Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Enterprize Conference

I've been meaning to post about this over the weekend but of course friends and Superbowl festivities pushed that back as soon as I landed in Toronto.

I hosted a workshop session at the Enterprize Business Plan Competition this year and it really was a great experience to go back to my business school to speak to aspiring young entrepreneurs.  When I first sent in my slides, which was 10 slides for an hour, I got an email back asking whether I would have any material on my own business, because students would be interested in seeing that.

I did, but that slide didn't have any text on it.  Powerpoint 101 for me is that there shouldn't be more than 3 lines of text on a slide...if the audience can read through the entire presentation I might be an audiobook.

I started off with a short blurb on the company and on the one slide I had, which was titled the PeerFX Heartbeat, went over the ups and downs I went through in the past 2 years, from flying solo in the initial stages of the business to securing government funding to finding committed advisors and employees that impress me with their passion for the business on a daily basis.

However, it would've been pretty boring if I talked for the entire hour, so I focused 80% of my presentation on scenarios.  I bluntly told the students that participation is mandatory and I would just pick on people if no one raised their hand.  Great.

I will highlight the scenario that the students had the most fun with:

Customer Service:  You run an online dating site and for the past month you have been getting complaints from customers saying that their online match has cheated on them, what do you do?
What would you do in this scenario?  Apologize?  Tell the customer that it's not of your business?  Give them free match ups the next time?  How do you save your business' reputation?  We all know that one bad experience is repeated to 100 friends...do you want to lose 100 potential customers?

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