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This is part of a case series. 'Could you turn the light on?' Adam Balon asked his colleague Jon Wright. Wright, Balon and their friend Richard Reed had assembled in Balon's office at Virgin Cola to begin drafting the plan for their business venture, a new brand of fresh fruit smoothie drinks. It was a typical English late summer afternoon - heavily overcast, with the promise of rain. In the steadily increasing gloom it was becoming impossible to read the mass of data gathered on the desk in front of them. 'You think we need to cast light on the problem?' joked Reed. In truth, each of the three knew it would take more than electricity to illuminate the difficulties that confronted them. They had been researching their idea for almost six months, and at the outset they had set themselves some ambitious goals. 'The quality of our closest rivals' product is not as good as you would make at home, nor as good as the smoothies you can buy in the USA,' they had said to one another. 'We'll beat them on taste, and match them on price.' But the three friends' analysis now seemed to show that if they stuck to those targets they would struggle to meet a third, no less crucial, objective. 'If you're going to survive you'll need to hit gross margins of 40 percent - that's the standard for the FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) sector,' a senior colleague of Wright's at Bain, the management consultancy, had told them early on. But every time that Wright had run a spreadsheet model, the message had seemed to be the same: they would not be able to achieve their financial goals and remain true to their other aspirations. This left the three with some stark choices. Should they plan to increase price, or lower quality? Or was there another solution to enable them to get this business off the ground?