Young entrepreneurs have ideas aplenty, but often lack the capital, mentorship, and relationships to make their vision a reality.
But, if you know where to look, you can find tens of millions of dollars of free capital, available for students and young entrepreneurs around the globe.
The source of capital that I am referring to is completely independent of loans, your credit score, investors, and other intrusions into your cap table.
So, what type of capital am I talking about?
The answer: Business plan competitions, the low hanging fruit in the young entrepreneur’s tool box.
This innovation engine is extremely under utilized and abundantly capitalized.
In this blog we’ll dive into:
- What a business plan competitions is
- Three Benefits of business plan competitions
- Where to find business plan competitions
Let’s get after it.
What are Business Plan Competitions?
Generally, business plan competitions are where you flesh out your business idea and innovation into a brief business plan or business model document, a pitch deck presentation, an accompanying pitch, and, frequently, a demonstration of your product or service.
You pitch to a panel of judges made up of industry leaders, local ecosystem leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, professors, etc.
The judges score you on the quality of your idea, your execution and experimentation to date, your planned strategic business model, the technical feasibility of your plan, and the market viability of your idea, prototype, or product.
There’s a wide range of other judging metrics beyond the scope of this blog (here is one example set of criteria from the Rice Business Plan Competition).
What’s important is that each competition uses a unique rubric and performance metrics to crown a winning team.
There are competitions for every type of entrepreneur, from the solopreneur to teams of all sizes.
Some competitions emphasize innovation and technology. Others prioritize strong marketing plans and financial models.
Business plan competitions can be hyper-focused on one industry (take the Holtz Energy Competition), or they can be extremely broad (e.g. the Global Entrepreneur Awards).
Regardless of the specific rules, business plan competitions are an excellent opportunity for entrepreneurs to grow, refine their idea, refine their pitch, practice their ability to sell, get feedback from leaders in their field, build relationship, and experience a semi-infinite number of other benefits.
Three Incredible Benefits Of Business Plan Competitions
Benefit #1– artificial deadlines for you to flesh out your ideas.
To even compete in the business plan competition, you MUST organize your idea or business into a compelling, sensical story, told through value propositions, marketing plans, customer data, and partnerships.
By imposing a hard deadline (e.g. final submission date), business plan competitions force you to flesh out and think through all of these concerns, to figure out how to tell your story in order to sell your idea, your team, and business strategy.
Under the spectres of deadlines and competition requirements, you’ll have to formalize your pitch deck, marketing copy, business model, and more.
These are all documents that you’ll need anyway in order to sell investors and your customers, when you launch your company or product.
At a minimum, you’ll need to answer these crucial questions:
- What is your value proposition?
- What is your preliminary marketing plan? You have a great innovation, but how will you spread the word?
- What customer data do you realistically need to prove the business viability of your idea?
- What key partnership do you need to establish from the get-go?
If you want to succeed in a business plan competition, you must excel in all of these minimum competency areas.
Whether you are just discovering and developing that initial raw idea, or you’re at a later stage in developing your business (in which case you likely have this info already fleshed out), taking the time to formalize your business onto paper and into assets is invaluable.
Benefit #2 – there’s an abundance of ‘free’ capital
There is a tremendous amount of capital available around the world.
Dr. Peter Diamandis provides an excellent overview of where to find this capital in his Abundance Of Capital Blog post.
In a future blog, I’ll quantify how much no-equity-taken capital is available through some of the biggest business plan competitions around the globe – my early estimates place the number somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars.
That’s millions of dollars of ‘free’ (meaning no-equity taken) startup capital sitting and waiting for young entrepreneurs.
The steps to take your shot at earning this capital are simple. At a minimum, here is what YOU need to do to open up the door:
- Sign up or apply before applications close – if you don’t sign up, then you have already boxed yourself out of winning.
- Flesh out your idea into the appropriate documentation
- Show up on competition day
- Pitch your idea.
Benefit #3 — building relationships with…
… leaders in your industry and seasoned entrepreneurs.
Generally, the judges at these competitions are high achieving individuals in your industry (if the competition is industry specific) or in the broader startup ecosystem.
The judges themselves, outside of the competition, have resources (extensive networks and capital) that might pay dividends in the future.
Their feedback, mentorship, and guidance alone is of the utmost value.
If solid relationships with these individuals are all you take away from your time competing, you’ve already won.
Maybe a judge that you meet helps you secure a job at a company where you want to work.
Maybe the judge helps you find outside investors or is interested in personally investing in your project.
Maybe the judge makes introductions for you that help you find your next co-founder or advisor.
Certainly, they have faced some of the exact same problems that you are facing and made the exact same mistakes that you are making.
They have dealt with customer acquisition, sales, employee productivity, how to hire, how to fire, and more. With their feedback, you’ll learn the lessons that you would otherwise learn the hard way, on your own.
Best of all, the judges of business plan competitions genuinely want to mentor and help young entrepreneurs like you. That’s why they’ve chosen to be judges in the first place!
… your peers
Business plan competitions are a HUB of entrepreneurial activity, attracting young entrepreneurs on your campus, in your city, in your region, and from around the world.
And you can bet that some percentage of them are high achievers with persistent and driven mindsets who are inspired to build things, who love innovation, who push to drive revenue, who are addicted to the sale, and who are passionate story tellers.
These students are people from all walks of life and all fields. And you want to meet them. You NEED to meet them.
Show up and compete. Put yourself among their ranks. You’d be a fool to pass up this kind of opportunity. .
If you have no substantial business idea whatsoever, even if you throw together a sub-par pitch deck and just show up, you’ll still meet people.
You’ll talk to your peers about your ideas, take inspiration from their ideas, gain clarity on what you want to do, and maybe find life-long friends or future business partners who are, like you, driven to innovate.
How To Find Business Plan Competitions
Many Universities have their own business plan competitions, so start by finding out what’s available on your campus.
Your school does not have a competition? No worries.
This is a tremendous opportunity for YOU to be the force that brings this transformative resource to your campus. In doing so, you become a leader, opening up all the opportunities discussed in this article to your own army of young and hungry entrepreneurs.
Because I’m a University of Wisconsin Badger, I’ll start with what I know best: business plan competitions on my campus that I’ve competed in.
Transcend Madison. Transcend Madison is the largest student-run business plan competition in the entire U.S., with over $55,000 in prize money. The focus of the competition is on innovation rather than the intricacies of the business plan. Transcend offers two tracks: one for later-stage companies with more fleshed out business models, revenue, minimum viable products, etc. and another for early-stage ideas with some mock ups, designs, and maybe a draft business model.
Wisconsin School of Business, Business Plan Competition. Formally known as the Burrill Business Plan Competition, this competition focuses more heavily on the business model, financials, market research, and product-market fit of your company.
Moving off of my campus, here are some state, regional, and global competitions you should definitely check out.
Wisconsin Governor’s Business Plan Competition. Produced by the Wisconsin Technology Council, the GovsBiz plan contest is open to ventures and entrepreneurs established in Wisconsin. This contest links entrepreneurs to an extensive statewide network of mentors, experts, education, and community.
E-Fest. Hosted at the Schulze School of Entrepreneurship in Minneapolis, this competition caters predominantly to Midwestern University student entrepreneurs. This high-energy competition awards over $250,000 across four separate competitions. The wide-ranging focus of this event includes innovation, general entrepreneurship, social impact, global impact, and storytelling (via elevator pitches).
Rice Business Plan Competition. One of the largest and richest business plan competitions out there, the Rice Competition awarded over $2.2M to competing startups in 2018. This global graduate student competition emphasizes innovation and technology.
Global Student Entrepreneur Awards. With more than 1,700 competitors from 50 plus countries around the world, the GSEA is powered by the infamous Entrepreneurs’ Organization. With an emphasis on student owned and operated companies already generating revenue, the GSEA recruits competitors through an intricate network of local and regional sub-competitions.
Global Social Venture competition. Focusing on socially-conscious business ventures, the GSV competition offers over $80,000 in prizes.
Looking for something close to home? These regions, states, and countries also host business plan competitions: New York State, USA; Pennsylvania, USA; Utah, USA; Europe (regional); and Tel Aviv, Israel.
Or, try out one of these six other notable business plan competitions.
- Hatch Pitch
- Postcode Lottery Green Challenge ($1M+ in prizes)
- The Diamond Challenge (for high school students)
- The Hult Prize (energy focused)
- New Venture Competition (all that you need is a Harvard MBA student on your team)
- Milken-Penn Education Business Plan Competition (education business only)
Conclusion
Business plan competitions are a highly-underestimated engine for invigorating startup activity and, in particular, young entrepreneurship.
For entrepreneurs, these competitions can be launch pads for careers and companies, an access point to the relationships, guidance, and capital they need to execute their vision.
Don’t put your vision on hold. Sign up for your first set of business plan competitions. TODAY.
Eager to learn more about the transformative power of business plan competitions? Subscribe here to be updated about part two of this blog series.
Do you have a business plan competition success story? Tell me about it in your comment below.
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Are you a young entrepreneur looking to access the abundance of opportunities available to you around the globe? Through this blog series and the Next frontier Podcast I explore precisely where to find these resources and how YOU can efficiently and effectively utilize them to execute on your vision. If you’d like to stay up-to-date with these tactical insights, subscribe here.
