Spellman Gardens: A Review Case Study Samples

The Spellmans' decision to start a new business, selling seeds and equipments necessary for home vegetable gardens, pays off immediately and business grows exponentially. By selling more, filling orders still lag behind, although friends and family members are being "called up" to fill in order request gaps. Still, Spellmans' ad hoc practice of collaborating with family and friends, Spellmans find out, need some restructuring, i.e. organizational alignment for more effective group work, better meeting of deadlines and places, agendas as well as problem-solving procedures. Loosely organized as an informal network of friends and family members, Spellman's company is experiencing a stage of conflict and emergence in which friends and family members – as best befits a closely-knit group of coworkers in a start-up – grapple, mainly, with daily, innovative solutions in order to fill in orders as quickly as possible. Growing organizationally, Spellmans ponder, means imposing a structured hierarchy in bigger businesses which, Spellmans fear, might impact on Spellman Gardens' agility. The Spellmans' dilemma is, accordingly, one of organizational structure and communication par excellence. This presentation aims, hence, to address Spellman Gardens' restructuring dilemma of keeping an informal, family-and-friend organizational structure or adopting a conventional, executive style and recommend possible solutions.
Typical of start-ups, Spellman Gardens is facing a growth dilemma. By expanding business, Spellman Gardens is no longer able to meet all orders. Indeed, by increasing expansion of roles and responsibilities of Spellman Gardens' closely-knit "founder group", focal points are reached – at operational, organizational, communication and management platforms – when contributions of individual members – often swapping and overlapping roles – are far surpassed by business demands. If anything, bottlenecks are increasing at different business areas and, not least, value chains are not exploited optimally. Accordingly, staffing emerges as an intuitive solution but one which poses organizational and communication problems. By departing from a closely-knit model of an informal network of associates, Spellman Gardens' staffing decision requires a deeper analysis.
Considering for esprit de corps – which Spellman Gardens and all startups, in fact, are distinguished of as an essential component of corporate communication culture – restructuring Spellman Gardens should, ideally, adopt a hybrid model of startup, quasi executive organization and web-enabled network organization. That is, at different levels of organizational structure, Spellman Gardens should, ideally, be re-organized based on an organizational model made up of a team of family and friends for upper management, conventional executive style for middle management and full-time delivery staff and on-demand, web-based organization part-time delivery staff.
Given Spellman Gardens' line of business, vegetation remains a communal practice. That is, by offering seeds and equipments, Spellman Gardens could create an on-demand, web-based platform via which stakeholders, including end consumers, could manage seed and equipment products. Internally Spellman Gardens could maintain her initial esprit de corps culture by opting for a conventional, physical mode of communication between "core staff" defined in a rewritten company charter based on existing and predictable areas of expansion. Operationally, however, given Spellman Gardens' main staffing expansion dilemma is centered on a problem of distribution channels, Spellman Gardens could adopt a web-based model of organization and communication by which orders are filled. This could, ideally, be achieved by creating – usually by outsourcing – a web-based platform via which orders are initiated online and delivered by staff categorized into Main Area and Subsidiary Areas staff. More clearly, by employing full-time staff dedicated to Spellman Gardens' core market of vegetation consumers, such group of on-site staff should, ideally, fall under an executive chain of command like in conventional business hierarchies. The part-time – probably an on-demand, home-based staff – should be assigned under a deputy of a core staff's supervision. This should ensure order delivery to areas outside Spellman Gardens' main areas is expedited since given on-demand, web-enabled, part-time staff are availed and resourced more optimally in specific areas of growing demand. Understandably, web-enabled staff needs pre-orientation sessions before joining in. This group of web-enabled staff would, ideally, be supported by a group of customer care personnel who would handle online communications and phone calls of clients and web-enabled staff.
Thus, at a superstructure level, core staff's main organizational closely-knit esprit de corps is maintained. This is followed in a next organizational level by conventional mode of hierarchical organization in which full-time staff is organized under a direct supervision of a core staff's deputy. Finally, part-time, web-enabled staff is organized in a network-styled, virtual team schema which covers areas of growth outside Spellman Gardens' main areas as well as areas of potential growth. These fall under supervision of personnel department which manages when and how – in collaboration with support department – part-time, web-based staff is recalled into service.