Business Plan Results

The semi-finalists for the UH Business Plan competition were announced yesterday. Neither of my teams make the cut -- oh well.

Because of both the competition and Entrepreneurship class, I've developed a real distaste for business plans. We had to develop a business plan for the class and enter it into the contest, but rather than treating it as a simulation or allow us to team up with outside team members (the competition requires only 1 of a team's maximum 6 member be a UH student), we were forced to team up only with classmates and then were graded on things like how we would do financing and whether or not we had "skin in the game."

I've learned business plans are one of those things that have to be "pushed" rather than "pulled." If you have a real product that's new, great. The plan is somewhat easier to do. However, if you have to pull a product out of your butt and then justify why people would buy it, it's significantly harder.

You also need to be serious. Questions like

• "How would you finance your venture?"


• "Are you going to invest any of your own money?"


• "Does market research indicate the product would be successful?" and


• "Do you have any credible management experience in the field you're going into?"

were stupid questions because it led to students making things up.

I don't blame them -- who's gonna walk around campus interviewing people for a product that will never exist? Who's going to test a pilot product that we have no means of creating? And who's going to go the extra mile to issue debt and figure a cost of capital when we're playing with monopoly money anyway?

It led to situations like "We don't need to borrow money from investors -- I'm going to front all $2 million of the investment captial from my own pocket!"

Many people had compaints about the Entrepreneurship professor as well. His slides were filled with cliches and platitudes like "Brand You!" "Have Passion!" and "Find a niche!" Inspirational, but hardly pragmatic. He changed assignment due dates three or four times, and graded the business plans by different criteria than he originally stated.

The best thing I got from the class was the handout of things to cover in a business plan. Even though it wasn't practicable for the class, it might prove useful in the future. Hopefully I won't forget the platitudes by then.