Go Mechanic, a 7-year old car service startup, has laid off 70% of its workforce and asked the remaining 30% to work for free for 3 months due to major financial issues. The company is losing 200% of its revenue and approached Softbank for funding at an inflated $1.2 billion valuation, but an audit found they had inflated their books. Once this was revealed, Softbank and other investors pulled out, leaving the company in need of funds to continue operations but having lost trust from the investor community due to the fraud. As an advisor, you must devise strategies to make Go Mechanic a leader in car servicing again, raise necessary capital, improve profitability, launch marketing and PR
Go Mechanic, a 7-year old car service startup, has laid off 70% of its workforce and asked the remaining 30% to work for free for 3 months due to major financial issues. The company is losing 200% of its revenue and approached Softbank for funding at an inflated $1.2 billion valuation, but an audit found they had inflated their books. Once this was revealed, Softbank and other investors pulled out, leaving the company in need of funds to continue operations but having lost trust from the investor community due to the fraud. As an advisor, you must devise strategies to make Go Mechanic a leader in car servicing again, raise necessary capital, improve profitability, launch marketing and PR
Go Mechanic, a 7-year old car service startup, has laid off 70% of its workforce and asked the remaining 30% to work for free for 3 months due to major financial issues. The company is losing 200% of its revenue and approached Softbank for funding at an inflated $1.2 billion valuation, but an audit found they had inflated their books. Once this was revealed, Softbank and other investors pulled out, leaving the company in need of funds to continue operations but having lost trust from the investor community due to the fraud. As an advisor, you must devise strategies to make Go Mechanic a leader in car servicing again, raise necessary capital, improve profitability, launch marketing and PR
Go Mechanic, a 7-year old car service startup, has laid off 70% of its workforce and asked the remaining 30% to work for free for 3 months due to major financial issues. The company is losing 200% of its revenue and approached Softbank for funding at an inflated $1.2 billion valuation, but an audit found they had inflated their books. Once this was revealed, Softbank and other investors pulled out, leaving the company in need of funds to continue operations but having lost trust from the investor community due to the fraud. As an advisor, you must devise strategies to make Go Mechanic a leader in car servicing again, raise necessary capital, improve profitability, launch marketing and PR
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
Download as docx, pdf, or txt
You are on page 1of 2
GO (Goa Gone) Mechanic
The 7-year-old startup – Go Mechanic’s business is pretty simple. Its services
Cars. It’s a network of technology enabled car service centers, offering a seamless service experience at the convenience of a tap. It lures local garages in to a tie-up and rebrand them. A customer would simply fire up the app and demand a service. But this segment’s margins are wafer thin. Now to the other problems – Go mechanic has laid off 70% of its workforce and has asked the remaining 30% of the workforce to work for free for the next three months. The company is going in losses (200% of their revenue) and they do not have much runway left. With no money left to run their business they sought out to raise funds from investors. They approached SoftBank with a valuation of $1.2 billion which is 4 times their actual value. However, SoftBank was only comfortable with disbursing money for a valuation of $650 million – approximately half of their ask. Go mechanic and SoftBank got into negotiations and the latter, to be on the safer side asked EY an auditing firm to conduct a forensic audit of Go Mechanic. The reports showed that Go Mechanic had inflated its books and its assets. Once these reports were out, SoftBank pulled out of this deal and shared these reports to Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global – two of the largest shareholders in the company with an accumulated stake of 35%. After the reports were circulated in the media, Amit Bhasin the owner of Go Mechanic, posted a thread on LinkedIn apologizing for committing financial fraud. The exact words he used in the post were “grave errors in judgement, particularly in regard to financial reporting”, which he later went on to edit and removed the word “grave” to hide the magnitude of the fraud. Now Go Mechanic finds itself in a deadlock- it needs funds to continue its operations and it has burnt its bridges when it comes to VC’s and PE’s because of the fraud. There are no investors interested in giving funds to the company. Finally the business model is not working very well for them either – How many of us think of Go Mechanic when we are required to service our car – Exactly, Not many of us! TASK AT HAND You are an advisor to the management of the board of Go Mechanic. You are required to: - Make Go Mechanic, synonymous with Car servicing with their business model clearly not able to create an impact. - With no more money to continue operations, and with investors losing trust in your company come with different avenues to raise necessary capital for the functioning of the business. - Losses have amounted to approximately 200% of their revenues, devise revamped revenue models to steer the business into profitability. - Present 3 marketing campaigns to garner more consumers on your platform. - Devise 3 PR campaigns to address the financial frauds you’ve committed and gain the reputation of the brand back. - The company has fired 70% of its workforce – formulate necessary policies to compensate the employees for the same. - Defend your company’s decision to ask its employees to work for the company for free for the next three months, and come with a detailed implementation of how their deferred salaries will be paid once the company turns profitable.
DELIVERABLES - A ppt with minimum but not limited to 8 slides. - A minimum of one creative to support your marketing campaigns - A press release - An excel file to support your financials.