Late one night last week, Sing in Can received a Whatsapp message from a course mate, who excitedly declared, “Wtf guys, we won!” I was in the shower and by the time I clicked open the conversation, there was already a shower of chatter regarding our win at the pitch for our business venture that we made just hours before.
Venturing Into Entrepreneurship and Small Business
I enrolled myself into a “Entrepreneurship and Small Business” course for my first semester studying in Canada. Not surprisingly, one of the final outcomes of this course was a business plan for a business idea. Along the way, we had to come up with a draft elevator pitch (90 seconds on a video) and a final business pitch (“live” before the rest of the class).
Right on the first day of the course, we were asked to decide for ourselves whether we are a “Hipster”, “Hustler” or “Hacker”. Following that, we had to find at least 2 other persons to form team – each team should have all of the 3 roles for a start-up.
My team mates consisted of RS (if you recall, was also part of my click that I got to know from Orientation) and VW. Being closeted foodies, our business ideas started off with solutions to the high food prices in Vancouver, and eventually, inspired by Chef-in-Box in Singapore, to have Canada’s very first hot food vending machines.
Our company is “N.I.C.E Hot Meals”, with N.I.C.E. being the acronym for “Nutritious”, “Immediate”, “Cheap” and “Effortless”, which were also the company’s value proposition for our meals.
Pitches
For our first assignment, I managed to pyscho RS to deliver the elevator pitch on video, which was scripted and recorded over a course of a single day, one day before submission deadline!
Fast forward 1.5 months, it was time for us to deliver our final business pitch to the rest of the class. Unfortunately, that presentation day also happened to be right smack in the middle of the last week of term, which represented a week of project and assignment submissions.
We then decided that I would be the one to deliver the pitch.
Sandwiched between finalising my final project for my Communications class, and churning out the financial projection for the business idea, I only completed the slides and script on D-1. I chucked aside everything on hand and spent the remaining few hours memorising and rehearsing for the business pitch.
Rules of the Presentation
The rule for the presenting teams were simple: 5 minutes to deliver the pitch, which would also include the Q&A.
Everyone in the class were told to assume we each had $100,000 of cash that we could use to invest in any of the business ventures presented by our peers. We could only invest up to 3 ventures, and of course, we could not vote for our own business ideas.
In other words, there was a change in plan to adjust our request for $250,000 in funding to suit the budget of our “investors” – that was just a little hiccup – told them instead that they could choose to each invest $50,000 to receive an equity in N.I.C.E Hot Meals.
There were other crazy good ideas presented in the class, which over ran by 15 minutes. I voted for a simple idea of a sticker for car plates, an outdoor gym and a bespoke furniture design company.
My team split up right after the class, with that heavy burden off our shoulders. We never expected our instructor to be so quick in delivering our results for the business pitches, which was less than 2 hours after our session ended!
Reflections
So… that was the full story of how my team, N.I.C.E. Hot Meals sort of won the session. We garnered a total funding of $708,285, which was almost 3x more than what we targeted for, and of course, we were the “company” that scored the most funding.
Our “professional score”, as assessed by our instructor based on the assessment criteria for business pitch, was not the highest, but we still got one of the highest score, nonetheless. It was surreal, because everyone in the team were just expecting to pass the course, since none of us had real life experience in entrepreneurship.
Yup, perhaps we dreamt of starting our own businesses, which was the reason why we signed up for the course, but it was meant to be a first baby step, to help us understand how we can prepare ourselves for the start-up reality.
At the point of writing, we had just completed and submitted our final business plan. The win for the business venture pitch was an adrenaline shot and gave us much needed motivation to pump in content (as well as to skim the report to meet the 10-page restriction).
The whole experience was surreal, but enriching!
Business Venture Pitch Practice Video
The video below was edited from my business venture pitch practice. I am not a born presenter, so there was a lot of editing. However, I wanted to keep a record of this experience for memory sake, which was why I spent some time editing and creating this video.
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Till then, sing while you can!
In case you are wondering, I considered myself a Hipster, though I might have a sub-role of a Hustler.
Disclaimer: There were pictures used in my presentation that were taken off the internet, meant for a learning environment. It was never intended to be used as a form of monetisation.
Editor’s Note: This article was first posted on Sing in Can blog in 2019. It is now re-posted with edits on Live.Life.Love as SiC has closed down.