Every year, the CSUF Consulting program works with over 100 clients to help them improve their businesses in a number of key ways, including: Marketing, Operations, Finance, Accounting, and General Strategy. From these projects we enter one undergraduate and one MBA project into a national consulting competition for universities. Out of the hundreds of universities who entered this competition both of our teams finished in the Top 3 in their categories!
Dr. Lorenzo Bizzi’s MBA Capstone team took home the second place prize in the Graduate Comprehensive Project category, which means they did a comprehensive review of their client’s business and created a general strategy report for them based off of their observations and research. This is the first Top 3 finish for Dr. Bizzi; his team consisted of: Jennifer Pueblo, Rossana Alvarez, Hanisha Balani, Amber Soares, Leo Lee, and Bown Guan and their client was Orange County Fair and Events Center.
“This was an invaluable experience which not only exposed the team to the world of consulting, but also helped to create and cement life-long professional and personal contacts. Access to Dr. Bizzi’s knowledge and expertise served as an instrumental force to focus and guide our consulting project which in the end, validated everything we learned but may not be able to be fully utilized in our day-to-day careers,” said MBA team member Rossana.
CSUF Center for Entrepreneurship Director John Bradley Jackson’s marketing consulting team took the third place honors in the Undergraduate Specialized portion of the competition, which means that the team did an intensive review of their client’s current marketing efforts and created a strategic plan on how to achieve the goals as set out by the client. This is the fifth time that one of Professor Jackson’s teams have finished in the Top 3 since he has been teaching at Cal State Fullerton and his team consisted of: Stacy Goldstein, Emma Osman, Johnathon Veta, Andrew Goclowski, Tristan Schmitt, and Jenny Frolova; Curtis Chan, founder of Chan & Associates and Cognitive Impact, was their mentor.
“Collaboration was the key to this project. Our client was the Fullerton College Foundation and they were open to the students working with them to develop an in-depth marketing strategy plan for them to increase the volume of donations coming in. On our end, the team worked very hard and I am proud of their report and the fact that they did so well in the competition,” said Director Jackson.
Stacy Goldstein, one of the students working on the undergraduate project with Professor Jackson, had this to say about her experience working on this project: “For me, the best value I got out of doing the project was working with a great team. A lot of students, myself included, dread the “evil” group projects. While I can’t claim to have ever had a truly terrible team in my academic career, I can boast this team was the best. A positive group project experience like that in an academic setting is so very rare, and I’m glad to have experienced it.”
This competition is hosted by the Small Business Institute (SBI), a national organization that promotes and supports universities in employing high impact practices in their courses like consulting projects. Including these two teams, the CSUF Consulting program has now finished in the Top 10 of the SBI National competition 31 times. We’re looking forward to many more wonderful projects and many more exemplary clients like the ones we worked with for years to come.
[03/21/17 Edit: Added in quote by MBA team member Rossana Alvarez and included her name on the list of students on the MBA team]
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For more details on CSUF Entrepreneurship: http://business.fullerton.edu/Center/Entrepreneurship/
For more details on how we help people become entrepreneurs: http://business.fullerton.edu/Center/Entrepreneurship/Incubator
For more details on how CSUF Consulting can help businesses thrive: http://business.fullerton.edu/Center/Entrepreneurship/Consulting
Attend one of our events for entrepreneurs or sign up for a free mentoring session: http://bit.ly/CSUFEntrepreneurEvents