I just wanted to share something with you guys that I got to participate in this semester at school. It’s not racing but something pretty neat that I was able to do. As I have posted before I am getting my Master’s Degree at the University of South Florida here in Tampa and it has been a great experience up to this point. I have been fortunate to meet a lot of brilliant people with great businesses and great business ideas.
Early in August, the graduate business school started advertising for the “MBA Case Competition” taking place in November. I didn’t know what the heck it was, but I put my name down because I figured if it wasn’t fun it would at least be a good networking opportunity. So a couple months go by and I started to occasionally hear a little bit of chatter about who was participating, who people thought the company was, teams talking trash on how they were going to beat everyone, and etc. A couple weeks before the competition in mid-November the teams are finally announced, 5 teams of 5, and my team members and I got together for a few beverages to figure out a good plan of attack so we could win this thing.To give you a little bit of a breakdown of the purpose of the event, the graduate school selects a business that has a problem/problems, and it could be anybody so guessing does no good the previous year it was Tampa Electric company, not a small one by any means. All at once they present the company, information, and problems to the teams, then the teams go their separate ways and do the necessary analysis until all your eyes are so blurred that everything starts to look like the matrix. The teams are then assigned a time to give their presentation of their findings/recommendations to a panel of judges made up of company officials, professors, and other local executives in the business world. Fun right? OF COURSE! Except for when you are only given 24 hours to complete the whole thing.
They loaded us on to a bus Friday morning at 8am and took us to a “secret” location that ended up being the Hillsborough Education Foundation. Gave us a presentation of all the information we could every want to know from 8:30-Noon. We got back to school and debriefed as an entire group till 1:30pm, at this point we still thought we were going to have 3 days to pulls this deal off. At the end of the meeting the professor dropped on us that we were being given 24 hours till we had to present. So we had from 2:00PM on Friday till 9:00AM on Saturday morning to get everything done. Needless to say there was absolutely no sleeping, tons of regression testing, multiple SWOT analysis’s, too many Guy Kawasaki recommendations, 22 total cans of Red Bull, and more Taco Bell than you could imagine. My group was great and we nailed the presentation on Saturday morning with some awesome ideas but the Executive MBA team won. Kind of a joke because these people are actually acting CEO’s in the Tampa Bay area and we thought there was a bias there anyways because of the judging panel…..but that’s a story for next time.
However, yours truly came up with an idea that the judges mentioned specifically that they liked during the awards presentation…..yup I’m taking all the credit for it too.
(Me all the way left, my team on the bottom, and some Tampa execs up top)
The reason I wanted to fill you guys in on this was because I know Pro-Line does a good share of charity work and because I think the education arena is often overlooked when we think of charitable giving. It isn’t as glamorous as supporting breast cancer by wearing a bracelet that says you love boobs but it certainly is something that every child can benefit from. It’s all about growing our future with these kids and giving them to be successful in their future endeavors. I am sure there is something similar where you live and I encourage you to check it out. The Hillsborough Education Foundation gives a ton of money to scholarships, learning programs, and most importantly the teachers. It was a great event to be a part of because not only did we give them $50,000 dollars worth of free consulting but we actually provided them with useful information to help them gain donations.
You can check out more on them at www.educationfoundation.org
You can also check out this link about the competition:
http://engineur.com/post/2373923326/usf-graduate-business-case-competition-2010
**Also check out my new sports website the 1st of the year. If you think you can write a story and want to contribute let me know. www.straightsportstalk.com
**Racing News coming soon from the sunshine state where we are still wearing shorts and t-shirts this winter 🙂
Till Next Time,
Leon McIntosh
