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Friday, March 23, 2012
Business
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High-school students get down to cases ALLAN WISHART allanw@pgfreepress.com
One of the members of the first team to complete its presentation at Saturday’s Business Case Study Competition at CNC had a question for organizers. “Do the judges know we’re high-school students?” The answer was no, the judges didn’t, and that wouldn’t factor into the judging. The answer didn’t seem to faze the three highschool students, though, whose reaction after their presentation was probably the same as any of the CNC and UNBC teams. “It got nerve-racking as the time went by in the isolation area,” said Deidre Suhr. “Now I’m relieved it’s over.” Suhr and teammates Randy Roy and Kaylee Harned, like the other teams in the competition, were given a business case study to examine and make a presentation on,
then put into a room for three hours. “We had a Powerpoint, a calculator and paper,” Suhr said.”That was all.” Harned said they knew they had three hours to do the work. “It was very quiet at first when we read through the package.” While Roy goes to Prince George Secondary and Suhr and Harned attend Westside Academy, this wasn’t a case of three students being thrown together at the last minute. “We know each other from Youth Parliament,” Harned said, and Suhr noted she and Roy had known each for years. Roy was the only one with previous experience in the competition. “Last year, I was put on a team because I was the only high-school student to put my name in. This year it was easier, because I called them up. From being at Youth Parliament, we knew each oth-
er’s strengths and weaknesses.” Suhr agreed. “Being friends and knowing each other ahead of time made it easier to delegate the jobs when we were working on the case.” The Youth Parliament experience also helped when it came to the preparation. “All of us are used to speaking in public,” Suhr said, “so we weren’t nervous at all.” The next Youth Parliament is coming up at the end of April, and Roy is already “dreading” it. “We’ve been working together for the last year,” he said, “and I’m going to be on the government side and they’re in opposition. They know how I think, so that could be a problem.” As it turned out, the high-school team placed right in the middle of the nine teams in the competition, in fifth place. First place in the compe-
A lla n W ISHA RT/ Fre e Pre s s
Randy Roy, left, Deidre Suhr and Kaylee Harned were the youngest – and the first – team in a business case study competition held at the College of New Caledonia on Saturday. tition went to Shea-Marie Glass, Stewart Lambert, and Ed Kovach. The team of Lydia Rudolph, Stephanie Kao, and Andrew Steele placed second,
while third went to Steven Clarke, Dale Watt, and Tiffany Bennet. Judges were Eric Griffith, CNC Senior Management instructor, Troy Dungate,
lawyer and chairman of Community Futures Fraser Fort George Board of Directors, and Lane Zirnhelt, partner in the Prince George office of KPMG.
New business-student society plans for future at CNC ALLAN WISHART allanw@pgfreepress.com
They were already hard at work before they were even a society. “Technically, I guess we started last spring,” says Andrew Steele, president of the CNC Society of Business Program Students. “That’s when we started getting people together. We were legally incorporated in January. “It was a good day.” Before they became official, though, the members of the society were already making their
presence known, such as gathering presents for a toy drive for the E. Fry Society. The idea for the society at CNC came on a visit to UNBC, says vice-president Grant Bachand. “We were up at UNBC for a case study competition, and saw their business society. That really sparked off our desire to create a society of our own.” While Steele and Bachand are both in their second, and final, years at CNC, the society is being built to survive. “There are nine on the exec-
utive,” Steele says, “myself as president, four directors and four assistant directors. All the assistant directors are first-year students. “It’s a structure we’re trying to continue.” He says more and more people want to get involved, and there is only one rule. “People from outside the business program can work with us, but they can’t be on the executive.” They are finding people from outside CNC who want to be
involved, Bachand says. “We’ve held public speaking sessions with the Toastmasters club in town. We also volunteer with different groups, which helps get other people involved.” Steele says one of the things the society is hoping to do is identify skill gaps for the students. “The level of education here is great,” he emphasized, “but there are some areas we find students are lacking, things like preparing resumes and making early investment plans. “We want to fill the gaps
between the curriculum and the workplace.” Bachand says the society is also looking to bridge those gaps by working with businesses in the city. “We would like to get partnerships in some groups in the city, hopefully to have them act as mentors for some of the students..” Anyone interested in learning more about the society can follow it on Twitter at @cncsbps or on Facebook under CNC Society of Business Program Students.
Crescendo of credit can mean problems for business It starts out innocently enough, usuleasehold improvements and enough ally with a small loan or a couple of trade operating money to see you through the accounts, but by the time the bailiff puts start-up period. a lock on the door, the amount of debt Life is good, but you still need suphas become one of the nails in the failplies. In the early days of business, suping business’ coffin. Here’s pliers can be an uncooperative how easily it can happen. lot – nobody wants to extend Imagine that you’re startcredit until they develop a relaing a venture with limited Boudreau tionship with you. So, following funds and eager to get the Biz “Supplier Development Rules doors open and succeed. DANBOUDREAU Of The Road”, you proceed to A startling number of build relationships and apply to new businesses fail in the first five years. establish a couple of trade accounts with Lenders know new business is risky, and enough headroom to enable you to order manage their loan portfolios accordingly. a month’s supply, as long as you pay However, with the right security, such as within 30 days. equity in the family residence or a willBecause the business isn’t yet churning ing co-signer or guarantor, it’s entirely out enough margin to provide you with feasible to nail down a start-up loan for a a paycheque, you might find yourself risk-laden small enterprise. nicking the corporate credit card to buy a So, congratulations are in order; you’ve few groceries. Every new business owner got the loan and started your business. knows this is evil, but most do it anyway. Let’s say the borrowed funds pay for After all, you’ve got to eat. You intend
to pay the card to zero at the end of each month, but as you bang it up with personal knick-knacks, and the money just isn’t there to pay it down, the carryover gets higher each month. You discover that you need a couple more trade accounts and use your newly honed skills to set up a few more accounts. In the meantime, your responses to pre-approved credit card marketing campaigns procure you a couple more credit cards. With trade accounts and other random sources of debt like credit cards, the trap is that none of them know what the others are up to, they rely on your diligence and integrity, and also hedge their bets on their expertise at extracting payment from you like bad teeth, regardless of how you’re managing your other debts. So, by cherry picking and presenting a small part of your financial picture to the disparate players, it’s entirely possible for
a clever operator to outsmart the entire bunch, including yourself, and tilt the financial chariot so far off centre that you wake up one day with no hope of ever getting your business back into the black, and no possibility of ever repaying the amount you owe. All it takes from there is a small disaster to tilt the financial house of cards into pandemonium. Perhaps one morning as you’re about to head off to work, your aging vehicle coughs and refuses to take you anywhere. A flurry of repairs and a yelling match later, you owe a mechanic $900, and the corporate credit card takes yet another hit. That’s how debt can destroy a business. Credit can be evil. Just because you can borrow, doesn’t mean you should. Treat debt with respect. Dan Boudreau is the creator of the Online Business Planner’s RoadMap at www.riskbuster.com/roadmap.