Leabre’ McNeal
Dr. Linda Reid
Leadership Capstone 560
Food Service Terminal Case Study
In the food service Terminal Case study Mike Bellafacia is faced with the task of being a
young manager with little to no experience in a failing organization and turning it around for the
immediate positive. Mike has just been offered and accepted the position of Store Manager for
the grocery chain FoodCo Ltd. a managerial position that reports to a director in the company.
Mike’s first quotation in the case study is “When I arrived at the store, the staff morale was
terrible. The previous manager had made a mess of things, the recession was hitting home, sales
were spiraling downward quickly, and my store was losing $10,000 per week. To make matters
worse, most of the key people in the company felt that I didn’t deserve the store manager’s
position.” With Mike being only 3 months out of college employees and reaching a mid-senior
level within the company so quickly there will be employees at all levels that will question if
Mike is capable of doing the job, even Mike’s employees will possibly feel a negative way about
someone younger than them that has not invested nearly as many years with FoodCo leading
them with little experience and knowledge about the company.
The case-study does not state how big Mike’s store is but it does say that there are only 7
total stores, meaning that every single stores success is extremely important. Mike is taking over
the newest Foodco location in St. Catharines, Ontairo. We can make the educated assumption
that with Mike’s store being the newest, the company has to have invested the most money in
this particular store for its duration of being open thus far (technology, facilities, etc.).
FoodCO’s corporate office is also located in St. Catharines, Ontario and the company is listed as
a “large player in the Niagara Peninsula grocery retailing industry.” With Mike’s store in the
same city as the corporate headquarters, being the newest store in FoodCo’s grocery chain, and
with the store already declining at alarming rates before his arrival as Store Manager Mike would
be smart to expect that executives would be watching the store extremely closely, and that
improvement would be appreciated as soon as possible.
Mike has proven that he has elite educational knowledge in business. The text states that
“Mike Bellafacia graduated from the University of Western Ontario with an Honors Business
Administration Degree. During his summers at the university, he was assigned spical projects
from his father that focused on a variety of company problems. Mike would combine the
analytical skills developed in the business school with his knowledge of the family business to
address these issues. In his last year in the HBA program, Mike and a team of student consultants
