The final round of the Notre Dame Entrepreneurship Society's Case Study Bowl took place Wednesday evening in Jordan Hall, with the student team Yellow Tail prevailing over the other two finalists to show its company — a wine brand — offered the best product and business plan.
The Case Study Bowl is the Entrepreneurship Society's signature event, based on the Harvard Business School's own case study program. The first round happened two weeks ago with six teams competing and the final round was tonight with the top three teams competing for the top prize, Director of Case Studies junior Kyle Fitzpatrick said.
The other two companies represented by tonight's top teams were the clothing designer Rogue Status and the lingerie retailer Victoria's Secret. Final rankings were equally based on both the judges' scores and audience's text-messaged reactions.
"We heard Yellow Tail was a good story and we started investigating it. The more we researched it the more we liked it," freshman team member Will Streit said.
Each team, comprised of three to four members, were given 20 minutes to discuss its company's history, its current operations, and an examination of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats — known in the business world as a "SWOT analysis."
Following each individual presentation, three University professors serving as judges assessed the performance of each group based on organization, presentation skills, stage presence and creativity.
"Basically when we started as a club three years ago we were just a club of 25 students who would get together and talk about cool companies," Entrepreneurial Society President senior Michael Streit said. "So then we thought this is fun we have a small group here why don't we take it to a bigger scale and make it into a competition."
Sponsored by the Entrepreneurial Society of Notre Dame and Dorm Books, the Yellow Tail team won $1,000 with several audience members also winning prizes such as an iPod nano and Chipotle gift cards.
Yellow Tail teammates, freshmen from Alumni Hall, David Acton and Tate Kernell, discussed their victory.
"After working on it almost 20 hours, we wanted the $1,000 and we had fun with it," Acton said. "So we figured we would reward all our friends if we won so we are going to splurge and probably not use the money as wisely as we could, but maybe next year."
"Between hassling professors, judges, and teams to get them to come, getting SAO's support, I couldn't have done it without my team, Rina Ventrella, Chris Michalski, Tom Haylon, Andrew Rehagen, Christine Roetezel and John Rocha," Fitzpatrick said.
Streit said he hopes the event will help generate even further interest in the Entrepreneurial Society.
"One thing that's cool about this is kids are here in sandals and riding bicycles around," Streit said, "We are having fun and studying business because we like studying business not because we like dressing up in suits. We are really just the cool laid-back business club."
