Entrepreneurship Award Submission Clarification?

[Riverdance]

This is probably going to sound like a really dumb question... I'm typically in charge of awards submissions for my team, so lately I've been working with our treasurer to prepare the Entrepreneurship Award.

I've gotten most of the writing/editing done, and so he (the treasurer) went to start on the financial plan. We realized that a lot of the resources we had found prior to starting out were really long and involved. I have no doubt that I can get something of that caliber done in the amount of time left. Most of it is already written/outlined. The problem lies in the fact that apparently, the financial plan is supposed to be 1600 characters or less.

I have seen many of these very professional-looking, long and involved financial/business plans from teams, and I'm wondering how they managed to submit them when they are clearly over 1600 characters. We would love to submit something of that caliber, but we're not sure how to go about it while remaining within the rules. If it wasn't obvious, this is our team's first year (at least in my memory) submitting for Entrepreneurship. Does anyone have an insight?

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by Riverdance

This is probably going to sound like a really dumb question... I'm typically in charge of awards submissions for my team, so lately I've been working with our treasurer to prepare the Entrepreneurship Award.

I've gotten most of the writing/editing done, and so he (the treasurer) went to start on the financial plan. We realized that a lot of the resources we had found prior to starting out were really long and involved. I have no doubt that I can get something of that caliber done in the amount of time left. Most of it is already written/outlined. The problem lies in the fact that apparently, the financial plan is supposed to be 1600 characters or less.

I have seen many of these very professional-looking, long and involved financial/business plans from teams, and I'm wondering how they managed to submit them when they are clearly over 1600 characters. We would love to submit something of that caliber, but we're not sure how to go about it while remaining within the rules. If it wasn't obvious, this is our team's first year (at least in my memory) submitting for Entrepreneurship. Does anyone have an insight?

I'm a little confused. Do you mean the financial statement? Financial plan isn't a section in the Entrepreneurship Award.

Don't want to sound picky, but I don't want to waste your time telling you something you may already know.

[Riverdance]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

I'm a little confused. Do you mean the financial statement? Financial plan isn't a section in the Entrepreneurship Award.

Don't want to sound picky, but I don't want to waste your time telling you something you may already know.

Yes, that's what I mean. Sorry, didn't mean to confuse you. Plus, that's the term my treasurer has been using so I'm a little all over the place.

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by Riverdance

Yes, that's what I mean. Sorry, didn't mean to confuse you. Plus, that's the term my treasurer has been using so I'm a little all over the place.

The entrepreneurship award, as I'm sure you've gathered, is about a great many things. Calling it just the business plan award doesn't really do it justice, especially with the relatively new way you submit for the award (it used to be a turning-in of your own fully formatted document in the pits on Friday).

For the financial statement, they aren't looking for a full fledged business plan. It would be best if you had a spreadsheet (Excel file) that detailed your team's expenditures and incomes in a format like this:



Your expenditures as a nonprofit robotics team will naturally look different. Your revenue can be broken down into showing the sources of your funds (raising $xxxx from corporate partners, $yyyy for fundraising drives) and your expenditures can be broken down into where your money goes (for us it's our three divisions of competitions, technical, and community operations). From there you can try to add detail in subsections. Those could answer questions like "Who are the corporate sponsors you are working with and how much do they give?" on the revenue side and "How much money are you spending on capital improvements (buying shop equipment) vs. operational expenses (raw materials and COTS items for robot construction)?"

Take an image capture of the statement under the award's guidelines. While you don't get to submit a 1-page PDF here like I personally would like, you do get an opportunity to show this information in a more conducive format than plaintext.

[Riverdance]

Okay that makes so much more sense! We've been trying to make head or tails out of this all night. I guess we had a lot of conflicting information coming from different sources. Thank you so much for clearing that up!

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by Riverdance

Okay that makes so much more sense! We've been trying to make head or tails out of this all night. I guess we had a lot of conflicting information coming from different sources. Thank you so much for clearing that up!

Don't worry, this submission is a bit of a whirlwind. I remember the officer for this team division pieced it together with existing documents (SWOT Analysis, old RCA applications, sponsor presentations, budget documents, and bylaws presentations) and some ingenuity. I think being able to tackle this submission, like the one for the RCA, is its own reward. This section should be really easy to do if you already have something like this lying around like we did/do.

Good luck!