Aside from my six month AMR consulting project that I've mentioned a couple times, the other big outside-of-class time sapper this quarter has been helping organize a stock pitch competition. Last spring when we formed the Anderson Investment Association (AIA) we listed a few grandiose ideas of new events that would help improve the investment management career vertical at Anderson. These included the New York recruiting trip in December, and the highly successful UCLA Anderson Inaugural Investing Conference last month. Another big initiative was to create a stock pitch competition that would be hosted on Anderson's campus, have industry professionals as judges, and MBA students from across the country as participants. And I was in charge of putting it all together.
(Sidenote: I recently read an article that said that wannabe bloggers like myself should frequently link to previous posts to improve their blog. So I'm being a little link happy today. This kinda reminds me of a time that I tried to book a stay in the Dakota Inn. Well not really, I just wanted another link.)
The really good news that made this competition a realistic idea initially was that last spring one of the SIF fellows (let's call him Ben, because that's his name) who graduated last year told us that he had secured $10k from an alumni to fund prize money for the competition. This was huge news naturally because no one is going to travel for a competition without prize money, and this meant we didn't have to do additional fundraising on our own.
Even with funding secured, there was a lot of logistical work to be done to plan the competition. Throughout the past two quarters important tasks have included picking dates, reaching out to other MBA programs, finding judges, creating rules and a competition structure, booking rooms, organizing catering and the award reception, and setting up/hosting a preliminary UCLA-only competition to see who got to represent Anderson in the actual competition. Luckily I had three helpful first years and another second year helping out on the project. Unluckily, things did not go as smoothly as we hoped.
The first main issue was that we scheduled it poorly. March 9th seemed like a great date. It worked well with the Anderson schedule, and we figured east coast schools would love to come to LA in the winter. Unfortunately we didn't realize it coincided with a lot of spring breaks and finals weeks for other schools, so interest in the competition was very low. We originally wanted 10-15 teams, but ended up with only 6. This included 2 from UCLA and 2 from USC, plus NYU and Columbia. We had commitments from Harvard and Michigan but they each dropped out during the last week.
The biggest curveball during planning, however, came two weeks before the competition when I emailed the alumni asking how and when he was planning on sending his $10k, and he replied that he had no idea what I was talking about. He was under the impression that he would be making a significantly smaller gift, as part of a larger group of alumni, and that all donations would be going to charity rather than winning MBA teams. Long story slightly shorter: there had been some major miscommunication dating back almost a year between all parties. Ben had certainly given us incorrect information. But I, and a couple other 2nd years who had been speaking with this alumni over the past year, never properly confirmed it with him either. Each of us had on multiple occasions thanked him for being the event sponsor, but never mentioned a dollar amount (b/c we thought it was already agreed upon, and thought it was somewhat tacky or inappropriate to bring up the exact amount). And the alumni never questioned why we kept referring to him as the only sponsor for our competition.
So finding out this news led to two extremely stressful days. Without funding, we were extremely close to cancelling the whole competition, which would have been very embarrassing to Anderson, would have set AIA back significantly for future projects, and we'd have to eat the cost of schools who had already made travel arrangements. Fortunately though, we got really lucky because after meeting with the executive director of the Fink Center (a campus finance research center endowed by Larry Fink, Anderson alum and CEO of Blackrock) and presenting our dilemma to them, they agreed to sponsor the event in its entirety. This was largely possible because they were so impressed with the Investing Conference (which they co-sponsored) that they were happy to help AIA out again. All we had to do was change the name of the competition to the Fink Center AIA Stock Pitch Competition, and $10,000 was ours.
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| We ordered giant checks and everything! |
The actual event itself went very smoothly. A few hiccups along the way and we wish we had more than six teams, but it turned out to be a success (plus UCLA's team won - it wasn't rigged, I promise). The whole missing funding ordeal might have actually been a blessing in disguise because the Fink Center will sponsor the competition every year now. They have extremely deep pockets and an even deeper network of contacts, so getting their support on an annual basis will really increase the chances of this event being a regular, highly successful event in the future. The event took a lot of work and caused a lot of stress over the past several months, but of any activity that I've been involved in at my time at Anderson, this has the highest chance of having a lasting impression on a wide range of people for a long time. Who knows how long this event will go, but I think it'd be really cool if one day I can read about how Anderson is hosting its 20th Annual Stock Pitch Competition, and I can remember that I was a major part of getting it all started.
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