recent

A Day in the Life of Jack O'Brien, MBA '25

A Day in the Life of an MBA Student

Navigating MIT Sloan: The Experience of a Student, Veteran, and Parent

MBA

Bienvenidos a “Big Craft”

By

 After four months of conference calls and e-mails, our G-Lab team has finally met our host company in person! We are now on-site at the Estrella Galicia headquarters in A Coruña, Spain, and our first week here has been even better than we imagined.

Our team in the Estrella Galicia office showroom.

One of the reasons our team chose this project is to see first-hand what it’s like to work at a family company. Estrella Galicia is a “big craft” beer brand, as they produce their beers with high-quality ingredients in one central brewery. The “Estrella Galicia” brand is owned by the private company Hijos de Rivera, and the current CEO is from the fourth-generation of the Rivera family. On our first day of work, the CEO told us that instead of facing pressure from outside investors to maximize short-term profits, he is able to focus on setting the company up for success for the next generation.

 We saw this long-term orientation in action when we attended Hijos de Rivera’s  entrepreneurship competition for start-ups called “The Hop.”  Hijos de Rivera is investing in start-ups that will bring them new capabilities and innovation for the future, from augmented reality-bars to last-mile delivery. Watching the pitches brought back memories of working on pitch decks for MIT’s “New Enterprises” class and gave us insight into Hijos de Rivera’s view on how technology fits into the company’s current value chain and future business models.

CEO Ignacio Rivera speaking at “The Hop” Cultural Immersion event

Although Hijos de Rivera is over 100 years old, it is in a high-growth phase and their revenues have experienced double-digit growth over the past 5 years. As the company has grown, it has become one of the most desired employers in Spain, and most of our host team recently joined the company after working in the start-up world. One of our main challenges has been framing the problem statement for our project, as the company’s main goal is not to gain the biggest market share or largest revenue. The CEO frequently repeats his vision for the company, saying “we want to be the most loved brand, not the most sold.”

Now that we have a better understanding of the company context, we are interviewing key stakeholders like the Director for International Sales to help us further refine our strategy recommendations. Our project sponsor is the “Chief Digital Officer”and has shared with us some of the challenges of changing the culture of a traditional beer industry to face digital disruption and test out new business models.

Team working lunch featuring alcohol-free beer

We have also continued to pay attention to our team dynamics. After work we cook together and then do “Insanity” workouts on our apartment terrace to let off steam. At the end of the first week we revisited potential conflict points that we identified last semester and talked about our expectations for working on-site.

Working at a beverage company has its perks, and we capped off our first week by attending a beer tasting for the product launch of Estrella Galicia “India Pale Lager."