Corporate Growth - Mrs Fields Case

The corporate growth is defined as a growth in sales and resources. This development can be mesured in a quantitative way (sales growth, profit growth, inrease of market share, of employees or resources) and in a qualitative way (a bigger influence on the market, better notoriety, development of its image, etc.). Thus, the corporate growth means its capacity to maintain or to develop its position in a hostile competitive environment and to win increased market share.

According to Mr Bossidy, in Fortunes, there are 2 key benefits of growth:

- On the people's morale who work for him: growth attires the best executives and motivate workers

- Growth improves sales, productivity and there is more profit.

Mrs Fields'Cookies is an international company that has grown from just one small store to a huge organization with over 500 stores in United States and present in fives countries on four continents. This case is a nice family story of partnership and entrepeneurship.

Debbie Fields created this company and opened her first store in Pao Alto, CA in 1977. With the help of her husband Randy, Debbie grew significantly her business.

We are going to analyze the reasons, which allowed this successful company to grow and how it became a successful story.

I will join the idea of Edith Penrose, the author of The Theory of the growth of the firm, who explains us that the reasons of the growth have to been search by the organization, the management.

A very structured system

After a few stores opened, mostly in shopping malls, Debbie Fields realized that she could not be present in more that on place at once. Thus she decided to create a system that will allowed her to delegate some responsabilities. Thanks to this system, the differents stores could run with more independance. As she attached a great importance to the quality of the service and efficiency of the organization, she developed with Randy Fields, graduated at Stanford in economics, a very structured system, IT solutions (TPS, MIS..) that seemed to be incredibly advanced for its time.

The use of IT enables rapid growth of the company while maintaining control.

In this system, each employees, I mean the sales, the stores managers, the district managers or the regional directors of operations, had tasks that have to be completed. Debbie and Randy were always available to communicate with their employees as needed.

Mrs Field's cookies manage to integrate a new information system into a growing business.

An external and internal growth

Mrs. Fields, Inc, adopted the management's strategy developed by a few big companies explained