In October of my first term at Ivey, after a discussion with my learning teammate Kevin Dribnenki, I decided to enter the annual business plan competition at Ivey.  Kevin and I thought it would be a good learning experience for us; he had never written a business plan or been in involved in a startup company, and although I had been with a startup and raised VC capital, I had never run the process of writing a business plan and raising money from start to finish.  

After some discussions, we added two more people to our team:  Jamil Murji - formerly a software engineer and project manager, and Sarah Cullen - formerly an accountant with KPMG.  To round out our team, we recruited Professor Larry Menor - our Operations professor - to be our faculty advisor.  We all agreed that our primary objective for entering the competition was to learn and have fun.  School and our job searches took priority over the competition.  

Together, the four team members threw around some ideas for businesses, eventually settling on an idea I'd had that grew out of a project I had done at Bremer involving reconciling account positions for a hedge fund. I won't go into the details of the business idea here, but if you're interested, you can take a look at the Executive Summary. 

Approximately 25 teams entered the competition, representing business schools from across the country.  We managed to finish our plan before the January 31 deadline and submitted, fully expecting not to make the finals.  Much to our surprise, we made the cut - along with 9 other teams.  This meant that we would be presenting our plan to a panel of judges including Venture Capitalists and industry experts on March 28.  

Now that we had made it this far, we decided as a group that we wanted to win.  To achieve this goal, we spent innumerable hours preparing our Powerpoint presentation and practicing it in front of friends and professors who volunteered to help us out.  We're very thankful to Professors Darren Meister (Information Systems Management) and Charlene Nicholls-Nixon (Strategy) for taking the time to listen to our presentations and for providing invaluable feedback.  

The day of the finals, we were to make our presentation in the middle of the afternoon.  The presentation went quite well, but we didn't think we had much of a chance, given some of the competition we were facing.  To our surprise, we made the cut and went on to a head-to-head faceoff against one other team.  The photo above is of our team presenting at the final competition, before the other team, SoftStitch.  Despite a valiant effort, we were beaten by SoftStitch in the final and we had to settle for second place.  Congratulations to SoftStitch and Hussein Kurefi, its CEO and an Executive MBA student at Ivey.  Ivey's press release on the results of the competition is available here.  

Thanks to the volunteers, professors, teams and judges who made the competition such a success.  

CIBC Ivey Business Plan Competition

The CIBC Ivey Business Plan Competition entered its fifth year in 2002-2003 and has grown to become the premier competition of its kind in Canada.  The winner of this competition goes on to represent Canada in the Global Moot Corp competition, held in Austin, TX.