At the start of the year, each Ivey MBA student has the opportunity to choose between two projects that they work on throughout the course of the year: The New Venture Project (NVP) or the Ivey Consulting Project (ICP). The former is meant to simulate the business creation process from the spark of an idea, through the grueling work of formulating a business plan and strategy, all the way up until a business pitch to a panel of seasoned entrepreneurs. The latter is meant to simulate the process of an actual consulting assignment that you solicit from a company, research, develop alternatives for, and ultimately pitch the company on a strategy for solving that problem.
There are several great aspects about each project:
Ivey sets very few rules in terms of what company / project that you must work on. In that sense, students are free to use their imagination and creativity to solve business problems and create business opportunities. It makes the work so much more enjoyable given that MBA students are generally forced to learn accounting, statistics, finance, and other courses where ingenuity is not always rewarded.
Regardless of whether you choose NVP or ICP, you are allowed to form your own teams. This allows students to work with people that they like, respect, and can engage with in terms of mutual learning.
Each team has update meetings with the Professor, who challenges them on their idea and pokes holes in the work. For example, with NVP the Professor critiques the business plan extensively and focuses on competitive advantage, which helps to clarify in students minds what they should be doing to further insulate their new business idea from competition and how best to write a proper business plan that would ultimately receive funding.
Each team is assigned a seasoned Ivey alumnus who is experienced with either building businesses or has done extensive consulting work. For example, this Entrepreneur-In-Residence (EIR) is usually assigned to your team based on the business that you are creating. This EIR not only has valuable insight into entrepreneurship, but also the specific industry that the team is in. They make themselves available for conference calls and in-person meetings, provide resources occasionally, and give value-added advice and feedback.
At the beginning of the year, I was really unsure as to which opportunity I would take – NVP or ICP. After much consideration, I made the decision to go with NVP based on the fact that I wanted to learn the process of creating a business and pitching the idea to potential investors, as these skills would likely be very useful later on in life.
I was very lucky to join a group of five other individuals that had an exciting idea with a lot of potential – green real estate redevelopment in sub-urban cores. The idea for our company, Ivy Green Real Estate, initially came about because the group was formed around four core individuals with real estate experience who wanted to create their own real estate company and develop a project from beginning to end. I had the good fortune of working with them, mainly on the financial side of the business plan, but had the ancillary benefit of learning all about real estate from experts.
The first few months were rough as we had several meetings with our Professor who kept asking us the same questions – What makes your idea unique? What is it that you can do that nobody else can do? After several iterations, we finally developed a business model and first project that worked for us. It was then time to put the time into the nitty gritty details of creating a business plan. To help us out, we were assigned an EIR that had extensive consulting experience with many different types of businesses, and was actually working on a real estate redevelopment project of his own. He had the knowledge and experience to make a meaningful impact on our project, and guided us quite well throughout the lengthy project.
After months of work, we finally finished our business plan – 35 pages of pure money-making magic. Looking back on it, I have to say that it was a pretty great experience in all because I had the opportunity to work closely with team members that I learned a lot from, and worked on a project that I cared about. I don’t know if I would have obtained this experience from anywhere else, and it has given me confidence to step out from my business (investments) where returns are typically generated in tandem with risk, and into entrepreneurship, where returns are enhanced by mitigating risk.
On a final note, if anybody has an extra $10 million in their pocket and is looking for an 18% IRR, I’ve got the perfect real-estate investment for you.
Kyle graduated from Wilfrid Laurier University with an Honours Bachelor Business of Administration degree, majoring in finance. Prior to pursuing his MBA at Ivey, Kyle achieved his CFA designation, worked for five years on Bay Street in quantitative equity research, and most recently worked as an Analyst on the Institutional Equity Sales & Trading desk at a boutique investment dealer. At Ivey, Kyle is a member of both the Investment and Finance clubs, and is a contributing member to the latter’s bi-weekly newsletter. In his spare time, Kyle enjoys reading the WSJ, analyzing stocks, playing on the Ivey recreational softball team, and enjoying nights out on the town with fellow classmates in glamorous London, Ontario.