The case examines the focus of an early stage company, and how an unexpected external incidence can threaten or void the business model. It encompasses issues such as defining and pivoting a business model, organizational requirements for a pivot, investor relations, disruptive business models, as well as business conduct in continental Europe. In 2017, Dr. Torben Antretter, a former competitive tennis player and academic researcher, founded RightNow with his two co-founders. RightNow was set out to provide consumers with “Justice-as-a-Service” by purchasing their legal claims that they would not pursue otherwise. Just one year after its inception, the company had closed a 25 million financing to increase its market share and leverage further growth opportunities. Upon closing of this financing round, matters took a sudden and unexpected turn when the National Supreme Court announced a ruling that airlines were no longer required to refund flight tickets. This decision wiped out RightNow’s profit margins. Antretter and his co-founders had to decide what they should do with the business. How should the founders approach investors? Should they quit and walk away from their entrepreneurial dream or try to reinvent the business with a different focus? What would be the strategy going forward?
The case examines issues such as cascading problems within the organization, changing founder roles, founder success criteria, as well as company exit consideration. In 2017, Dr. Torben Antretter, a former competitive tennis player and academic researcher, founded RightNow with his two co-founders. RightNow was set out to provide consumers with “Justice-as-a-Service” by purchasing their legal claims that they would not pursue otherwise. Three years after inception and after overcoming numerous consecutive hurdles, the company was entering its next stage of its lifecycle. The selection of an investor type would be instrumental to the next few years of the company and the lives of the founders. With success, considerations around company exit and defining success criteria became inevitable. Different investors types had different investment criteria with regards to target returns, growth ambitions, decision rights, and ownership stakes. Antretter and his co-founders had to decide, jointly as well as individually, what they want to do. Discussions among the founding team showed that they needed to develop an ‘exit strategy’ in the same way that they had developed a growth strategy. When should they consider an exit and take some chips off the table? Was it more important to become rich or to remain kings of their kingdom?
Riccardo Cortese and Federico Pinna were the CEOs of Briscola—Pizza Society, a restaurant chain they had founded in 2014 with a clear ambition: create a distinctive international pizza chain that would combine a fast-casual format with the devotion to quality that characterized family-run Italian restaurants. In 2017, Francesco Trapani, the former CEO of luxury jewelry company Bulgari, had taken a majority stake in the chain, which had switched to a format of "affordable luxury." At the end of 2019, Briscola counted six restaurants in the northern regions of Italy and its founders were grappling with a series of questions: Should they consolidate their position in other Italian regions or expand directly abroad? In which countries would their concept work best? Should they change their direct ownership model? If so, what kinds of partnerships, licensing agreements, and franchise models should they use? Finally, what was the right degree of standardization across their restaurants? Allowing some variations in the menu at the restaurant level would be attractive to target specific segments of their clientele, but would this complicate their operations and potentially hinder their growth?
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Vincent Dessain, a Belgian national, is the Executive Director of the Europe Research Center (ERC). Vincent has extensive management and business education experience. He is a co-author of two books in finance, a book chapter on intercultural management and a co-author of a wide variety of articles in academic journals, case studies and course development notes (cases can be found on www.hbsp.harvard.edu or here). He is a frequent guest speaker invited by academia, business and government to speak on topics in management and education.
Prior to his appointment at the Europe Research Center, he was Senior Director of Corporate Relationships at INSEAD in Fontainebleau and elected as the representative of the INSEAD administration on the School’s Board of Directors. Earlier in his career, Vincent has been active as a management consultant with Booz-Allen & Hamilton in New York and Paris. His field of consulting was international market entry strategies, financial products, strategy, negotiation and implementation of cross border alliances, financial restructuring, mergers and acquisitions. He has also been active as a Foreign Associate with the law firm Shearman & Sterling in New York in Banking and Finance and as an Advisor to the President of the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium.
Vincent speaks five European languages (French, English, German, Dutch and Italian). He holds a law degree from Leuven University (Belgium), a Business Administration degree from Louvain University (Belgium), an MBA from Harvard Business School (Boston, USA), and a PhD in management and communication from Université Paris VIII, France, on corporate social responsibility.