June 11, 2007

Students pool efforts for MBA Cup
Winners worked on contest’s tight deadline, created professional pitch book in midst of midterm exams.
By Jan Norman
of The Orange County Register

SANTA ANA, Calif. — Not every college student wins $10,000 and polishes valuable career skills at the same time.

The latter is more valuable to the MBA team from the UC Irvine Paul Merage School of Business, which recently won the Association for Corporate Growth MBA Cup.

Competitions for business school students across the country abound, and MBA candidates are encouraged to test their mettle. Many of those events involve writing a business plan for a fledgling company or creating investment portfolios.

The ACG Cup seemed more practical to first-year MBA student Alex Rapoport, a former consultant at accounting giant PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

The ACG Cup challenges students to create the best solution to a realistic financial problem for a fictional company. The contest also allows MBA students who are considering a career in finance a chance to rub shoulders with ACG members who are investment bankers, hedge fund managers and mergers-and-acquisition specialists.

Rapoport asked classmate Jason Phillips, who’s getting a joint MD and MBA degree, to form a team. The two had worked well together on class projects.

They figured their team needed someone with real-world mergers experience, so they sought out Thor Clark, a second-year MBA student who had worked at a startup that had grown through acquisitions.

Then Clark recommended Dan Gabele as the team’s fourth member. Gabele is a self-professed finance enthusiast who already had lined up a job with investment banker Duff & Phelps after graduation this spring.

The resulting team had the right mix of chemistry, knowledge and work ethic not only to beat out four other UCI teams, but also to capture the ACG Cup and $10,000 regional prize over teams from Pepperdine University, University of Southern California, Chapman University and Cal State Fullerton.

“We’re all committed to this industry, so we treated it as a learning experience,” Phillips said. Rather than trying to figure out what it would take to beat other student teams, the UCI team focused on doing the best possible work.

They achieved that goal, said ACG member and judge Allan Siposs, head of investment banker FMV Capital Markets in Irvine. “They did a thorough analysis of the underlying information, and their recommendations were the most appropriate for the set of circumstances we gave them,” he said.

The campus-level contest scenario was a buyout offer for a fictional, family-owned company whose members had different, sometimes conflicting goals. Teams had to weigh pros and cons of selling vs. recapitalizing the company and justify their calculations and recommendations. The regional contest made a few twists to the same scenario.

The teams had one week to analyze the issue and suggest action.

“We gave (contestants) an almost insolvable set of conditions,” Siposs said. “We wanted to make it as real-world as possible.”

Clark, who was on a winning team in a venture capital competition last year, said the deadline was difficult for full-time MBA students.

“When you have three months to prepare, you can schedule out your time,” he said. “This competition was one week, and it was at midterms.”

When the teams received the details, they could do preliminary work and research separately, sharing their findings by e-mail, but they had to polish the oral presentation in person, Gabele said.

The four stayed up until 3 a.m. perfecting what proved to be one of their greatest selling points – a 60-page, full-color pitch book that judges said was as professional as any they’d seen from industry veterans.

Then Rapoport, Phillips and Gabele had midterm exams hours later.

They believe they barely survived the campus competition. Judges told them their information was solid but their presentation could be better organized.

They followed the feedback in preparing for the regional competition.

They figured there were nine combinations of recommendations, Rapoport said, so they put them up on a white board and argued through the pros and cons.

The competition proved to be the great learning experience for which the team members had hoped.

“I spent my first (MBA) year working for a financial services firm, and after the competition, Jason and Alex knew everything I knew,” Gabele said.

Phillips added, “This is the strongest experience I’ve had in business school so far.”

Local MBA students receive awards from regional competition
In May, a team of Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne MBA students took home awards from the 2007 Ohio Graduate Business Student Competition in Columbus, Ohio. The team – James Alt, Julie Brennan, Beata Ksionski and John Lee – won first place in the oral presentation and second place overall, according to a news release from the school. They received $2,000 in prize money.

The team partnered with Fort Wayne-based Bonne Chimie, a privately owned custom skin-care franchise. The team created a business plan for the company, which was one of the top six in the competition. Fifteen universities were invited to participate.