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Quiet Competence

Behind-the-scenes Wharton Business Plan Committee forges Venture Finals, friendships.

A memorable performance or sporting event inevitably obscures the practice and preparation preceding it. Whether ballerinas or baseball players, the performers endured months of sweat and stumbles to choreograph their perfect day.

So it is, too, with the Wharton Business Plan Competition and Venture Finals. Each April, 8 teams of students present their business plans to a panel of venture capitalists, vying for cash prizes and in-kind contributions of support for their fledgling ventures. That day, the stakes—at least in terms of potential humiliation—are high; the auditorium in Huntsman Hall brims with fellow students, faculty, family and friends. Blunder, and your friends will rib you for weeks. Yet rarely do mumbles, muffled microphones or missing PowerPoint slides mar the slick presentations.

And while the aspiring entrepreneurs face the crowd, they're not the only ones being tested. A committee of student volunteers stages the competition. In some ways, that committee is as remarkable as the competition itself. 

The committee is rebuilt from scratch each year, consisting of about a dozen first-year MBA students and undergrads. Its members can log as many as 15 hours a week for no pay and little public recognition. Over the course of the school year, they'll manage a process involving dozens of student teams, hundreds of judges and multiple rounds of screening and winnowing business proposals and plans. While certainly not a thankless job, it's not a sexy one, either. Yet it's one of the most sought-after service opportunities at Wharton. Former members call it one of the highlights of their time on campus.

Kunal Bahl, an aspiring entrepreneur himself, passed up the chance to enter the competition so he could work on the committee.  When he joined the committee he had already devised a product prototype—for now, it remains under wraps—and had begun to market-test it.  Bahl figured that he could learn more from the dozens of people he would meet through the committee than by polishing his business plan.

"I got to work with a dozen other organizers who were very smart, and from them, I got a lot of feedback to fine-tune my product," says Bahl, who graduated from the Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology with his bachelor's this year and now works at Microsoft. "I got to know the participants in the competition and learn what kind of challenges they faced. And I got to talk with the venture capitalists and learn what they look for in businesses."

For Eric Grimes, who graduated with his MBA in 2003 and is a finance director at Nike, the appeal of the committee was the concreteness of its mission. "There are a lot of extra-curriculars on campus that are about socializing and community building. I love the fact that, on the BPC committee we were supporting entrepreneurs. It's real."

Committee members fill a variety of roles. The co-chairs function, with the help of Megan Mitchell, a WEP senior associate director, as the chief operating officers, making sure everyone does his job and meets deadlines. Judge-relations coordinators recruit and interact with the hundreds of venture capitalists and professional investors who review the business summaries and plans at each stage of the competition.

Educational coordinators plan seminars on business plan writing and entrepreneurship and match contestants with mentors. Marketing coordinators recruit sponsors and publicize the competition around campus. And the information-technology coordinator oversees the website and competition system through which teams submit their plans and the judges review them.

Paula Janssen acted as director of technology and operations during the 2002-2003 school year. She wasn't concerned with entrepreneurship as it is conventionally understood—that is, startups and high-tech—because she planned to return to her family's business, a gourmet market in Delaware, after graduation. But even though none of the plans proposed during her tenure involved retail businesses, she found that she gleaned useful tips from reviewing the judges' critiques.

"The nuggets they gave were good for any entrepreneur—they always wanted numbers to back up everything," says Janssen, who earned her MBA in 2004. "They wanted marketing studies and projections of future cash flows. They wanted to know exactly when teams needed money and how they were going to use it."

Of course, intense teamwork often yields fast friendships. Past members cite the relationships they forged through the committee as one of the highlights of their work.

"Three of my best six friends from Wharton were people who I worked with on the BPC," says Thatcher Bell, who earned his MBA in 2005 and is a venture capitalist at DFJ Gotham Ventures in New York.

For Bell, as for many past committee members, the best night of the year might have also been the easiest. "The most satisfying moment was the day of the final judging on campus when it was all done," he recalls. That evening, the group adjourned to Pod, a sushi restaurant a block from campus, to toast a successful competition.

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Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs

Wharton Business Plan Competition

Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology