Every year for the last ten years, Saint Michael's College business students have competed in the Enterprise Plan Competition which yields the winning team a $5,000 prize, with $2,500 going to second place, and $1,000 to third. This year, for the first time, the winning team is two business majors and a biology major-all three dean's list students. They used extraordinary business and biology expertise that won top prize and had the judges speaking superlatives about the sophistication of their plan.
Brendan Clark, business major from Franklin Lakes, N.J., Cinzia Coppola, business major from Waterbury, Vt., and Mallory Norton, biology major from Pearl River, N.Y., created a fully formulated company (on paper) called GRATEFUL COMPOST, and were named the winners at the 10th annual Saint Michael's College Enterprise Plan Competition held April 29 in the McCarthy Arts Center. This team was advised by Biology Professor Valerie Banschbach and Business Department Chair Robert Letovsky, who also coordinated the competition.
Sponsored by Peter R. Worrell '79 and Dr. Kareen Kendrick Worrell '77, the Enterprise Plan Competition, "challenges Saint Michael's undergraduates to develop and market sustainable business plans to a panel of business leaders serving as competition judges."
Contestants were judged on creativity, social purpose, thoroughness of research, persuasiveness of presentation, quality of analysis, likelihood of success of enterprise, and quality of written materials. Several dozen plans were entered into the competition and five made the finals after repeated readings by members of the Saint Michael's Department of Business Administration and Accounting.
Grateful Compost wins
The elegantly presented winning plan, a business to collect and process organic wastes to sell later for garden compost, included all the financials, a logo, and a detailed spelling out of objectives, mission, location, facility, products, services, market analysis, and implementation (make-it-happen) sections, in 34 pages of text and 48 pages of appended graphs, charts, photos and more.
The plan for Grateful Compost locates the business in densely populated Bergen County, New Jersey. It spells out a mission of creating a sensible environmental remedy for the over-flowing land-fills in the region, while also creating a product that will sustain and enrich a gardening culture and become a profitable business. Grateful Compost would collect food wastes, process them scientifically in a processing facility, turn them into garden-enriching compost, and sell the compost. The very impressive presentation and analysis by the young business trio demonstrated evidence of a start-up company with a fully coherent plan for future success.
Sponsored by Peter and Kareen Worrell
Benefactor Peter Worrell, principal in the Bigelow Co. of Portsmouth, N.H., a leading regional venture capital firm, said the plan demonstrated "true talent and creativity." Former trustee and 1979 graduate of Saint Michael's, Peter Worrell and his wife Dr. Kareen Kendrick Worrell, have provided enthusiasm and support the program for ten years.
"These plans all showed time, talent and creativity," Mr. Worrell said. "You talked about these difficult economic times-it's times like these that yield great entrepreneurs," he added. "The difference between a great idea and a great entrepreneur," he said, "is not in knowing something but in doing it."
Other winners
Winners of 2nd place and $2,500 were Mariah Dukeshire, Meghan Louf and Matthew Mascelli for their plan, CHITTENDEN GROCERIES EXPRESS. And 3rd place and a $1,000 prize went to Kimberly Davis and Lindsey Levesque for their plan, JOIE DE VIVRE. The other two finalist teams were AREA TRANSPORT created by Artie Dionisio, Alexander Hill, Eric Mitchell and Michael Sugrue; and GREEN SCALE SERVICES created by Timothy Bednar, Molly Dever, Jonathan Downey, Anastasia Konopka and Melanie Randle.
Judges
Judges for the competition were Jerry Ford, CEO of Marathon Health, former CEO and president of an Accel-KKR-owned company (Systems & Software), and former VP at IDX Systems; Richard L. Kalich, president and CEO of Vermed, a medical device manufacturer; Emily Kaminsky, director of Community Capital of Vermont, a nonprofit loan fund for Vermont small businesses; James O'Brien, 1987 Saint Michael's graduate, co-founder and managing partner of Vertex Engineering Services, and president of Vertex Environmental Services, and Michael Seaver, 1981 Saint Michael's graduate and now President and CEO of Chittenden Bank.
"All the teams reflected the important three-some of knowledge, skill and attitude," said Jerry Ford. "It was a very hard debate; every team had at least one first place vote," he said. The judges were in agreement that the plans were very viable, very professional; they advised the students to "find something you enjoy and find a way to make money at it ... pursue your passions and you'll be successful."
Competition organizer, Dr. Robert Letovsky, said, "These plans prove that socially entrepreneurial plans can make money and do good in the world."
Saint Michael's College, founded in 1904 by the Society of St. Edmund and headed by President John J. Neuhauser, is identified by the Princeton Review as one of the nation's Best 368 Colleges. A liberal arts, residential, Catholic college, Saint Michael's is located just outside of Burlington, Vermont, one of America's top college towns and less than two hours from Montreal. As one of only 270 institutions nationwide with a prestigious Phi Beta Kappa chapter on campus, Saint Michael's has 2,000 full-time undergraduate students, some 500 graduate students and 200 international students. In recent years Saint Michael's students and professors have received Rhodes, Woodrow Wilson, Guggenheim, Fulbright, National Science Foundation and other grants, and Saint Michael's professors have been named Vermont Professor of the Year in four of the last eight years. The college is currently listed as one of the nation's Best Liberal Arts Colleges in the 2009 U.S. News & World Report rankings.
Photo caption: First place winners of the Saint Michael's College Enterprise Plan Competition, left to right, Brendan Clark, Cinzia Coppola and Mallory Norton