nan | 楠木

8.11 Showdown

So finally, we got down to the real business–the competition. In the morning, the 30 teams were divided into 6 groups, and only the best team from each group would be in the afternoon’s finals.

The morning started a bit unpleasantly. I found that another team had updated their powerpoint file, just before presentation. I thought this was a direct violation of the rules, so I brought this up to the officials. It turned into a bit of quarrel between me and the Chinese girl of the team in question. She told me they had only made one minor change, but frankly, I wasn’t interested in what they did. If you broke the rules, you broke the rules, it doesn’t really matter if you only changed one page or completely upgraded the whole presentation.

The official decided that they had to change back to the original file. Curiously enough, they did not do this by replacing the file itself, but instead by making changes to the content. I thought this was rather a odd way of doing it– the original file was just in the recycle bin, why not just bring it back?

Anyway, after this unpleasant opening– the girl was quite angry with me, thinking I was too stubborn– the show began. We quickly discovered one other team had similiar concepts.

When it came to us, I thought we did an okay job, but our presentation was indeed nothing fancy.

The final team of our group really had an enthusiastic presenter, but their concept was too big for their own good.

Two judges marked us, and then gave us comments. I glimpsed that we were ranked 1st, meaning we had qualified for the afternoon’s finals. But the results were only to be officially announced then.

The judges, when commenting on our presentation, thought we had solid concepts, but our presentation was quiet and unexciting. This made us think over whether we wanted to change into a group presentation. Actually I quite wanted to go with this plan, but again I retreated in the threat of totally messing up the time schedule, since we only had 12 minutes to do the whole thing. If we could not finish the presentation in time, the group presentation strategy would backfire. So we stuck to our original plan. This turned out to be not so perfect a choice.

After lunch, we did some dvd shopping in PKU. I later discovered the dvds that I bought were not satisfactory at all.

In the afternnon session, the winners of the morning’s preliminaries were announced, and indeed we were in the final.

As luck would have it, we were the first team to present in the afternoon session. This was good luck and bad luck. Usually the first team to come out may get lower scores, as the judges tend to be tight at first then gradually loosen up later on. On the other hand, the judges would not ask hard questions at first.

Tana was obviously a bit nervous. However we still pulled it off quite well.

The following teams all had better presenters and presentation strategy. The winning team was especially good, but I thought their content wasn’t so great. Actually, I’d say most of the teams had grandiose concepts– including our team– that were hardly feasible. And the financial forecasts done were all big jokes. The problem was, the sales forcast and the pricing strategy are incoherent with the target group– do you honestly believe that Chinese students would regularly spend hundreds of RMB to take part in a party? Or would a art gallery really work in Wudaokou, selling pieces at 400-2000 RMB? I don’t konw if it’s me being too pessimistic and conservative or them being overly optimistic, but I really thought all the plans were seriously flawed.

Overall I would say we had the most practical plan– which is what several judges told me afterwards– but we lost in presentation delivery. We were 4th in the finals, losing less than 1 point– the winner were 88, and 2nd to 4th were both 84.xx, meaning we barely lost being 2nd place. In hindsight, if we were bolder with our presentation strategy– if we changed into group presentation, we might have won 2nd prize. As it is, we were 4th, getting 3rd prize.

So I was a bit unsatisfied with our final result, but this is because I knew we could have gone the extra mile. Inches, inches. Life is a game of inches, as Al Pacino adequately puts it, in the football film Any Given Sunday. And indeed we lost by inches. So suffice to say, I was slightly disappointed.

Still, the whole process was very rewarding. Making business plans is hard work, but a lotta fun. You look at the world in a totally different angle. Everything is calculated in terms of money– revenues, expenditures, incomes, cash flow… Every little detail, you find out, is all about money. How much you pay. How much you charge. How long you’re open every day. How many customers you have each day. The electricity and water bills. The rent. Equipment upkeeping. The list is endless.