Business Plan Competitions

Want to win $675K in cash and prizes?

2008-11-05_1614The Rice Business Plan Competition is now accepting applications for the 2009 competition, to be held April 16 - 18 in Houston, TX. Only 36 teams will have the opportunity to compete in this prestigious competition, and one lucky team will walk away with more than $675,000 in cash and prizes.

All interested teams must submit an Intent to Compete no later than February 13, 2009 to be eligible for the competition. Palo Alto Software is proud to once again sponsor the competition and provide all teams who submit an Intent to Compete by the February 13th deadline with a free download of Business Plan Pro Premier Academic Edition software.

If you meet the eligibility requirements and are interested in the opportunity, I would highly encourage you to submit an Intent to Compete. I attended the competition in 2007 and can honestly say it was an experience I will never forget. It is by far one of the best business plan competitions out there today.

Kristen Langham
Manager of Business Development
Palo Alto Software, Inc.

Boost your Business 2008 - Forbes.com

The 2008 Forbes.com Boost Your Business competition is nearing it’s final deliberations. Next week in New York City the final five finalists will present their business plans–including how they intend to invest the prize money to boost their prospects–to an expert panel of judges. One of those expert judges is Palo Alto Software’s own Tim Berry.

According to the Forbes.com Boost your Business blog: In addition to next week’s presentations, each finalist also must submit two written business plans: a full-length plan (20 pages max), that only the judging panel can see, and a condensed 3-page version which will be posted–along with videos of the presentations–on Forbes.com during the final voting period in November.

Palo Alto Software sends their good wishes and congratulations to all the finalists of the Boost your Business competition.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

$100,000 Deadline This Friday: Amazon Startup Challenge

Amazon.com has a $100,000 prize available for the best startup using its AWS Web services (storage, hosting, etc., for what seems to me to be amazingly attractive pricing and equally attractive peace of mind — after all, it’s Amazon).

The bad news is that this thing closes Friday.

Click this link to go to the page and fill in your entry. Amazon is asking for basic name and address info plus several simple text entries.

  1. A summary of your idea.
  2. What stage you are?
  3. How you’re using the Amazon Web services?
  4. What is the problem you solved?
  5. Who is your target customer?
  6. Who is your competition?

From now until Friday is plenty of time. Right?

(Note: this is republished from my Up and Running blog. Tim.)

Tim Berry
President and Founder
Palo Alto Software

Do you know when to give up?

Every year Palo Alto Software contributes to and participates in business plan competitions. We receive business plans from several different competitions around the country and key members of our staff read the plans then meet to determine best written plan, or best executive summary, what ever it is we’re set to award for that particular event.

I’ll never forget this particular plan for a resturant that was submitted.

Business plans for resturants seem fairly easy to write, I say this because we seem to get a lot of them during college business plan competitions, but harder to implement in the real world.

The plan started out well, they had a good management team, a good location and their “secret sauce” was pretty effective I thought. But then I got to the end of the document where they finished the plan with this summarizing comment:

While we believe the restaurant is a good idea, we’ve realized through the writing of this plan that there’s no way we could make a living running this restaurant. It’s just not going to work.

Well, I guess it’s good to know before you go too far that it’s not going to work, but here’s my question. Did they give up too soon? Was it a good assessment of the feasibility of the plan and the business? Or of their passion and willingness to build the business? I guess we’ll never know.

Sometimes the difference between success and failure is all in the way you look at it.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Let’s get it started

As an entrepreneur, how far could $250K get you and your business? If you are interested in starting your business in Fresno, CA, you have a chance to find out. Start It Up - Fresno’s $250K Entrepreneur Challenge is an opportunity for one lucky entrepreneur to win $100K in cash and $150K in prizes and get his/her business off the ground.

According to the competition site, Fresno is known as the financial, industrial, trade and commercial capital of California’s San Joaquin Valley and provides a perfect venue for the budding business entrepreneur. Additionally, there is an exciting downtown revitalization underway, which could provide a perfect opportunity for new business growth.

We at Palo Alto Software are proud to be a sponsor of the competition and are excited about the buzz this first-time competition is generating. They are doing a great job marketing the competition and are being rewarded for their efforts. Look and listen to their mention on SBTV.com last week!

If you’re an entrepreneur and interested in starting your business in Fresno, what are you waiting for? Check out the rules and regulations and get started on your chance to win $250K!

Kristen Langham
Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Attribution and the need to cite your sources

Last week saw the thrust and parry of dueling keyboards as [a mainstream media consortium] took umbrage with the blogosphere, and bloggers’ frequent quotations from the [mmc]’s posted stories. There were demands for the take-down of various blog pages, and attempts to collect fees-per-word of quotes, as well as rapier-like witty ripostes. You can read about this on the TechCrunch blog, Post 1, and and Post 2.

While this issue seems, on the surface, to be about copyright, fair use, and possibly expansion of new revenue streams, it also deals with attribution and citing of sources. This is not just for journalists. It is just as important to entrepreneurs.

When you write your business plan, especially if you are using the plan to secure funding, you must cite your sources. Your plan will have topics and statistics covering your target market, population demographics, spending habits, market trends, market growth, and the like. The banks or investors or VCs are savvy business people. They know how to double check your assumptions, and will have no qualms about calling your bluff…and quashing your funding if they don’t credit your stats.

If your business is going to provide day care services, you’d better be able to show an increase in young dual-income families in your area. Investors are unlikely to support the construction of high-end mansions in a community that has been losing all of its industry. If you forecast skyrocketing sales, you’d better be able to document how a similar product or service did the same, and why yours will follow suit, and not crash and burn in a saturated market niche.

In other words you can’t pull your projections out of your … that is, out of thin air! Do your research! Develop your forecasts using that information. Document your sources in your plan. Take a look at this blog post by Alan Gleeson, Managing Director of Palo Alto Software Ltd, in the UK. The post quotes several people, businesses and news sources, and includes links and footnotes. Your business plan should do the same, giving the proper attribution to your sources.

As a raconteur I can make it up as I go along. As a business owner you don’t have that luxury.

Steve Lange
Senior Editor
Palo Alto Software

I don’t think that word means what you think it means

I found the following story on several Internet sites.

At New York’s Kennedy airport today, an individual, later discovered to be a public school teacher, was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square, and a calculator.

The Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security believe the man is a member of the notorious Al-Gebra movement. He is being charged with carrying weapons of math instruction.

Al-Gebra is a very fearsome cult, indeed. They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on a tangent in a search of absolute value.

They consist of quite shadowy figures, with names like “x” and “y”, and, although they are frequently referred to as “unknowns”, we know they really belong to a common denominator and are part of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country.

As the great Greek mathematician Isosceles used to say, there are 3 sides to every triangle, and if God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes.

Therefore, I’m extremely grateful that our government has given us a sine that it is intent on protracting us from these math-dogs who are so willing to disintegrate us with calculus disregard.

These statistic scumbags love to inflict plane on every sphere of influence.

Under the circumferences, it’s time we differentiated their root, made our point, and drew the line. These weapons of math instruction have the potential to decimate everything in their math on a scalene never before seen unless we become exponents of a Higher Power and begin to factor-in random facts of vertex.

As our Great Leader would say, “Read my ellipse.”

Here is one principle he knows with certainty, they continue to multiply, their days are numbered and the hypotenuse will tighten around their necks.

Funny, yes? I think so.

Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning-bug.”

The story above is also a cautionary tale about spell checker software, and the almost-right word. Everything in that story is spelled correctly, but many words are very incorrect in the context of Homeland Security. My spell checker just breezed right on by those.

If you make similar mistakes in the business plan you submit, the bank, the investors, the venture competition judges, or your MBA professors will also get a good laugh … and keep right on chuckling as they send your plan to the Out box.

Proofread your plan. Have someone who wasn’t involved in writing the plan read it over. Implement the edit suggestions you receive.

Steve Lange
Palo Alto Software

Coming up with new business ideas

The recent launch of the Zilok website in the U.K. (May 2008) reaffirmed to me that the way we have been consuming for many years in Western Society is changing. The raison d’être for Zilok goes something like this:

“Why own a ladder or a drill when you only need to use it once a year and you can rent one from a neighbour for a very low cost?”

I think of my parents’ generation, and a combination of increased disposable income (relative to their parents), significant marketing and the growth of retail parks meant that most of their generation have garages full of items that rarely see the light of day. However, our world is changing. In recent years there has also been an increase in single-person households, as well as a growth in apartments and flats with less square footage for storage than the houses of our parents. It’s not simply a case of why buy a ladder to use once a year but also a case of if I buy it, where do I store it?

The notion of community has also changed and urban dwellers are more likely to access an online community than knock next door to borrow something.

The Internet has also served to reduce transaction costs across the board. It is now easier to search for a wide range of (long tail and /or obscure) products and services from a PC. The days of driving around calling into different stores are well gone. On the supplier side it has removed the need for providers to have a physical presence in the various markets that they serve, or to carry a lot of stock in these stores.

Finally there is a greater environmental awareness amongst consumers and an increasing amount of purchase decisions now include a weighting for the environmental impact of their purchases. Websites such as The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard seek to promote sustainable production and indeed consumption –again seeking to promote shared ownership, product reuse and seeking to educate people about the impacts of their purchase decisions.

As a result of these changes, there is a raft of emerging offerings that blur the lines between products and services as we have traditionally known them. The message for entrepreneurs is that environmental changes and changes in consumer behaviour create business opportunities. The next ‘big idea’ is more likely to be a simple tweak to an existing product or service rather than a ‘mad professor idea’ concocted in a garden shed! Read More..

Alan Gleeson

Palo Alto Software (U.K.)

Rice Business Plan Competition, one last thing

A few weeks ago we had a conversation with Nate Alder, one of the people behind Klymit Technologies, featured on our blog.

The Money.CNN.com website featured them as one of the winners of the Moot Corp Business Plan Competition back in April.

If you’re interested, you can see the elevator pitches for all the 2008 winners, including Nate giving one for Klymit.

 

‘Chelle Parmele

Launch: Silicon Valley - VC opportunity

Launch: Silicon Valley is a product launch platform for cash strapped startups in the information technology, mobility, security, digital media, next generation Internet, life sciences and clean energy fields.

They are currently accepting executive summaries from new companies that are ready for launch, but are not yet well known.

Companies that are interested in presenting their products at Launch: Silicon Valley 2008 should send an Executive Summary of no more than 2 pages to Launchsv@svase.org by latest  May 9, 2008

 

‘Chelle Parmele
Palo Alto Software