Scaling the Venture — Harrow & Vale Foods at the Inflection Point

A four-round, intermediate entrepreneurship simulation set inside Harrow & Vale Foods Ltd, an owner-managed premium chilled-food manufacturer in Banbury, Oxfordshire (£9.4M revenue, 11% EBITDA, 78 staff, one site at 82% capacity). Founder Priya Anand owns 100% and still personally signs off recipes, key customers and every spend over £2,000. On 13 January 2026 national supermarket Northgate Grocers offers a 240-store own-label contract worth £6.2M a year — nearly doubling the business — but volumes triple in four months, payment terms are 75 days, the SLA is penalty-backed (£8,000 per major failure), and Priya has 90 days to decide against a cash buffer of just £0.45M while the ramp needs £1.4M. Playing the owner-manager's leadership team, you (1) diagnose growth readiness — ranking the binding constraints of cash, capacity and the founder bottleneck and naming the survival risk each poses; (2) choose a growth path along the spectrum from full Northgate acceptance to phased entry to doubling down on the resilient online subscription; (3) break the founder bottleneck through deliberate delegation with decision rights, thresholds and a £65,000 operations director, deciding what Priya must still own; and (4) time and structure a financing move — bank growth loan at ~9%, a £1.5M-for-25% regional growth-fund equity round, or bootstrapping on supplier terms — weighing dilution, repayment risk, timing against valuation, and resilience. The math is grounded in Hussels' research on entrepreneurial resilience and survival in owner-managed firms: it rewards funding the cash gap before the ramp, scaling decisions not just revenue, managing the 40% customer-concentration risk, delegating with governance not abdication, and timing the raise — and it punishes the five classic errors of funding-gap blindness, founder-bottleneck, trading resilience for revenue, delegation as abdication, and mis-timed financing. Final KPIs track Revenue Growth, the Resilience & Survival Index, Founder Capacity freed, and a live Cash Runway that can run the profitable business insolvent.