Strategy & Management · Competitive Strategy

Roadside Strategy — Defend Granger Hardware Before MegaBuild Opens

A four-round, intermediate small-business strategy simulation set at Granger Hardware & Outdoor, a 26-year-old family store on a state highway in Logan, Utah doing $3.6m in revenue at a 38% gross margin and ~$240k of owner cash flow.

4 rounds MBA & Masters English, Español

Preview

About this simulation

A four-round, intermediate small-business strategy simulation set at Granger Hardware & Outdoor, a 26-year-old family store on a state highway in Logan, Utah doing $3.6m in revenue at a 38% gross margin and ~$240k of owner cash flow. On 4 May 2026 the big-box chain MegaBuild announces a 60,000-sq-ft store opening 12 miles away in 9 months, with everyday prices 8–15% below Granger on commodities.

Playing owner Tessa Granger, you have one pre-entry window and a hard $300k capital cap (savings plus a 9.5% SBA line) to reposition the business.

Applying Schaefer's Roadside MBA lens, you (1) diagnose where Granger truly has a defensible local advantage — the contractor segment (45% of sales, ~$1.62m) that MegaBuild serves worst, not the price-shopping retail walk-ins; (2) set a pricing posture, learning from the math that a blanket 10% commodity cut erases roughly $130k of gross profit (more than half of owner cash flow) for a price war Granger cannot win, while targeted matching on ~10 known-value SKUs protects price image cheaply; (3) allocate the $300k under the cap, choosing concentration over sprinkling and weighing the $420k second store (which exceeds the cap, adds ~$180k of annual overhead, and splits the owner's attention) against the $140k contractor pro-desk + delivery that widens the gap with MegaBuild and the $120k store renovation; and (4) sequence a 9-month plan and defend its margin, break-even and 9.5% debt hurdle to the founder and the SBA lender.

The scoring rewards competing where the giant is weak, building contractor switching costs, capital discipline and ROIC, and punishes the five classic errors — matching prices across the board, expansion as reflex, sprinkling capital, chasing the wrong customer, and adding fixed cost without checking break-even.

Final KPIs track Defensibility, Contractor Retention %, Cash Strength, and Capital Committed against the $300k cap.

Who it is for

An intermediate simulation for participants who already know the core concepts of the subject, designed for master's and MBA programmes.

How a session runs

  1. The instructor creates a session from the Eureka dashboard and invites the participants.
  2. Participants play 4 rounds. In each one they submit their decisions and the simulation calculates the results.
  3. The simulation can be run in English, Español.
  4. The instructor follows each participant's progress and results from the dashboard, and uses the class results for the debrief.

Decisions participants make

The decisions participants make during the simulation:

  • Where should Granger concentrate its defense against MegaBuild?
  • What is Granger's real, defensible advantage?
  • How honestly does your team name where MegaBuild will simply win? (%)
  • What is your overall pricing posture against MegaBuild's 8–15% lower commodity prices?
  • On service-differentiated items where Granger has pricing power, do you add value rather than discount?
  • Price-image budget: invest in a few loud known-value 'we're not expensive' signals (in $k)?
  • Margin discipline: how firmly do you refuse to chase MegaBuild down on commodity price? (%)
  • Allocate your $300k capital across the three ideas (cap is hard — totals over $300k draw the 9.5% SBA line)
  • How explicitly do you protect Tessa's attention — only fund what one owner can run well? (%)
  • How do you sequence the 9-month pre-entry plan?

What participants track

What participants follow on screen as the rounds go by:

  • Defensibility, Contractor Retention & Cash Strength

Subjects covered

Designed for courses in Competitive Strategy.

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