The New Entrant

What this pack runs.

A new entrant, as this pack uses the term, is a competitor that has arrived in your market with money it did not earn there, raised or carried from a parent, and is spending it to take customers you already have. The product is what the room talks about, because the product is what the room can see. The money is what decides how many customers the product can be given to below what serving them costs, and for how long. So the threat has a size, in customers, and the size is arithmetic: the entrant's money divided by what taking one customer costs it, capped at the customers its offer reaches. That cost is a fact about somebody else's business, what it spends winning a customer plus what it gives up on that customer a year for as long as it can hold its price, and in most companies no one has assembled it from the price list, the incentives and the sales hiring that carry it. This pack turns the response into a division and an annuity. What the money can take, times what one of those customers earns you a year over the horizon, is what holding costs. What the answer costs on every customer the entrant reaches, including the ones who were never leaving, plus what it costs once, is what answering costs. The decision reduces to the break-even funding, how much money the entrant would need before answering costs less than holding, which is a distance in somebody else's money, read against the last round and watched at the next. It names four readings, the money runs out first, answering costs less than what the money can take, the money is not the constraint, and buying it is cheaper than either, and a fifth response no room models, arriving first. It stops on two halts almost no company has met: what taking one customer costs the entrant, and how much money it has.

The casebooks these cases come from.

The pack reads nine sourced decisions through the framework. They are drawn from these casebooks, each one a set of verified records on a single decision type.

A verified record has passed a mechanical claim-versus-source check, a second model's read, and human approval. The count is what exists today, not a target.