Being an entrepreneur is something that is very gratifying to me, and I’m always looking for ways, albeit lazily, to spread ‘the message’. I had the chance today (thanks Amar for passing on the invite!) to be on the jury of the elevator pitch competition today at NITIE’s Empresario business-plan competition. NITIE is a premier Indian B-school based in Bombay.
The format was that each team got 2 minutes to present their plan, followed by 2 minutes for a Q&A between the jury and the team. There was a 3 member jury, including me. There were 33 teams, some 80% of which were composed of students still in B-school, and the rest were of working professionals. Interestingly, 4 of the 33 teams, or 10%, submitted plans that were in the online space. None of these four were very good, but it’s a heartening statistic to see a relatively high amount of interest in the online space. Most of the plans were in the education and training area, not surprising, since most of the participants are still students.
The winner, by unanimous consent of the three member jury, was a team of working professionals from Godrej that submitted a plan to commercialize bio-gas, by selling it in cylinders, just like LPG and CNG, to restaurants and households. This team was really passionate, knew their stuff (they had a well-thought answer for every one of our questions), and the idea was scalable. What I really liked about this team was that they were walking the talk. They just didn’t have an idea, they were executing it too.
I was delighted to be among students who are starting to think about entrepreneurship. The only feedback that I have for many of these students is that 95% of them thought hard about the idea and the plan, but stopped at that point. What’s the missing part? Execution. Very few of them thought about execution – about the team and how they would get it done. What is it about them that qualified them to go make a run at something? For example, one of the teams made a really strong case for opening a chain of bowling alleys. They had the numbers all figured out, and they were passionate about bowling, but what do they know about the dynamics of real-estate and of managing large facilities. The plan would be a lot stronger if they had a team member who had been in facilities management, or had worked in real estate, or best of all, worked at or managed a bowling alley.
I had a great time. It was my first time doing something like and it made me realize that I’d love to do it again, and again. I actually realized today that I had a lot to say, from experience, to these young uns’.
