The Business Challenge

A wise man’s questions contain half the answer........ Gabirol

Most students fail this challenge. Here's what we can learn from their mistakes.
You’re a student in a class on entrepreneurship. Your professor walks into the room, breaks the class into different teams, and gives each team fifty dollars in funding. Your goal is to make as much money as possible within three hours and then give a five-minute presentation to the class about what you achieved.

If you’re a student in the class, what would you do?

Typical answers range from using the fifty dollars to buy start-up materials for a makeshift salon or burger stand, to buying a lottery ticket. But the teams that follow these typical paths tend to bottom the class.

Key Steps to Become an Entrepreneur

• Shift your mindset to think like a problem solver, ready to take risks and learn continuously.
• Identify a specific problem or opportunity to solve with a meaningful product or service.
• Validate your idea by getting feedback from potential customers using a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
• Develop a simple business plan covering value proposition, target market, finances, and marketing.
• Set up the basics such as business registration, bank accounts, and necessary permits.
• Build and launch your product or service on a small scale.
• Collect feedback, learn from it, and adjust your business for growth.

Essential Qualities and Skills

• Problem-solving ability focused on solving one clear problem.
• Resilience and ability to handle rejection and setbacks.
• Building and hiring the right team who share your vision.
• Finding mentors and expanding your network to gain guidance and support.
• Passion, ambition, adaptability, and continuous learning are foundational traits

The teams that make the most money don’t use the fifty dollars at all. They realize the fifty dollars is a distracting, and essentially worthless, resource. So they ignore it. Instead, they go back to first principles and start from scratch.

They reframe the problem more broadly as “What can we do to make money if we start with absolutely nothing?” One particularly successful team ended up making reservations at popular local restaurants and then selling the reservation times to those who wanted to skip the wait. These students generated an impressive few hundred dollars in just three hours.

But the team that made the most money approached the problem differently. They realized that both the $50 funding and the 3-hour period weren’t the most valuable assets at their disposal. Rather, the most valuable resource was the five-minute presentation time they had in front of a captivated class.

They sold their five-minute slot to a company interested in recruiting students and walked away with $2000.

The fifty-dollar challenge illustrates the difference between tactics and strategy. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, they refer to different concepts. A strategy is a plan for achieving an objective. Tactics, in contrast, are the actions you undertake to implement the strategy.

See You at the Top