|
Evolving Ideas
By Justin Wilga
The last couple of weeks were a transition period for numerous groups, including me. We pitched our rough 'new' ideas and got back incredible feedback, which let us focus our research. The coolest part about the LaunchPad is seeing the evolution of the ideas from the feedback of a room full of entrepreneurs trying to help each other’s business. It’s incredible and a great method that leads to the adoption of new ideas. They get to the breaking point (is this business idea worth pursuing or not) much faster than before.
Some of the more developed ideas are getting ready to be pitched to investors for money very shortly. Some of the ideas are polished enough to try prototype services and products. It will be interesting to see some of the results of the beta tests and what each group decides to do. Keep on the lookout for something services out there.
Perfecting the Business Pitch
By Justin Wilga
In our second Launchpad class of the quarter, we had homework from the first week. It was to make our 30-pitches better with the feedback and deliver them better through practice. We all got up and pitched our new ones. We tweaked them again based on feedback from students and professors again. I pitched our most recent one and from the feedback we got, and my teammate Chris changed it and re-pitched it a couple of minutes later, and we tweaked it again from more feedback. Everyone did much better and had more polished pitches. Some were really convincing that didn’t need much change.
The second half of class was discussing the business pitch presentation template. We went over the template and discussed the importance of each slide and what we need to accomplish in each slide. We have to start this presentation and present some of it next week.
Not much else to say other than grinding out our business plan. Next week’s class should be interesting seeing the different approaches to the template.
Business Launchpad: The Art of the Start
By Justin Wilga
The third class was interesting. The first part was spent in discussion of the reading of the textbook The Art of the Start. If you’re interested in entrepreneurship, you should definitely pick up a copy.
This is Amazon link to purchase it: Click Here.
The book was great read, at least the chapters we had to read for that week (Ch. 1 & 3, in case you were wondering). The first section we discussed was pretty much a call to action, telling us to get off our butts and go do what we want to do. So that was a reality check. We get into this academic analysis-paralysis mentality where we can’t do anything until we think of absolutely every possible issue or problem and their solutions (I include myself in this category). The second section was tips for pitching a business, which was relevant to class and there was some good advice in there as well.
The second part was listening to people present the first 3 slides of the their business pitch presentation. We tweaked our pitch again in front of class and this is by far the most compelling it has been, which is very exciting. Each group also received a lot of feedback for each slide they presented.
Again we are grinding away. More of the presentation is expected to be done next week, so it’s back to grindstone.
First Class of Second Quarter: Business LaunchPad
By Justin Wilga
One of the most important things we learn at JP Catholic is to be effective communicators whether in business or in the media. These are some of the most important skills any individual can acquire in business school, and at JP Catholic they ram it down your throats. To highlight this, our class spent the first day writing and pitching our 30-sec pitches. We all wrote them and presented them and tweaked them through the feedback of the students and the faculty. What was really awesome was getting feedback from Professor Iocco, but even more awesome was getting feedback from JP Catholic’s Script Writing Professor, Professor Chris Riley. He has given pitches for movies in Hollywood and his advice was invaluable to the film projects and the business ones too. It was a great class and we all had fun raising the bar about who had the best pitch. In case you were wondering, Chris Lane had the better pitch for our laundry business than me.
After class my esteemed friend, Steve Marshall, and I attended a quick pitch competition hosted by an angel investor group. We watched 12 companies pitch their company to investors for real money. What we saw was 12 individuals that made the same mistakes at we all made in the first 3 years at JP Catholic. Hard to read slides, boring hooks, too little detail, too much minutia, all too common problems during the beginning of our education at JP Catholic. It was incredible to see these CEOs make the same mistakes that we made as freshman and sophomores. What blew me away even more was how anyone of the kids in our class could easily deliver a pitch on par or better than the ones we heard that night.
We again only had one day doing it. Going to events like the quick pitch competition, gets me excited about the education I am receiving at JP Catholic. It’s great to see how we stack up against other companies and I think we stack up pretty well in regards to skills. Still a lot of work remains, and I mean a lot. Everyone has to pour in a lot more time, but it’s cool to know that we have the tools to make it happen.
But to put it simply, I think the LaunchPad passed its progress report.
Business Launch Pad: What Is It?
By Justin Wilga
So my job is to show you guys out there what is going on in the Business Launch Pad. So the first question that comes to mind is: What is the Business Launch Pad, Justin? You can look it up on the school’s website: Click Here
But if you want a student’s version of what it is, I am going to tell you.
Well it is the final project for every student at JP Catholic, but it is not just an academic project. It is a platform to launch a real, breathing business. The project is part of the last six quarters of our time at JP Catholic. What is interesting is that every class that you take at JP Catholic has its end goal in supporting the Business LaunchPad. As an example, our marketing class’ final marketing plan was an initial marketing plan for our business idea.
Every professor is at a student’s disposal to offer invaluable advice and mentorship. This advice comes from true business leaders that have proven track records. Every business professor is an expert in their field as well as an experienced executive. To prove this, the chairman of a bank taught my economics class. The ability to seek advice from any professor is invaluable to the development and launching a business.
The school pours every resource it has at its disposable. If it doesn’t and you need a certain resource, they bend over backwards to get it. The school’s physical and intellectual assets also become the assets of any student venture. You are able to use their phones, internet, buildings, and really any typical business need. So instead of launching your company and taking on huge debts with non-strategic assets, you are able to save money and use the school’s infrastructure as your own.
What this means to us is that we are able to mitigate the risk of launching a new business. Everyone knows the failure rates for a new small business, but with the JP Catholic Business LaunchPad, you are able to dramatically decrease the failure rate with mentorship and cost savings.
The director of the LaunchPad is Professor Dominic Iocco. Here is a little about himself:
Family: Dominic and his wife Kate have three children. They currently attend St. Therese of Carmel Parish in Carmel Valley. Dominic and Kate grew up in Michigan and relocated to San Diego in late 2007.
Education:
Dominic holds a BAA and an MBA.
Career:
Dominic, along with his parents built a company that was a pioneer in the highly lucrative, and heavily patent protected inkjet cartridge business. Having developed some key intellectual property in the form of trade secrets around a novel cartridge refilling process, they were able to rapidly grow the business supplying inkjet cartridges to the wholesale market. Their company was acquired in 2007 by the world’s largest aftermarket inkjet and toner company. He also orchestrated the rescue of a failed PayPal competitor that had received over $14 million in venture capital. He was able to successfully stabilize and sell the operation. Dominic, in addition to his role at JP Catholic University, serves as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at San Diego’s CONNECT. In this role he is helping other entrepreneurs build their companies.
Check out his website.
It has all the information for the LaunchPad classes on there as well as student presentations.
Summary of the First Quarter of the LaunchPad
By Justin Wilga
In order to give you a behind the scenes look at the LaunchPad, I have to bring you guys up to speed. I am a junior and we did our first quarter of the six-quarter series. The main purpose of the quarter was to examine an industry and increase speaking, writing, and presentation skills. We had to give numerous speeches about an industry of our choice. We would choice any industry that we were interested in. From there, we would analyze the industry as a whole and understand it better. From this understanding, business opportunities would present themselves.
Many industries were chosen and many were changed. The key was finding an industry that you were truly interested in. My colleague, Chris Lane, and I started the class looking at opportunities in the real estate markets, more specifically, college town real estate markets. Through careful analysis of this industry, we realized there was not a significant problem in the industry that we could solve (the real estate markets have bigger problems than a solution we could have thought of).
Check out our terrible first presentation, it’s the first one on the page: (keep in mind these were presentations on where we were at).
Halfway through the quarter, we changed our industry to laundry services. This may seem like a random jump, but it wasn’t. We were talking to the LaunchPad director, Professor Iocco, and we hitting off ideas to him. We were really curious about launching a small community bank focusing on providing funding to small to medium sized businesses in San Diego (currently there is a huge demand for this). Again we would be unable to deliver as a bank. It is way too complex and to launch a bank, you need a CEO with numerous years of banking experience as a CEO to get a bank charter (Chris and I had a combined total of zero experience as a CEO). We were disappointed again. Through this conversation, Chris joked and said “what about a laundromat for college-kids with high-end amenities, and call it The Mat.” This was an idea his uncle had for a business. Professor Iocco entertained the joke and we kept talking about it. Then we realized as we kept talking about the laundromat, many problems surfaced. Professor Iocco told us to check out the industry and see what are current solutions. We did and realized there were numerous problems and a few solutions that weren’t exactly favorable.
Through mentorship by the professors, we had a new direction. This happened to almost every student in the LaunchPad. They started somewhere, ended up somewhere us. At the end of the six quarters, I’m sure there is a possibility we could end up somewhere else again.
So we spent the rest of quarter analyzing the laundry services industry. The class had a couple of deliverables: one being a 30-minute presentation on the industry and a 20-page paper on the industry as well. The whole quarter was spent preparing for these two. We would give mini speeches through out the quarter that would be building into the final one. These helped our skills and build confidence. I can’t think of a school that really pours its heart and attention into the success of the students. Through constant mentorship and feedback from faculty and students alike, all of our presentations really took shape. It was really awesome to see the change from the beginning of the class to the presentations at the end.
Beginning Presentation of Laundry Services Industry
Final Presentation of Laundry Services Industry
Overall the class was great. Every student came out a better presenter from it. It really taught us to examine an industry and see problems and trying to solve those problems. The next class will focus on solving that problem.
|
