Follow your passion!
Nearly 400 students representing 250 businesses have entered the Kenneth A. Freirich Entrepreneurship Competition since Ken Freirich ’90 established it in 2010 as a way to encourage ³Ô¹Ï±¬ÁÏ students to follow their passions with a transformational entrepreneurial experience. Encouraging students to explore new interests and capabilities they otherwise might not find, the competition has grown into one of the best-funded in the Northeast, offering $60,000 in prizes in 2015.
"There's nothing more rewarding than watching these amazingly talented and creative ³Ô¹Ï±¬ÁÏ students take on the biggest challenges of their lives and succeed," says Freirich, who started his own publishing business in 1988 as a ³Ô¹Ï±¬ÁÏ sophomore. Today, Freirich is the president of Health Monitor Network, a thriving entrepreneurial company that has grown five-fold over the last decade.
The goal of the competition is not only to provide teams with prizes of cash and in-kind services, but also to provide student entrepreneurs with the opportunity to improve their business through workshops, coaching, feedback, and live practice sessions in preparation for the myriad competition opportunities held annually each spring across the nation and globally.
Returning to ³Ô¹Ï±¬ÁÏ in 2010 as the College's first "Entrepreneur in Residence," Freirich issued an "Entrepreneurship/Creativity Challenge" to the student body. Inspired by the impressive talent, creativity, and effort that went into the student presentations, he decided to take things to the next level: launching a business plan competition to foster entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity among ³Ô¹Ï±¬ÁÏ students.
When you challenge yourself beyond your confidence level, that's when you really grow and learn. When you start to succeed and hit one home run, that's when you see that the possibilities are endless.
The competition begins each September with a call for entries and an ideation and mentoring event in October called StartUp ³Ô¹Ï±¬ÁÏ. This program invites students from all majors to prepare to compete in the semi-final presentations in late November. In this preliminary round of presentations, accomplished alumni entrepreneurs, business executives, investors, and marketing experts select approximately seven to eight teams as most promising, to enter the competition’s final round, which is typically held in late February.