One of the biggest inconsistencies in business plans is the gulf between the financial sections and the narrative sections, says Jerry Pradier, a business coach and author of Financial Success: Ten Shortcuts to a Profitable Business. “The numbers in the financial section have to support the narrative,” he adds. “Investors will check to see if they match up, making sure areas like the development plan have enough financial resources allocated to them. You have to be realistic with the numbers and reconcile them to the narrative.”

Potential investors and good critics of business plans will challenge every assumption the plan makes, notes Terry Murray, founder of Performance Transformation, LLC. “Before you finish your plan, ask yourself serious questions about all of your assumptions,” he says. “Make sure you include the data points that are going to substantiate your position. If they don’t, open up your thinking, do more research and explore possibilities that might not have occurred to you.”

A business plan tells the story of the company you plan to start, articulating the business’ goals and objectives in a measurable, tangible way. By tying those goals to the present, entrepreneurs keep the plan and themselves grounded. The process of writing a business plan creates a road map to implementing those goals in the months and years following the opening of the business, Murray says.

Pradier sees the goals section as the hardest part of the plan to write and present because there are so many potential variables involved in growing a business once it’s started. “The goals need to be authentic and reasonable,” he asserts. “You need to think about the smaller steps that it will take to meet the larger goals and make sure that they have the characteristics of being measurable and observable. Each goal should be assigned to be the responsibility of one staff member.

Many business plans fail just because of the lack of “chunking” goals down into smaller more manageable steps, Pradier believes.

Finally, testing your business plan’s assumptions through some type of prototyping or market testing will either validate your assumptions or send you back to the drawing board, says Murray. “It will help you incorporate real world lessons and validate the intuitive leap that brought you to create the business plan if you do it with discipline and honesty. You have to be flexible and willing to change your plan if you need to.”

There are many great resources available if you need assistance writing your business plan. One step is to check with your local economic development agency to find out about programs that they may offer. If a business plan competition is being held in your area, check there for resources as well. Many times competitions host workshops or mentoring sessions that are open to the public in addition to competitors.

Photo credit: mhaithaca

For nearly 300 men at the Cleveland Correctional Facility — a state prison near Houston, Texas — the opportunity to participate in entrepreneurship classes and a business plan competition is literally a chance at a new life. These men, who are at risk for returning to a life of crime and ending up back in jail, work with business leaders and MBA students who mentor them and instructors who teach them how to operate a legitimate business once they are released from jail, according to Erin Davis, communications specialist at the Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP), a non-profit organization in Houston, Texas.

The program focuses on entrepreneurship because it’s so difficult for former inmates to get a job upon release from prison. By helping them think about and plan for a business that can financially support them upon release, the PEP program offers an alternative to unemployment and also prepares them for employment if they are able to find a job, she adds.

“We take guys who have two or three years left in their sentences and work with them intensively on entrepreneurship, business training and character,” she says. “Right now we have 300 inmates at the Cleveland Correctional Facility who participate in our program and by the end of 2013 the entire prison population of 520 will be enrolled in our program.”

It is an intensive program that is designed to focus on inmates who are the most receptive to PEP’s message. The inmates are chosen from prisons across Texas and upon acceptance are moved to the Cleveland facility. The program assists men who haven’t graduated from high school in getting their GEDs and once they have accomplished that, they spend eight hours a day, five days a week in college-level business classes, many taught by volunteer executives who agree to mentor the inmates on an ongoing basis, Davis says.

“Once they get involved with us their first assignment is to read Crime and Punishment in a week,” Davis notes. “This sends a couple of messages. One is that this is a serious program — we will kick them out if they don’t read it. We’re trying to see how serious they are. Also, the theme of the novel ties into the mindset of many of the inmates.”

From that first assignment, the program moves into intensive classes in marketing, finance, psychology, accounting and other topics. Many of the men in the program have committed serious crimes but also have some practical business acumen from running criminal enterprises before they got arrested, she adds.

“We work a lot on character issues as well — we talk a lot about healthy behavior, understanding boundaries and integrity,” Davis notes. “Those are as, if not more, important than the classes that focus strictly on business issues.”

The business plan competition is a major event in the program. The competition begins with a kick off that welcomes participants into the program and progresses through a number of events including:

• The Venture Capital Panel where participants pitch preliminary business plans to a group of VCs.
• Etiquette Night features discussions and lessons around business etiquette and proper dress, culminating in the crowning of Mr. Manners.
• Business Plan Workshop, a day long session where mentors give written and verbal feedback to business plans in progress.
• Business Plan Competition and Graduation, where one participant will win the competition and everyone who completes the program graduates.

The results of the program have been nothing short of remarkable, according to Davis.  After three years of graduates, 89 of the 100 businesses started by inmate graduates are still operating. Many of these are food service, landscaping and similar businesses. During those three years, only 9 percent of graduates have been imprisoned again, versus a rate of 48 percent for all Texas prisons, Davis says.

“We estimate our program is saving the taxpayers of Texas $7 million, because that is what it would cost if more of our graduates went back to prison,” she states. “We’re excited about the opportunity we have to work with more inmates at the Cleveland facility and to eventually expand our program to two additional prisons in Texas.”

Through the course of studying entrepreneurship and entering business plan competitions, they learned a lot about what makes — or breaks — new business ventures. Their team has won awards in three business plan competitions sponsored by MIT:

• 2011 LinkedData Prize, MIT 100k Entrepreneurship Competition: Co-Winner with two other companies
• 2011 Deployment Category Winner, MIT Clean Energy Prize
• A 2011 MIT Global Challenge Development Grant, MIT Global Challenge 

Key to their success in wining competitions and launching their company is the support that MIT provides around entrepreneurship and their business plan competitions, he says. “MIT has built a very successful entrepreneurial eco system that provides ongoing mentorship, feedback and help constructing a viable business plan,” Loijos continues.

“We were appointed a mentor through the process of competing for the MIT Clean Energy Prize and he was phenomenal,” he comments. “He helped us put together a very solid pitch and understand how to get the key compelling points across that would resonate with the judges.”

A major motivator through the competition process was that Loijos and his team planned all along to launch their business; it wasn’t a theoretical exercise. “It was a business that we really wanted to get off the ground so everything we did around the competition and in other areas, including applying for SBA grants, forced us to refine our ideas and get them down on paper,” he adds. “We didn’t get the grants, but the feedback was very helpful.”

While competing in business plan competitions in the midst of grad school and starting a business didn’t leave him and his team members much leisure time, the time put into formulating the business plan was definitely worth it. “It was a nice break from research, more applied, more relevant to my future,” he notes. “Working on the business and competing in the MIT competitions motivated us to keep going forward on the business. Having the deadlines of the business plan competition forced us to prioritize and get what we needed to get done.”

Loijos graduated from MIT with a Master’s in Technology and Policy last year. Sahni is a PhD candidate in Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. Both are working full time on getting the company off the ground. “It’s challenging,” he admits. “Being such a small company that is brand new, it’s hard to convince potential clients to work with us. We have to sell our experience in practice and fulfill multiple roles, from running marketing campaigns to keeping the sales pipeline full.”

Photo Credit: LinkCycle

The Plan Fund’s 2011 Business Plan Competition, sponsored by Capital One, awarded grants and software to four entrepreneurs. The Plan Fund’s Business Plan Competition is designed to help specific disadvantaged populations — including men that have been recently released from jail and graduates of a small business training program at the YWCA of Greater Dallas — learn more about starting their own businesses, according to Jeremy Gregg, executive director of The Plan Fund.

“We focus on low to moderate income entrepreneurs, those who are disadvantaged and extremely credit challenged,” he says. “Our business plan competition, which concluded in November, gave us the opportunity to bring attention to what we do, attract more applicants and provide grants and QuickBooks software to the four entrepreneurs who won the competition.”

The Plan Fund’s focus is quite different from that of most organizations that sponsor business plan competitions, notes Gregg. “We focus on micro loans — our average loan is $2,000, but can be as low as $500,” he says. “We’re trying to help men who are out of prison, battered women and the homeless start their own businesses so that they can earn a decent income of anywhere from $30,000 to $40,000.”

As part of the business plan competition, 10 applicants who submitted proposals were chosen to partner with business bankers from Capital One to work on their fully-blown business plan. Those bankers gave the contestants anywhere from eight to thirty hours of mentoring and helped them write their business plan to the contest’s specifications.

Those specifications included descriptions of the business plan in 10 different areas, including marketing, finance and operations. The business plan couldn’t be any longer than 10 pages, which forced contestants to boil their idea down and make it as easy to understand as possible, Gregg says.

“The entrepreneurs really benefitted from being matched up with a mentor, who guided them through the process of putting the business plan together,” he adds. “And it was good for Capital One, because they were able to fulfill some of their community development requirements by sponsoring the contest.”

Next year, The Plan Fund will hold two separate business plan competitions, which Gregg is already planning for; the year after, he hopes to scale up the format to four different business plan competitions. The goal is to attract as much attention to the Plan Fund as possible to get more loan applications and help these underserved populations get a head start on becoming entrepreneurs.

To win, contestants had to score the most points in three areas: the business plan competition, a 10 minute pitch competition in the Shark Tank format and a 10 minute question and answer session with the judges.

Photo credit: Jeremy Gregg

For Paul Kirsch, program manager at the Samuel Zell & Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich., team formation in business plan competitions is one of the “biggest black boxes of the entire process.” The Zell Lurie Institute sponsors the Michigan Business Challenge, a business plan competition for University of Michigan undergraduate and graduate students.

“We sponsor live events and provide opportunities online for students to interact with each other so that they can find the best partners for their venture,” he says. “It’s not something that we can get involved in, in terms of matching students with each other, because then there might be problems if a team didn’t work out.”

The Institute provides opportunities to register online both for students who have an idea that they want to build a business plan upon as well as students who are looking to join a team that already has a business idea and plan in place. In the past, more than 1,000 students have registered on its site.

In addition, the Institute runs three or four “mingle and match” events before the competition begins so that students can gather in a room, listen to students with ideas pitch those plans and have the opportunity to talk with them about those plans, according to Kirsch. “We provide the space, pizza and soda over an hour and a half time period so students can mingle and form teams,” he adds.

Because putting the right people together is so critical to the success of a business plan competition team, students need to think through what they are looking for in other team members and seek complementary skills when forming a team. Learning how to form a team and work with team members with differing perspectives and skills is an important part of learning how to partner successfully with others on an entrepreneurial level, he notes.

“It’s important that students do their due diligence and take the initiative to find team members who they are compatible with and who will help them navigate the various events in the competition,” Kirsch says. “This is a critical skill for our students to develop as they move through the program.”

Photo credit: Jiheffe

For community colleges, there’s a great opportunity to partner with local banks, venture capitalists and other stakeholders to start business plan competitions and grow their entrepreneurship programs. To get a business plan competition off on the right foot, getting buy-in from community college executives is critical, says Nevels.

“You have to get buy-in from the top to filter down to get what you need to have in order to try something new, if starting a business plan competition is what you want to do,” she says. Establishing a time line around all the tasks involved in a new competition is key, Nevels adds. Reaching beyond the college to find partners to help sponsor the competition and get buzz going in the community around it is critical as well.

Local banks and credit unions can make for great partners and sponsors because they are required to spend dollars on community reinvestment projects. Business plan competitions are the perfect venue for a bank or credit union to use these funds, not only to boost their image in the community but also to have a chance to connect with budding entrepreneurs, she says.

It’s essential to have a schedule and plan in place before you start the ambitious process of launching a business plan competition. It takes time and effort to start a competition, find sponsors, raise money and market it to the college and the greater community.

“Before you start, think about your purpose,” she advises. “What are you going to do after the first competition? What are you trying to achieve? What are your goals for the contestants, both winners and losers? Because everyone has to get something out of this whether they win or not.”

Nevels urges plan organizers to be savvy about how they publicize their competitions and connect with stakeholders. Social media, including using videos, Twitter, Facebook and blogs are great free ways to get the word out about a new or continuing competition.

Finally, she urges community college — and other — organizers to aim for big prize pools. “You can’t have a viable business plan competition and give away $1,000. Many community colleges are scared of the financial commitment, but if they line up donors in advance and really sell what they can get out of sponsoring a competition and prizes, they can do it.”

Photo credit: lambdachialpha

The Center’s business plan competition is the Olin Cup Competition, which began in 1988 and began awarding funding in 2003 in the form of seed investments. Judges award the $20,000 – $50,000 prizes based on their judgment as to whether an idea is likely to succeed as a viable business.

Rosemary Gliedt, Center director, notes that the confluence of events surrounding the business plan competition supports competitors, students and community members who are interested in entrepreneurship. “We have a really strong relationship with the community,” she says. “All of our events are free and open to the public.”

The Center partners with Youthbridge, a St. Louis-based foundation, to sponsor the Social Enterprise and Innovation Competition, which has been held for the past six years, Gliedt says. Here are some of the events the Center offers:

Idea Bounce: Gliedt describes this program as “the gateway” to all the events sponsored by the Skandalaris Center. The website, which is free and open to all entrepreneurs and students, is a place where they can post business ideas. Idea Bounce events, which are held four or five times a year, bring together budding entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, community leaders and community members. People who have posted ideas to the Idea Bounce website attend these events to pitch their ideas to the crowd. It provides a forum to help them hone their pitch and connect with the resources that they need to move their idea forward, she says.

Coffee with the Experts: In this forum, budding entrepreneurs can make appointments with a panel of experts. It’s an open forum so that each participant has 10 to 15 minutes to describe their business idea to this panel and get feedback.

Non-Credit Seminar Series: Offered in both the fall and spring, this series of four classes takes place over an eight week period and allows students to learn concrete skills to help them think through their business idea and write a business plan. The series includes lectures on topics including idea evaluation and testing, finances and writing a business plan, and panel discussions with entrepreneurs about the evolution of business ideas. The classes end with a reception to allow for networking opportunities, Gliedt says.

The Hatchery: The Center’s flagship entrepreneurial course is open to students from across Washington University, as well as outside entrepreneurs. Students form teams that are expected to make two presentations to a panel of judges and to prepare a complete business plan. Business plans developed via the Hatchery can be used to participate in the Center’s Youthbridge Social Enterprise and Innovation Competition.

Photo credit: binkle_28

While the basic format of the competition remains the same, a few changes have been made to help participants to make the competition more interactive. For this second competition, interested participants will be able to attend free workshops, which focus on the basics of a business plan, including writing an effective executive summary, conducting useful market analysis, and developing realistic financial projections. The five chosen finalists will attend a required boot camp to help prepare for their final presentations.  This time around, presentations will be made both in private and at a public forum, after which, the winner will be announced at a networking reception.

Timeline & Process

• October 19, 2011— Business Plan + Executive Summary Workshop
• October 26, 2011— Market Analysis Workshop
• November 10, 2011— Financial Projections Workshop
• February 6, 2012 — Executive Summaries Due (3-5 pages)
• February 20, 2012 — Finalists (5) selected and notified to submit business plans
• February 27, 2012 — Presentation boot camp for finalists
• March 27, 2012 — Deadline for finalists’ submissions of business plans and PowerPoint presentations
• May 2, 2012—Finalists present in front of judges, winner selected

TowsonGlobal is looking forward to seeing the exciting, innovative concepts that will be brought to the competition.  For more details on the competition, visit TowsonGlobal’s Business Plan Competition page or email info@towsonglobal.com .

“No one sees education as an industry in it’s own right, but it is,” he asserts. “If you look at the numbers in terms of its economic impact, education actually dwarfs healthcare in size as an industry. It makes sense to invest in it. There are a ton of business plan competitions specialized around biotech, high tech, clean energy and other areas, but nothing in education. We decided to do something about that.”

The competition is young as far as business plan competitions go, but it’s growing fast. Prize money for the 2012 competition includes five separate prizes:

• The Milken Family Foundation first and second prize go to the best overall business plans: first prize is $25,000; second prize, $15,000
• The Starti Prize for Open Educational Resources: $25,000
• The American Public University System Prize for online distance learning within higher education: $25,000
• The Non-Traditional Learner Prize for Innovation in the field of special education and at-risk students: to be determined

Lynch takes pride in the fact that the Penn competition has few barriers to entry: anyone can submit a business plan to the competition except a few people affiliated with the university and convicted felons. There are no requirements around student status or being part of a team or having a connection to Penn. He believes this is best way to encourage widespread innovation and already has seen results.

“We see great ideas in education coming from all over the place,” he notes. “We see them from teachers, computer programmers, college students, anyone. Our philosophy is to let an idea stand on it’s merits. If someone brings in a great idea that needs to be fleshed out more, we will give them some advice on how to proceed and encourage them to resubmit next year.”

Lynch’s objective is to turn a corner of Penn into a business ecosystem for education. The business plan competition is just one part of that vision. “People laugh at me when I say this, but I want to create an ecosystem,” he says. “In education, unlike medicine, there is no deal flow–no building of ideas and bringing them to market. Look at drug development, by contrast. There’s an established process for developing drugs, starting a company and eventually taking that company public. The same is true in technology. I want to build a Silicon Valley for education.”

He hopes to grow the Milken-PennGSE Education Business Plan Competition to a similar scope as established large traditional business plan competitions such as Rice University. “They started fairly small, but now they offer more than a million dollars in prizes,” he says. “I think we can really build something here, not just in terms of the competition, but to bring education into a bigger playing field.”

Photo credit: shareski

Rob Adams, Ph.D., director of the Venture Labs Investment Competition and a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Management, notes that the mandate of the competition is to increase the number of start-up companies on campus and to accelerate their access to the marketplace. “Venture Labs gives student teams involved in the competition access to legal, technological, entrepreneurial and business resources as well as multiple opportunities for networking during the three-day competition,” he adds.

Only ideas conceived by graduate business students are eligible to participate. The 40 teams that participate come from MBA programs around the world via two channels: they are either invited to participate or win a feeder competition. Feeder competitions include 19 competitions around the world. Business Schools in Australia, Canada, Brazil, Thailand, Columbia and the United States.

The competition winner, known as the Global Champion, receives a total of $135,000 in cash, consulting and mentoring. Other awards include those for outstanding business plan, outstanding presentation, outstanding product and outstanding market.

The name of the competition changed in 2011 to reflect the competition’s focus, which is “a forum where MBAs from around the world launch their ventures by raising capital. The competition parallels the real-world process and realities of developing and launching a venture backed company,” notes Adams. Adams is the founder of Tejas Venture Partners and previously founded AV Labs, an early stage venture fund.

Past winners of the competition have brought a variety of ideas from different industries to success at the Venture Labs competition. Many winners and runners-up have gone on to find success in the marketplace. These include Dynamics, a semi-finalist in the 2009 competition which closed a $5.7 million offering for it’s revolutionary paper-thin computer platform. Focal Pop, a 2009 winner of the Outstanding Platform and Outstanding Market, Division V, launched a platform for photography and represents photographers in more than 100 countries currently.

Photo credit: Parker Michael Knight

“For 2012, we’ll have 42 teams competing for prizes totaling around $1.4 million,” she says. While the exact prizes and amounts haven’t yet been finalized, Lueck expects the prize money to equal or exceed last year’s competition, which offered more than $1.3 million in prizes.

The competition is hosted and run by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, Rice University’s flagship initiative devoted to the support of entrepreneurship. The Rice Alliance is a joint venture between three Rice University graduate schools: the Jones Graduate School of Business, the Wiess School of Natural Sciences and the Brown School of Engineering.

To run a competition of this size is no small endeavor, It includes the original business plan competition, separate prizes for Clean Energy, Life Sciences, Technology and Nanotechnology, Women Business Plan Prize, elevator pitch and company showcase.

Between 2010 and 2011, applications grew 25 percent. Lueck and her staff culled the applicant pool of 510 teams down to 42 teams. Every one of those teams wins a prize, with the minimum prize being $500.

With the growth in the number of teams and prizes, there has been a corresponding growth in the number of judges. Last year, the competition featured 250 judges and more than 100 sponsors.

The bulk of the large prizes are in the form of convertible notes so that the prize winners receive an equity investment in their firms on terms “very favorable to the company” says Lueck. That fits in with the objective of the competition, which is to encourage students to form companies and become entrepreneurs.

Lueck is very proud of the track record of competition participants: since the competition started, 133 past competitors have successfully launched businesses, raising in excess of $396 million in funding. These companies employ more than 500 people.

“We are looking for teams that have ideas for companies that they plan to launch and that will be successful,” she says. “Our main instruction to our judges is to choose the company you would invest your own money in.”

In the past, the most successful teams are those with an interdisciplinary focus. “We love to see interdisciplinary teams from engineering and the sciences. Those tend to be the most successful teams,” she says.

Because of the large scope of the competition and the variety of prizes and tracks, it’s an incredibly complex venture to organize and run. The competition pretty much takes over the Jones School building during the week of the competition.

Last year was the first year that the competition partnered with iStart, the Kauffman Foundation’s business plan competition platform. Lueck notes that the automation in the process of dealing with applicants and judges offered by iStart has really helped make her job easier. They plan to use iStart again this year.

Photo credit: Rice University

1. A deadline: Without a deadline, it’s easy to let time slip by as you ponder your future life as an entrepreneur. A deadline, in the form of an upcoming business plan competition deadline,  may be just the spur you need to polish your ideas and get them down in the form of a cogent business plan.

2. Advice: Whether you win or not, many business plan competitions provide extensive support to entrants. At the Harvard Business School Business Plan Contest, for example, a speaker series includes seminars that discuss how to write a business plan, forums to receive feedback and networking opportunities. The Rhode Island Business Plan Competition runs a series of workshops that focus on developing financial projections, writing a business plan and presenting a business plan.

3. Hone your skills: Not all business plans focus on business plans themselves. Some focus on elevator pitches, others focus on social media while still others focus on the venture capital end of start ups. So if there’s a particular area of honing your entrepreneurial skills that you’d like to focus on, it’s pretty likely that there’s a competition out there for you. The University of California at Berkeley hosts a Venture Capital Investment Competition; MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition includes an Elevator Pitch Competition that awards $20,000 in prizes; and Georgia Tech College of Management includes a Product Showcase Competition.

4. Pitch multiple concepts: Not only can you enter different business plan concepts at different competitions, but some competitions, including the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, allow participants to team up with more than one group. So if you’re a serial entrepreneur, or have so many ideas that you can’t focus on just one, there’s plenty of scope for you in the business plan competition universe.

5. Network: Duh. Yeah, networking is a major reason to enter business plan competitions. If you win, you’ll get introductions to venture capitalists and other influencers. But even if you don’t win, you can network with teammates, professors, judges and other entrepreneurs. The networking potential in business plan competitions is only limited by your imagination.

Photo credit: SJ photography

Coming out of President Obama’s “Startup America” entrepreneurship initiative, and first announced by the U.S. Department of Energy in July of this year, the competition is broken up into six regional clean-energy competitions, which for the most part are existing business-plan competitions that have agreed to add a clean-energy track and award at least $100,000 to their student winners. (That $100,000, plus $20,000 for administrative support, comes the DOE and is provided each year for three years. It all adds up to about $2.1 million in federal money.)

The six regional competitions were recently announced:

• Northeast: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT Clean Energy Prize)
• Southeast: University of Maryland (ACC Clean Energy Challenge)
• Eastern Midwest: Clean Energy Trust (Clean Energy Student Challenge)
• Western Southwest: Rice University (DOE Clean Energy Prize)
• Western Midwest: University of Colorado at Boulder (CU New Venture Challenge)
• West: California Institute of Technology (First Look West)

The winners of each regional contest in 2011-12 will advance to the finals to be held at the DOE in Washington, D.C. in early summer 2012. The National Grand Prize has not yet been divulged but we are guessing it will include a visit with the President.

Photo credit: rob.rudloff

During the first year, the site has worked with 60 business plan competitions to help streamline the administration and organization of those competitions for both organizers and competitors. Along the way, iStart has become much more customizable so that competitions can gather information from competitors in any way they choose via multiple choice question, true/false, yes/no or text answers, Petersen says.

“We’ve tried to make the platform as flexible as possible for business plan competition organizers, knowing that each competition has different goals and aims and a different way of doing things,” she says. It’s worked well from the standpoint of Lea Aden Lueck, director of the Rice University Business Plan Competition, which bills itself as the world’s largest and richest business plan competition.

Rice was the first business plan competition to use iStart, so the staff at iStart and Rice learned from each other as they went through the competition season, which typically stretches from the beginning of the academic year to the end. “We worked with Rice and Lea to put this system into place,” notes Petersen. “They helped us, we helped them. We really had to learn the ins and outs of running a competition because none of us had done that.”

Lueck at Rice University is very pleased at how iStart has helped simplify administration of this very complex business plan competition. “Because iStart simplified the administration of the competition, we were able to give competitors more time to apply and give judges longer to judge,” she says. “It has really revolutionized what we do at the back end. Before, we had to spend so much time uploading and downloading information, getting passwords to judges and all that sort of thing. Now iStart takes care of it.”

Lueck recognizes the importance for competitors of having their ideas live on beyond the competition, which iStart helps them do with their large repository of business ideas, which investors and job seekers can search. “I think this feature of iStart is going to be increasingly important, going forward, for the teams who participate so that their idea can live on and be found for other opportunities,” she says.

As part of its goal to encourage entrepreneurship, the Kauffmann Foundation, through iStart, encourages anyone who has gone through a competition or any business student with an idea to submit it on the platform, Petersen says. Ideas can include just an abstract or videos, slide decks and other information, which will be available on the site to investors and anyone interested in start-up businesses.

Going forward, iStart hopes to attract more business plan competition organizers from around the country and around the world. Petersen says the site continues to evolve and add functionalities to make it more attractive to competition organizers, entrepreneurs, students and investors.

Many of the major Ivy League competitions — including Harvard, Yale and MIT — feature pitch competitions. The advantage of a pitch competition is that it’s much easier to enter, organize, participate and judge than a typical business plan competition, which typically encompasses an entire academic year, according to Bruce Bachenheimer, a professor of management who runs both the Pace University Pitch and Business Plan Competitions.

“Basically, competitors have three minutes in front of a panel of judges to sell their idea,” he says. “There’s an audience for our competition, who can suggest questions, and who also get an education in entrepreneurship.” Last year, Pace gave $50,000 in prizes to the competition winners, he says. The pitch competition has become very popular among business students.

Pitch contests require different skills than business plan competitions. In a pitch contest, you don’t necessarily need to have the fully-fleshed out idea that you need to succeed in a business plan competition. Instead, as Bachenheimer puts it, competitors need to “have excellent presentation skills, be quick on their feet, be able to provide a quick summary and be responsive to the very pointed questions of a panel of very distinguished judges.”

He’s very pleased with the way the pitch competition, which is now in it’s eighth year, has evolved. “In the beginning, some of the ideas were kind of crazy, but it’s gotten very serious,” he continues. “It’s very educational and very entertaining for the presenters and the audience. It’s a fast-paced, fun learning opportunity for everyone, including the audience.”

One big advantage of pitch contests is that they are relatively painless to enter. Instead of writing up a complicated, in-depth business plan that participants may have to revise numerous times over the months, a simple 500 word or so entry form, a brief biography and a 10-question form are the sole requirements for the Pace Pitch Contest. Not only is it simpler for the contestants, it is also much easier for the judges and organizers, he says.

And that makes it a good selling point for judges, who have to make a big time commitment to judge a business plan competition. Those can take months and judges must read multiple business plans, evaluate them at various stages and mentor competitions. With the pitch competition, it’s a one-day commitment. It’s also much easier on organizers, which is why it’s easier to start and run a pitch competition than a full business plan competition, he continues.

Photo credit: josterpi

But not every business plan competition has the backing to dangle a lot in prize money in front of competitors or even has the desire to do so. That’s because business plan competition founders have a variety of goals and objectives in mind when founding and running a business plan competition. Not every competition wants to directly fund small business creation or get the attention of media, alumni and the community that big prize money draws.

Now, few competition organizers are going to turn away large amounts of prize money. But in the absence of large donors or a strong desire to raise money to fund substantial prizes, organizers need to be more creative in figuring out what their goals are in starting a business plan competition and how to best further those goals.

For example, the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation underwrites three business plan competitions statewide in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Nevada with the goal of encouraging entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial studies at colleges, junior colleges and vocational-technical schools, according to Wayne Embree, vice president of Entrepreneur Services at i2E,who is involved in running the Oklahoma competition.

“Our prize money is not intended as seed money to start a company, but rather recognition of a job well done to be divided among members of the team,” says Embree. “A lot of the students use the money to pay tuition to pay their bills.” Rather than providing funds for the winning competitors to actually start a business, the goal of the Governor’s Cup is to encourage entrepreneurial thinking among college-age students in Oklahoma and to get colleges, junior colleges and vocational-technical schools to spend more time teaching entrepreneurial skills to their students.

“Entrepreneurial thinking is needed at new businesses, not just from the founder, but by all the employees,” notes Embree. “Employees who are familiar with entrepreneurial thinking are more likely to take a chance and work for a small business than someone who isn’t as familiar or comfortable with entrepreneurial thinking or what’s required to run a start-up business.”

Promoting entrepreneurship is also a goal of the Pace University Business Plan and Pitch Competitions, says Bruce Bachenheimer, clinical professor of Management, who runs both of the competitions. “One of our goals is to encourage an entrepreneurial mindset, which is important in today’s hyper competitive global economy, whether you work in an established business or not.”

The brevity of the university’s Pitch Competition is one reason it attracts a 400 person audience and a substantial number of actual competitors. That’s impossible to accomplish in a business plan competition because of the nature of business plans and the sheer length of the competition.

“The participatory nature of the pitch competition means that it’s benefitting the audience as well as the competitors,” he says. “Everyone gets to hear about the ideas and follow the give and take between competitors and the judges as questions are asked and answered.”

Photo credit: Johnny Vulkan

If you’re a wanna-be entrepreneur or student who has a great idea for a business and either wants to enter a business plan competition or find funding, here are some factors to consider as you craft a business plan:

1. The answer is YES! What? To the question “Do I really have to write a business plan?” No one will take you seriously without one, and you can’t enter a competition unless you have a plan to base your entry upon or get a bank or other financial backers to take you seriously.

2. It’s about your business: A business plan isn’t some abstract, dull document that will gather dust on a shelf — it’s a living document that summarizes the passion, thinking and strategy behind the business that you plan to create. It’s about you communicating what’s behind your zeal and how you plan to bring your dream to life. It’s also not meant to be static; your plan should be updated as your business evolves.

3. You don’t have to go it alone: Not only are there many great resources on the Internet, but many colleges, universities and cities have small business centers where you can get free help in putting together and critiquing a business plan in progress. One of the best resources is the US Government’s Small Business Association, which offers online and in-person assistance in starting a business and writing a business plan.

4. Take your time: Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it’s extremely unlikely that you can write a cogent, interesting and attractive business plan in a day. So get some help and put some thought into it rather than trying to set a record for the quickest business plan creation in history. Both Entrepreneur and Inc magazines offer comprehensive business plan creation resources.

5. Don’t give up: If you’re like many would-be entrepreneurs, you’re juggling your dreams of starting a business with a job, family and other obligations. There are likely to be days when your dream seems so distant and impossible that you want to give up. Don’t.

Photo credit: iheartpandas