD) in US. I said that Market Capitalization would be essentially a multiple of Operating income and hence we should see the problem in two aspects – increasing Revenue and decreasing Cost. I asked him if this approach was fine. He told me to proceed. I said revenue was determined as Price* Output. I asked if price could be increased, which he told me to park aside. Then I discussed output: one way to increase would be through M&A. Other ways would be through Greenfield, Brownfield projects of Joint Venture. He asked me what should be done even before M&A and then dropped a hint about current operations. I immediately said ‘that is something to be looked at first’. Any excess capacity may be utilized to raise output. Further more, the aspects to be looked at would be (1) efficiency (2) RM (biggest chunk of cost) He told me to look at RM. I asked the need vs capacity of the acquisitions done by client in US (3 million tones of output). RM need was not satisfied. Hence more RM sourcing should be ensured through either contracts, locating close to RM sources, acquisitions as RM is biggest part of cost and would help increase the margins and hence market cap also. At this point he asked me about other possibilities of increasing the market cap. I said some ways of indicating god future growth (investments, strategic tie ups) would increase the market cap. He asked me what else could be done and indicated spin offs. I said there could be alternative to float a new firm (separate venture for RM) or sell shares as different types – Type A and Type B while keeping the firm as one entity. He was fine with that. He stopped the case here and said I I wanted to ask anything. I asked him if this was a real case and what had they done in this situation. Then I said that I have wondered what has prohibited systems such as Social Security from being implemented in India and how does he see that coming in future? We had a discussion around the same for about 5-7 minutes and the interview ended.
Tips: Does not matter much even if your case is not going exactly how you want it but don’t hesitate to take a step back and to make efforts while solving. Do keep interviewer involved in the case (Think aloud – may be ask the interviewer at times...if the approach is fair/ assumptions are fair) Prepare intelligent questions (which you have to ask to the interviewer). These could be either based on the case, interviewer’s field of work (typically they introduce themselves at the start of the interview) or relevant to PI in respective interviews. ‘and don’t worry, you can practice drafting good questions while the interview is going on’

Round: Case Study Interview
Experience: I started by asking clarifying questions : 1) Tell some more about the client – are they only a distributor? Answer was Yes. 2) Is profit the criteria to be looked at for feasibility/ Sales Force allocation The structure that I made considered three aspects of the problem.
• Customers – are we targeting the same customers, how much of cannibalization (Share of wallet aspect) can we expect if same products are sold to same set of customers?
• Feasibility – in terms of skills (different selling skills for different products) Need/ demand in the market, training issues (all sales people selling all products?) Amount of investment required.
• Incentive alignment – He gave me information about prices of different products and clients margin (basis points). Target customers were same. As product type and related needs are different, cannibalization was not taken as an issue. Feasibility parameters were also fine. I calculated absolute margin (which is Revenue for our client) on each product. Then I said, for financial feasibility, Cash Flows need to be calculated and hence Revenue and cost need to be found. Hence Profit is a function of product Mix: Profit = Sum (Pi-Ci) And we know the values of Pi. I identified the possible costs as the commission to sales agents + The cost of channel (for each product). He was fine with this. He told me to focus on revenues only. He further gave me the capacity of Sales person (while selling only FDs, each person sells 10 FDs per month and if all products are sold the mix (4,8 and1 FD, MF and LI respectively). I calculated the as is case revenue (selling FD alone). I also found the profit (revenue for our client) in each category of products (as per the new mix) by existing sales force. (There were indeed a lot of calculations) The incremental profit was around 170 % more and I said on the basis of calculations, the model seems feasible but there are other parameters to be taken care – how to align incentives. Some part of incentives needs to be pegged to the number of products sold else higher margin products likely to be sold more (moreover there could be strategic reasons for selling even low margin products to customers – acquisition, customers may prefer to buy a basket of products from a single contact point/ sales person). He asked what would I say on basis of intuition ie, Should the client proceed with this. I thought and said Yes because the incremental impact is very high and even if some contingencies arise, the proposition is highly likely to be profitable. He agreed and seemed to be happy with this.
Tips: Try to present your opinion beyond the direct (numerical, as case may be) solution. It does help.

Skills: Basic Knowledge Of How The Products In The Case Studies Work, Guesstimation Cases, Case Solving Ability, Case Analysis
College Name: Indian School Of Business (ISB)