One day in late October 2000, Charles Saerang sat in his office, reviewing the family conflicts and tragedies in the history of P.T. Nyonya Meneer. He is the third generation of the Meneer family and now fully controls the company. Charles reexamined the old Chinese saying that the first generation builds a company, the second generation expands it, and the third destroys it. He swore to himself that he would not let this happen. He wanted to turn the Nyonya Meneer into a world-class traditional medicine company and bring greater pride and welfare to its stakeholders. At this time Charles began with the idea of restructuring the company’s organization to have a structure that can accommodate and maintain a better relationship between the family, shareholders and the management in the future, while at the same time reflect the family’s governance.

Growbox is a small creative industry located in Bandung. It was established in 2012 by four young individuals who wanted to be self-employed. Their idea of a business was to produce a media where mushrooms could grow. They sold the media in an attractive package, in the form of a box that was called a growbox. By buying a growbox, customers could experience growing mushrooms on their own. They were targeting people who had fun in growing plants and people who were interested in plants that had medicinal purposes.

Bandung was considered as a city in which the government put forth an effort in developing the creative industries. Most of the creative industries in Bandung were small. Approximately 96 percent of the creative industries had fewer than 50 employees. However, the revenue was quite fantastic. In a 2008 study, 19 percent of the industry had revenue of more than US$ 500,000 a year.

Growbox has been promoted many times in newspapers, in magazines, on TV, and through online media. Growbox participated in 16 exhibitions in the year 2013 alone or a total of 19 exhibitions from late 2012 to early 2014. It has won some business awards and prizes. Despite all of these achievements, there has been no significant growth in sales for the past sixteen months, particularly for the white growbox that was introduced to the market in 2012. There seems to be promising sales for the new products introduced (pink and yellow growbox).

It was a challenge for Annisa, as the finance and marketing manager of Growbox, to solve the problem of having almost no profit after operating for sixteen months with thousands of products having already been sold.

As one of the major investment companies in Indonesia, PT Bakrie & Brothers Tbk (called BB) is considering a major expansion of the business, growth through internal investment (organic), or invests by acquiring other companies (inorganic). From the firm's perspective, the investors' expected return is a cost of using the funds, called the cost of capital.  A variety of factors influencing a firm's cost of capital, such as level of interest rates, tax policies, and the regulatory environments.  The degree of risk in the projects it undertakes and the types of funds it raises both have a profound effect on its cost of capital.