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Thursday, 04 March 2010
The annual Langtree Homes' Business Trophy proved to be another
closely fought battle of the business brains between four
"companies" made up of Sixth Form students from each
division. The judging panel - "the dragons" - comprised Brian
Muir of BEAT, Beverley Bird of PricewaterhouseCoopers, Phil
Warriner of BT and Adrian Murphy, Development Director at Langtree
Homes. They had the unenviable task of declaring a winner
from four high quality presentations.
The competition had begun during the Autumn Term when students
took part in Business Enterprise and Awareness Training (BEAT)
courses, run by Brian Muir. Following the programme, the 240
students in Year 12 formed teams of six to develop prospective new
businesses offering a new product or service with a view to asking
a local bank for a business loan to set up their new
enterprise. The four teams that had won through to the final
had thus overcome a lot of competition already and had polished
their performance along the way. On the night, each group
made a ten minute presentation, backed up by PowerPoint slides, to
a panel of judges. Teams were put under considerable pressure in
defending the virtues and merits of their marketing strategies and
cash-flow forecasts.
Safe Blade opened the pitches with a measured business proposal
offering lockable knives in wooden blocks; Glacier Designs' premise
was to compete with the photographs on canvas market by offering
photos on glass, which is more durable and cheaper to produce;
Picture Perfect had built their enterprise around the idea of
personalised picture frames - all of which could be done online;
and Unique's U-Shoe gave the customer the opportunity to design and
personalise their own footware and then to redesign and change
indefinitely.
After grilling each team with some searching questions the
judges made their decision and the winning team was announced by Mr
Murphy of Langtree Homes as being Unique with the runners-up being
Picture Perfect. Mr Muir of BEAT commended all the students
for their "outstandingly good presentations" and for floating truly
viable business propositions. He felt this had been the
hardest year ever to judge.
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