University challenge

By MARK STORY

Lack of practical business experience is the key employment stumbling block for most business graduates. Enter the Students in Free Enterprise Programme (Sife).

Founded by United States entrepreneurs 23 years ago, Sife was brought to New Zealand last year by a group led by Stephen Tindall (The Warehouse founder), frustrated by business graduates' lack of practical management experience.

This year, teams from six New Zealand tertiary institutions - Unitec, Waikato Management School, Waikato Institute of Technology, Te Wananga a Aoteoroa, Christchurch Polytechnic, and Massey University - joined 1400 counterparts in 40 countries to establish and operate projects in their communities.

The projects were judged by a panel of business leaders on Saturday. Five members of the winning Waikato Management School team (and one academic staff mentor) will go on to the Sife World Cup in Frankfurt, Germany, on October 13.

While there's no prizemoney, Jens Mueller, executive director of Sife New Zealand, says the opportunity to learn from some of the world's leading business minds - including Sife's international chairman, Tom Caughlin, CEO of Wal-Mart, and fellow judge Tom Moser, Worldwide Managing Partner, KPMG - is reward enough.

By bringing academia and business closer together, Sife is an opportunity for students to become mini-managers even before they've stepped out of university.

"There's no other opportunity like this nationwide for students to interact with such a multitude of business leaders," says Mueller, an associate professor for entrepreneurship at the Waikato Management School.

So what are judges are looking for?

"These teams must convince judges how they've made a measurable difference within the communities they operate in," says Mueller.

New Zealand's inaugural winner last year, a team from Unitec, took top honours for the workshop days it ran within Auckland's lower-decile high schools.

What judges particularly liked about this project, recalls Sally Rosenberg, risk manager with Fonterra Operations, was their ability to spark enthusiasm in kids lacking academic aspirations.

"What impressed me was their ability to inspire through successful knowledge transfer," says Rosenberg, who's also judging this year's competition.

So how does the Sife programme work? Faculties from any university or tertiary institution are free to enter the Sife programme. Comprising students at varying stages of their degrees, each team can have an unlimited number of members. Local teams typically have from three to 40 members but some teams in the US have been 10 times bigger.

Each team has four to six months to identify an application, sell that application to the public and garner support from the business community.

While businesses have made nominal cash donations, Rosenberg says their mentoring and advisory support is by far their greatest contribution.

This year's projects cover an entire range of business disciplines and include a baking for business project incorporating high-school students, and a business model for an organic market in Tokoroa.

Teams were marked highly for displaying understanding of:

* How free markets work globally.

* How entrepreneurs succeed by identifying need then profitably producing and marketing a product or service to fill it.

* Entrepreneurial, communications, technology and financial management skills.

* Ethical and social responsibility.

Is the business community taking Sife seriously? Yes, says entrepreneur Neville Jordan, founder of venture capital firm, Endeavour Capital.

"The quality of businesses and executives supporting and mentoring this programme demonstrates how seriously Sife is being taken," he says.

As a judge in this year's programme, Jordan looked for well-crafted plans and understanding of a particular market.

"Raw enthusiasm is important. But it needs to be supported by a sound value proposition, a credible support team and forecasted budget expectations.

"Sife is as much a way for the business community to tap into good ideas, as it is a learning programme for students," says Jordan. "Sife should be seen as a feed-stock of good ideas for start-ups. It's also an avenue for commercial applications to attract seed capital."

He says the number of potential recruiters participating in this year's competition should give students added incentive to put their best feet forward.

In Australia, recruiters are already taking note. In fact, companies like KPMG, Arnott's and Woolworths use the programme as a main recruiting course for entry-level managers.

Similarly, in the US around 35 per cent of management trainees hired by Wal-Mart are Sife alumni and RadioShack is another heavy recruiter from the programme. Jordan expects Sife to be equally effective in New Zealand.

As Rosenberg says, "Sife provides recruiters with exposure to the cream of the crop without having to go through a formal recruitment programme."

Mueller's goal for next year is to have most of New Zealand's tertiary institutions enrolled - he already has a list of companies waiting to participate.

Merran Davis-Havill, the Waikato Management School team's academic mentor, sees Sife as a fantastic opportunity for young people to work collaboratively on projects.

"Students gain the opportunity to apply theory they've learned in the lecture theatre to real life situations, in real time," says Davis-Havill.

Waikato Management School's numerous projects, comprising 40 students and 20 business mentors, include setting up a chicken farm as a marae trade initiative, preparing/publishing and selling a recipe book for a special needs preschool centre, a strategy board-game for small business, and a personal selling programme for Asian migrants.

A Waikato rival, an eight-person Massey team, created opportunities for a low socio-economic community, to develop and operate new business ventures. They did this by providing local premises, equipment, computer training, information, and mentoring.

Team leader Meher Adenwalla says the project aimed to help community leaders reduce widespread dependency on government assistance through self-employment. "We've had the opportunity to pack away the textbooks, put our learning into practice and observe how the real world works."