Interview Question for Business Analytics Intern at Enova Financial:

Mar 22, 2012

Start with Assumptions:

320 million US citizens, avg life 80 years, he is calling people living at this time (in 20 years he isnt calling the new 20 year olds), the us population is equally distribed, same number of people are in the age range 0-10 as 70-80.

Break it down to age groups to assume total size of cell phone market in the US
Each age group has 40 million people.

0-10 0% have cell phones
10 - 20 25%
20 - 30 50%
30 - 40 50%
40 - 50 50%
50 - 60 25%
60 - 70 25%
70 - 80 10%

that gives you a total of 104 million cell phones.

now assume that he uses 30 seconds per call, he can call 2 people per minute, he needs 104 million / 2 = 52 million minutes to do this.

Now assume that 60 years, he makes calls 360 days a year, 10 hours a day. thats

60 years* 360 days / year * 10 hours / day* 60 minutes / hour = 12,960,000 minutes.

No this is not feasible. It all depends on the numbers you use, these are conservative but they want to know how you think and work through the problem.