Right now, my attention is being diverted. I can’t even tell, most of the time, people have to tell me.
As an entrepreneur, inventor, and just an idea-guy in general, I get distracted easily. In fact, although I’m not a huge fan of Donald Trump (did I mention I don’t like cockiness), I listened to some of his audio courses. Most of it was crap, but there was one thing I was happy to hear. He said as an entrepreneur you almost have to be ADD. Because you need to be able to jump from task to task, employee to contractor, finances to marketing, you NEED a short attention span.
I was happy to hear that at least Trump thinks my self-prescribed ADD is a good trait. Then again, you need to control it. Here is an example of something that one of my investors told me, rightly so, was distracting me from the real pot of gold.
When I presented to the University of Texas MBA Entrepreneur Club back in April of 2007, one of them asked me if I had tried business competition plans to raise money. In fact, I had just read about a Princeton drop-out that was using business plan competitions to raise money for his organic, worm-created fertilizer. Even at this point, I thought these competitions were only for students, so I answered the questions “no” and didn’t think about it any more.
A few months later I met an undergrad student from Southern Methodist University here in Dallas. We spoke on several occasions and he told me we should enter IdeaTango to the SMU MBA business plan competition. As it turns out, although he wasn’t an MBA student, he was allowed to participate. He said even non-students were allowed to participate, they just needed to get an MBA student on the presentation team to meet the requirements. This was the first time it dawned on me that maybe these competitions were a good way to raise money, even for non-students.
So we (me and an MBA student) signed up for the competition, which I thought would be good practice for raising money, and maybe we’ll even get a few thousand bucks if we win. Maybe we’ll even get some local press. Not a bad idea right?
When you have a business to run, you have to run advertising, sales, trade shows, employees, website development, raising other money, accounting, IP, etc. Was entering this contest in the best interest of our business?
Pros – we could win $5000-$10,000, had pretty good odds since only a few teams were selected to enter, good practice for raising money, GREAT publicity
Cons – does not help sales, which is the #1 focus before going to investors, takes time, detracts from other business activities, limits directions the business can go
Whatever will we do? Compete in the contest, or focus on driving business?
Bryan Daigle
I’ve found that the most valuable aspect of these business plan competitions isn’t the money itself, it’s the experience you get from presenting, and the constructive criticism you get from the judges. $5-10k probably won’t be enough to fund your business, but refining your presentation skills will help you raise that additional $50-100k from investors. When you’re presenting to investors, they won’t give you multiple chances, or criticism and advice at the end of each one.
I’ve won the Texas A&M Ideas Challenge as well as competed in the Research Valley Business Plan Competition. The experience I got from repeatedly improving my presentation was worth much more than the $3k I won.
Good luck in your business competitions! By the way, hope to see you at BarCamp Texas in two weeks.
Your experience is an exemplary. I have learned some good things from your experience. Thanks for sharing the work.