[BDC-2010] Upcoming activities for Tues and Thursday (Feb 1 and 3)

[Dan Heller]

Business Design Teams:

This week, we're hoping to tackle two of the main requirements for the
competition: the SWOT and the Employee Handbook.  After that, the executive
summary will be due, as it will be derived from the other documents.

As with all documents required in this competition, they would be required
by any investor looking to put their money at risk in your company. While
these documents are definitely beneficial for your own uses, their
importance to others outside your company are critical.

An executive summary suitable for this competition needs to be something
that a potential investor would read in 3-5 minutes. This is usually a
single page, maybe two. This is best derived from all the points in your
slide decks, rewritten as descriptive next in narrative form. Your team
should be continually updating presentations as teammates do market research
and other discoveries that may affect the evolution of your goals and
strategies. If you've been doing this, the exec summary document should be a
no-brainer.

This coming Tuesday, I plan is to go through this process by first
presenting the topic "globally", then running through one or two of the
teams' slide decks to illustrate how you should work among yourselves. You
will then break into your teams to discuss it amongst yourselves, revising
slide decks as necessary, coming up with your SWOT, and planning for how to
translate that into the descriptive narrative that will ultimately go into
your executive summary.

(Note that your executive summary will ultimately be a table of contents for
an eventual business plan. Each of the subheadings will expand into chapters
in and of themselves, each describing the various portions of your business
model and the research associated with each component.)

Thursday, we will cover the *employee handbook, *which should be available
for download by Tuesday's class. We encourage all team members to attend
Thursday's 6-8pm class, though we understand not everyone is in 194F and
cannot make it. That's no problem for us, but since a quorum is needed to
pass resolutions on policies and procedures before your handbook can be
ratified (and submitted to the BDC), your team will have to eventually have
this full-attendance meeting at some point. If you attend on Thursday, we
can help you.

Lastly, I understand students are asking if we are going to continue the
class into Spring quarter. The Competition itself is certainly continuing,
as we will be prepping you for the semi-finals and the finals thereafter. As
for 194F, we are eager to offer it as well, and will be working with the
administration to approve it. Stay tuned.

dan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.ucsc.edu/pipermail/bdc-2010/attachments/20110129/dc96adc3/attachment.html