Best in the Country
22nd March 2017
Two students from Melbourn Village College have finished top of the class in a national business challenge.
Charlotte Van Bochoven and Isabel Taylor came up with the ‘Best Sales Pitch’ in the country as part of the Young Enterprise Tenner Challenge.
Tenner Challenge provides a highly interactive way for students to develop key skills including creativity, resilience, and problem solving, using real money to take calculated risks in business.
Students, aged 11-19, are pledged £10 and have one month to set up a business – coming up with an idea of a product or service they can sell and gain first-hand experience of what it’s like to be an entrepreneur.
Each week in March there is a competition students can enter on-line to highlight a different aspect of setting up a business and the Year 8 Melbourn girls – one of six teams from the college taking part - came out on top for their ‘sales pitch and results’ for their company ‘Blue Bin Cards’ which uses items that might otherwise be thrown in the recycling to create cards for all occasions. They immediately sold six of them to their business mentor, Serdar Atamert, CEO of Foxton-based Epoch Wires, and have since visited his company and sold cards to his colleagues.
Charlotte said: “It’s been really exciting thinking of ideas and making all the cards. It’s really incredible to win this national award.” The girls have won £50 Amazon vouchers.
In an e-mail to the college, the feedback from the one of the judges said: I thought this was a very creative product and a well thought through presentation. You demonstrated a great grasp of your numbers and the profit margin was very impressive. Our favourite!’
Ben Hutchinson, Melbourn’s Head of Modern Languages and a careers teacher, said: “I am so impressed with how the 29 Year 8 students have taken to this Challenge. They’ve come up with some truly unique ideas and their enthusiasm as young entrepreneurs has been quite remarkable.
“We’re very proud of Charlotte and Isabel’s victory in the national “Best Pitch” category where ‘Blue Bin Cards’ came first ahead of 100s of other entries from schools across the country.”
The other weekly competitions are for logo design, marketing and a pop-up shop.
Participants have four weeks to make as much profit as they can from their £10 while also trying to make a social impact.
At the end of the competition on March 31, the teams decide what they would like to do with their profits after paying back the £10 stake plus a suggested £1 donation to help more young people take part the following year.
They can also enter a final competition to find the best business. This will be based on completed logbooks and judges choose the overall winners according to set criteria, including innovation, individual or teamwork and social impact.
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