STAR Project 2008 Does Consulting for Best Diamond Packaging

STAR team members present their findings
to Diamond Packaging on May 2, 2008

Kevin Thorne thanks the members of the STAR team for putting food on more tables in eastern North Carolina. Before Thorne, who runs Best Diamond Packaging in Kinston, invested in another dispenser napkin-making machine, he consulted a team of first- and second-year MBA students through UNC Kenan-Flagler’s STAR program who helped him strategize for smart growth.

“If my business keeps growing, I keep employing people,” Thorne said. “There are more people who can buy houses and cars, pay taxes that build bridges and schools, pay for their kids to go to college. It’s a win all the way around.”

STAR – Student Teams Achieving Results – offers selected North Carolina companies a six-month consulting engagement with a UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School STAR team free of charge. In exchange, the dozen or so teams of about six MBA students each work with real-world business challenges, testing and validating what they learn in their coursework.

“The students treat this like it is a full-time job,” said Pat Garner, executive-in-residence who advises the Best Diamond Packaging STAR team. “You see their commitment to excellence in the work they do. And they are honing their own leadership skills.

“ ‘Shaping leaders; driving results’ is not just a motto. That’s really how we operate.”

The Best Diamond Packaging STAR team, composed of four first-year MBA students – Graham Furlong, Andras Koncz, Priyesh Siddharth and Suzanne Zweben – teamed with project leaders Suresh Iyer and Pete Thirangoon, both second-year MBAs, began a four-phase process that was to take Thorne’s business from issues assessment to strategy implementation. A phenomenon familiar to consultants, “scope creep” vaulted to “scope leap” when Thorne’s business partner, Bob Beavers, who runs a baking company in the Midwest and recently acquired a plastic cutlery business, got involved. All three businesses – paper napkins, sandwich buns and plasticware – serve the fast-food business. The growth strategy of a 20 percent increase for Best Diamond Packaging expanded to a 500 to 1,000 percent increase in the three-business conglomerate.

“As we got into the project,” Garner said, “we wanted to embrace and engage in a broader and deeper dialogue with the client. What the STAR team brought Best Diamond Packaging’s founders and owners was the opportunity to think well beyond their initial project goals.”

Thirangoon credits the team for their flexibility, spending more time on strategy than implementation, ultimately delivering what the client needed most.

“We spent a lot of time getting good information,” Thirangoon said. “That’s what the clients didn’t have time to do because they have to keep the operations going.”

In identifying options, team members sometimes spent as many as 20 to 30 hours a week apiece researching the existing market, interviewing potential customers, even developing a risk-assessment software tool that produced hard numbers of expected yield for various investment parameters. Team members agree that the personal sacrifices they made were worth the benefit to their own careers and the community.

“If the client’s business does well, the state will benefit in terms of employment and tax revenue,” Iyer said. “And everything I did as part of this project – managing client relationships, managing team members, working as a co-leader – certainly had lessons there for me that I will apply to the management consulting I will do next year.”

Thirangoon, who will work in real estate development in Thailand after graduation, said, “This is the kind of experience that you’d get from working in the industry three to five years, interacting with high-level management teams and business owners.”

Thorne, who has an MBA, was particularly appreciative of the STAR program.

“I had six MBAs helping me for six months,” Thorne said. “How long do you think it would have taken me to do this by myself, not to mention the expense of having to hire that many consultants?

“Particularly for a small business, having a multitude of bright minds helping to think through the questions you ultimately have to address, highlighting the opportunities and risks, STAR is a godsend.”