Mia Foster Case Study Essay

Mia Foster has a tough road ahead of her. She needs to make her business a company that Wall Street thinks will be successful. Wall Street feels that Levendary Café has reached it’s potential in the United States and will see no growth. To combat this Levendary Café has launched efforts to go international. With this being said Wall Street is still skeptical of Levendary because it’s CEO Mia Foster has no experience with international business. This lack of faith from Wall Street is what fueled the fire in Mia Foster. Levendary Café is a well-established quick casual restaurant based out of the Denver in the United States. They have restaurants in the United States and they recently started opening up restaurants in China. To make opening up stores in China
To do this Foster wanted to standardize the operations in China to coincide with the operations conducted in the United States. Operations in China was not standard. Chen built the stores based on the regions of China they were built in. I believe this was a great approach to doing business. When entering a new market, you should try to tailor your business to the needs of the local customers that would come to your restaurant. I side with Chen and the decisions that were made based on the market research performed.
Foster and Chen did not see eye to eye. Foster wanted Chen to change all the progress that had been made so far. Chen did not want to conform to standardizing Levendary restaurants in China. Chen feels that this would hurt the profits in China. Foster and Chen have two different outlooks on the issues. Chen has a better outlook on what the Chinese market wants because he is actually in China and understands the locals. Not adapting to the Chinese market would be to go against what Levendary stood for which “was built on a culture that emphasized “delighting the customer”” (Bartlett & Han,