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. 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.