Brigham Young University’s best entrepreneurs went head to head at this year’s Student Entrepreneur of the Year competition, hosted by the Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. Three students were chosen out of more than 39 applicants to compete in the finals.
“This year has been particularly competitive and is the first time in history where the winners started their businesses during the competition cycle and scaled quickly enough to have sufficient revenues to win in the same year,” says Scott Petersen, director of the Rollins Center. “The difficulty of such an achievement can hardly be overstated.”
The competition welcomes participants whose companies are less than five years old and were started while their founders were enrolled full-time at BYU.
This year Derek Rowley, an economics senior from Santaquin, Utah, took first place and $7,500 for his repair tape company, FiberFix. Second place and $4,500 went to Garrett Aida, a mechanical engineering senior from Kobe, Japan, for Dark Energy, a portable charging reservoir. Derek Johnson, a first-year MBA student from Rocksprings, Wyo., was awarded the $2,500 third-place prize for Cowboy Donuts.
“SEOY teaches you how to ensure your manufacturing is done correctly, how to build an effective sales network, how to partner with the right people, and how to approach investors to pitch them,” Rowley says. “FiberFix has been refined and changed because of the Rollins Center.”
Contestants had eight minutes to present to a panel of judges, who evaluated them on presentation skills, the company’s financial performance and the investability of their business to determine who got the bulk of the nearly $15,000 in prize money.
The top teams in BYU’s SEOY competition will be placed in the semi-final round of the Utah Student 25, Utah’s entrepreneurship competition, where they will compete against student innovators from around the state.
“Without the skills that I’ve been taught at the Rollins Center, there is no way I would have been able to put FiberFix in 8,000 retail locations.” Rowley says. “My company wouldn’t be where it is if I hadn’t participated in SEOY.”
The Marriott School is located at Brigham Young University, the largest privately owned, church-sponsored university in the United States. The school has nationally recognized programs in accounting, business management, public management, information systems, and entrepreneurship. The school’s mission is to prepare men and women of faith, character and professional ability for positions of leadership throughout the world. Approximately 3,000 students are enrolled in the Marriott School’s graduate and undergraduate programs.
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Writer: Trevor Carver