Chicago Booth MBA Essay 1# How will the Booth MBA help you achieve your immediate and long-term post-MBA career goals? (250-word minimum)
Profile: Mr. J
Profile (Background): Mr. J wants to leverage the finance heritage of Chicago Booth and the VC community in the US to bring sustainability to African farms.
Essay Approach: “Why Chicago Booth MBA?”
Mr J should explain how Chicago Booth offers the foundation to marketing farm products to clientele willing to pay a premium for authentic organic produce, build a strategy to scale the vision, and network with the right ESG investors to invest in small farms and bring sustainability practices to small farms.
Essay Planning
Problem: The high failure rate of small farms in Africa and the lack of sustainability practices among small farmers managing them.
Problem (Explained): When a PE firm or a large fund invests in farms, meeting sustainability standards is a regulatory requirement. The applicant in one such deal brought fund influx into large farms in Africa. The implementation of sustainability practices, following the arrival of the funds, improved profitability, reduced the carbon footprint, and introduced water conservation and sustainable irrigation practices to the farms. But small farms exist in siloes, at the mercy of the weather. They struggle to survive.
Feasible Goals: Finding a premium market for small farm produce and finding investors interested in creating a marketplace for small farms.
Short-term Goal: US investors and large pension funds have slowly diluted their holdings in businesses with ESG goals. By exploring strategies to leverage technology in the Agri-Tech ecosystems, Mr. J wants to apply his market segmentation and develop product development skills to improve the efficiency of small farms and find investors passionate about small farms leveraging technologies.
Long-Term Goal: Create an umbrella brand for small farms to offer collective bargaining power in the marketplace.
Chicago Booth’s Strength: Mr. J. would find the right networking opportunities by taking advantage of the strong VC community in the US and the legacy of commodities trading in Chicago to fund small farms in Africa.
Opener: Starting with a connection with the farmers in Africa helps the Brazilian applicant build a case for the small farmers.
Strategy: After establishing the applicant’s passion for Africa, his success in persuading a large pension fund to invest in farms, I want to present the skill gap in brand positioning that Chicago Booth could address. I also want to highlight the hesitation of VC funds in the US in pursuing ESG funds, as the pressure on short-term return is high. Mr. J also needs access to the VC funds specializing in agri-tech startups that the US offers. Networking matters the most in accessing these investors.
The Chicago Booth MBA with a targeted curriculum in product development, marketing management, and innovation leadership would offer the opportunity.
Sample Booth MBA Goals Essay #4– VC funds for Small Farms in Africa (556 Words)
Coming from a Brazilian farming business, each summer was planned around my father’s meetings with farmers in Benue, Nigeria. 2014 was catastrophic for farmers, who faced the biggest droughts. Years following the crop failure, the tension between herders and farmers escalated from disputes over water and grazing rights. The impact of climate change requires enforcing sustainability standards through capital infusion. In 2018, I helped the largest pension fund diversify into the ..
....
