Congratulations are in order for two of our hardworking Student-led Business Consulting Teams! Professor John Bradley Jackson’s Undergraduate team took home the national title and Dr. David Leibsohn’s MBA team took home second place in their respective categories at the Small Business Institute‘s National Project of the Year Competition. To put this into perspective, these teams beat out the other 125 or so consulting projects that were completed by CSUF teams last year as well as a commensurate number from dozens of other schools. Doing some rough math, the odds of winning, or even being in the Top 10, are very small; close to zero actually.
Professor Jackson’s Undergraduate team did their consulting report for The Ticket Group. The Ticket Group is an online destination for people looking for tickets to large events. Working on this project were Heather Annette Castner, Erica Nicole Saunders, Zach Turner, Kayla Donohue, Max Lubliner and Rex Noreen.
Dr. Leibsohn’s MBA team worked on a consulting project for Loutech, a company that does CNC machining for many industries in Southern California. Working on this project were MBA candidates Omar Besiso, Simona Crisan, Jennifer Davalos, Erik Hayes and Silvia Liu.
For those of you who are uninitiated in our Student-led Business Consulting Program, let me give you a brief overview. Every semester CSUF students taking Entrepreneurship classes in Operations, Marketing, Finance, Human Relations and in a select number of MBA courses take on a semester-long business consulting report. These reports are not based off of cases taken from a book but, rather, based off of the real life situations that our clients (real businesses) are facing.
Throughout the semester, each team meets with their client at least half a dozen times in person and more so through phone calls and email. At the end of the semester our Student-led Business Consulting Teams present their clients with a substantial strategy report accompanied with a lengthy presentation outlining actions that the team believes their client should take. In turn, our clients implement our teams’ strategies as they see fit. Our students are making real decisions that can have a real impact on the health and growth of a business.
These projects are not for the faint of heart as the written reports regularly exceed 100 pages in length and the number of hours spent developing a unified strategy can number 500 hours or more over the course of the semester. Sure, each team has four to six members but that is still a great deal of effort that these students are putting forward.
Twenty-eight CSUF Student-led Business Consulting Teams have placed in the Top 10 in this competition over the last 22 years, including 11 National Championships. This was the first National Champion since back-to-back wins in 2010 and 2011.
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For some background on what the CSUF Student-led Business Consulting Program is about please watch the video below.