Winner of TiE Biz Planning Contest goes to Santa Clara

On 2nd April, 2008, TiE Sydney hosted the second and final stage of a Contest for wannabe entrepreneurs, a Business Plan Contest.

Four people presented their business plans and were grilled by the Judging Panel:
- Lisa Louden (www.lacemates.com.au)
- Dipankar Choudhary (www.pyrozone.com.au)
- Rahul Bhargava (www.thinknourishment.com)
- Janaki Joshi (www.iris.com.au)

Lisa wowed the audience with her display of sports boots 'before' and 'after' - one with ugly black electrical tape keeping the laces in place, the other with a slick Lacemates-branded band. Lisa is getting snowed under with orders from sports shops and her websites. Now she needs funding to manufacture her patented products in bulk and sell in Australia and overseas.

Dipankar has a plan to market proven fire protection systems into the booming Indian market and showed the potential for profitable sales given some funding for a sales and marketing team led by him.

Rahul is a student at an early stage of a service that could be delivered online or at point of sales via mobile, enabling diet-conscious consumers to assess the nutritional value of the products they buy. He needs seed funding to build a prototype and finalise a business model.

The winner was, wait for it, Janaki Joshi with the unique Product Lifecyle Management system developed by IRIS and taken up by the Australian subsidiaries of global pharma companies like Pfizer. Janaki needs funding to market her product and services to the US and European head offices of her existing and new clients.

The judges said all four entrants were deserving of support and found it hard to pick the eventual winner. Janaki wins a free ticket, courtesy of TiE member Arnold D'Souza (www.acrtravel.com.au) to travel to the TiECON 2008 event in Santa Clara, May 16-17.

To find out more about TiECON 2008, see: http://www.tiecon.org/TiESVHome/HomeView.

Our congratulations to Janaki and best wishes in raising funding in the months ahead.

All who attended also found the feedback from the panel to the contestants of great value in refining their own business plans. As a learning experience under the TiE Mentoring Program, the contest achieved all its objectives.

I would like to thank TiE members for their support and the panel of judges who chose the winner in this round:

- Nitin Singhi
- Mike Giles
- Bill Bartee

Do contact me for any information about TiE or our FREE Mentoring Program!