Behnke's team proposed a networking site that would connect parents looking for nannies with college students in their communities. "Mothers really connected to the idea," he says. "If we had focused on what they said, what they needed, and how we addressed that, it would have been more compelling." If you have the greatest product in the world but no customer, you don't have a business, he added.
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Winning a Business-Plan Competition: Be an Expert on Your Product and its Market
Holly has seen teams mistakenly choose the data they have instead of setting out to find the data they need. A prototype makes data collection easier.
"If the entrepreneur is really doing it, not just presenting an idea but has put a lot of effort into making it happen already in real life and could use the funding to move their business forward, that carries a lot of weight with the judges," Behnke says.
Make a beta site and have family members try it. "Even if it's a prototype you mock up in your dorm room that's put together with tape and rubber bands," Mitchell says, "You're going to learn more by having something out there."
One pet peeve that nearly every judge has is teams that present their idea and say that there is no competition in the space. "That's always a red flag because investors will say either you're completely clueless or it means that there's no market," Holly says.
Even if it seems like there isn't obvious competition, think about the alternatives to what your team is proposing. Recognize that, at the very least, those alternatives are competing for your customer's attention.
If the main selling point is a cheaper product, beware. "That's not a competitive advantage, especially for someone coming into the market, unless you're ten times cheaper," Holly says. "Any existing company is going to be able to undercut you until they put you out of business."
When setting a price point, coming in higher than existing products and services can actually be better, Holly says. This shows that the business is offering something with more value.
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Winning a Business-Plan Competition: Identify the Real Market Share
Recently Burke encountered an entrepreneur who claimed that in a $9 billion market, the business just needed a 2 percent market share to succeed. "Most of the time if they say there's a big market and they're going to get 2 or 5 percent market share, in truth we know they're going to get zero percent," he says. He suggests identifying the total addressable market, which is a subset of the larger market.
Mitchell has seen teams get overwhelmed. "They've got eight different products they're going to put out in the first six months," she says. "By having too many markets you're going to address and too many problems to solve initially, you spread yourself too thin."
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Winning a Business-Plan Competition: Make it Engaging
Bryce Benjamin, CEO in residence at USC Marshall's Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, heads the school's New Venture Seed Competition. He's seen presenters get caught up with their own cleverness. "Judges and investor panels need to be able to quickly absorb the problem and product solution," he says.
Behnke admits he wishes he had made his business plan less vanilla. "I tried to make sure I came across as very professional and smart," he says. "I think they needed more of my personality to come through."
On paper, the explanation should be simple and memorable. "If it gets to be more than about nine words, stop and make a new sentence," Cassidy advises. To present its automated grocery shopping system, Cassidy's team did a skit. "There's nothing wrong with doing a little show biz in your demos," he says.
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Winning a Business-Plan Competition: Accept Feedback and Anticipate Questions
Burke says investors are looking for a coachable CEO, not an arrogant leader who won't take advice. "Listen to the feedback that's given," he says. "Your chance of being successful drops a lot if you're not willing to listen to other people, and the VCs know that."
Some of the most cringe-worthy moments Bryce Benjamin has witnessed involved people who got defensive and argued with the judges. "That will take an otherwise presentable idea and undermine it," he says.
One of the smartest things Burke has seen is making an index slide in PowerPoint that links to backup slides containing answers to possible questions. That way, when a judge asks, "Tell us what your unit cost is in 2015," the team can go to the index, find the hyperlinked slide, and show the answer right away. "It's a preparation trick that most people don't use."
Benjamin suggests picking one spokesperson for a short Q&A to make the strongest impact. He also recommends teams view the Q&A period as a chance to present data that would complicate the initial presentation. "Recognize that judges are going to want to drill into what your assumptions are, so you want backup slides that have been created in anticipation," he says.
Contest participants who don't receive funding or awards can still find success. "We certainly took a lot from the feedback we got," Luke Behnke says. Recognizing a persistent need, his team continues to work on its business plan.
Burke sees enormous value in business-plan competitions. "We've had teams tell us the weekend they came here, they learned more than their entire two-year MBA program."
