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Boston Chicken, Inc.

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Boston Chicken, Inc.

Siwen Cheng

1. Assess Boston Chicken’s business strategy. What are its critical success factors and risks?
Boston Chicken is a company to operate and franchise food service stores that sold meals featuring rotisserie-cooked chicken, fresh vegetables, salads, and other side dishes. Its concept is to combine fresh, flavorful, and appealing meals associated with traditional home cooking with a high level of convenience and value. Boston Chicken focused its expansion through franchising the company through large regional developers rather than selling store franchises to a large number of small franchisees. In that, an established network of 22 regional franchises that targeted their operations in the 60 largest U.S. metropolitan markets and in order to do so, the franchisee would have been an independent experienced businessman with vast financial resources and would be responsible for opening 50 – 100 stored in the region. Boston Chicken focused on widespread continuous expansion of its operations to become to developed across the board food chain.
The risks include: 1. Unfavorable company culture: the quality and service is no longer guaranteed. 2. High franchise fee: the franchisees struggled to survive, and the quality in those restaurants was suffered. 3. Large amount of stocks: the company’s stock is oversubscribed in the early year, and the company easily tripled the offer. 4. Rapid growth: such growth implies the need for cash and investment.

2. How is the company reporting on its performance and risks? What are the key assumptions behind these policies? Do you think that its accounting policies reflect the risks?
Boston Chicken may not report its transactions transparently when it is facing the risks I just mentioned. Boston Chicken’s expansion from 34 stores at the end of 1991 to 534 in 1994 affects its

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