Magic From a Hat Lecture Series Review

By Darcy McRae, 4th Year Student and Head of ACE, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Entrepreneur Lecture Series Was Magic


The Magic From A Hat - Entrepreneurialist Culture Lecture Series 2000 was extremely well received by the students.
Dr. Bruce M. Firestone, Prof. John Callahan, and fourth year business student Darcy McRae launched the lecture series last term.

Dr. Firestone, Founder of the Ottawa Senators Hockey Club and currently Chair of the Hickling Capital Corporation, kicked off the series on September 11th and was instrumental in creating the impressive speaker line-up.
Prof. Callahan incorporated the lecture series into the curriculum of 42.360 Small Business Management. Each student was required to write a summary of each guest lecturer and how their insights benefit their term business plan.
Darcy McRae, President of the local ACE chapter at Carleton, was brought in by Firestone and Callahan to advertise, promote, and cover some of the logistics for the series.

Dr. Firestone's lecture was "Entrepreneurialist Culture-How to Bootstrap Yourself to Success". Firestone emphasized the need to create a personal map of the world so you have a theory of the environment in respect to your business plan. Firestone also stressed the concept of creating synergies in relationships and the premise that more pie for me is not less pie for them.
Ward Yaternick, Senior Director of Business Objects, lectured on "Tips and Techniques of Launching a Software Start-up". Yaternick talked about the need to focus on your strengths: core competitive advantage, sustainability, core competencies, know your weaknesses, enumerate your goals, and the periods of cash flow. A planned exit strategy (IPO, buy-out, absorption) is required to pay back the venture capitalists that invested in your idea.

John B. Kelly, Founder of JetForm and CEO of Rebel.com, lectured on "Entrepreneurship-30 Years of Lessons". Kelly has two main lessons that he learned through his life. Answer the three questions of your business plan, so what? who cares? and why you? By knowing these questions you will be prepared to answer many questions others may have. Kelly came up with five rules to live by: show up on time, respect others, do what you said you would do, deliver more than expected, and do all of the above with energy and passion.

David Luxton, President of The Business Media Network, lectured on "Winning in a World of Competing Business Models". Luxton talked about the opportunities on horizontal and vertical portals linking across and within industries over the Internet. There are many types of portals that can be used: shopper, specific, enterprise process, specific business services, market makers, aggregate, and pooled purchasing.

Cyril Leeder, COO for the Corel Centre, lectured on "Location, Location, Location-How This Axiom Will Work For You For More Than Just Real-estate". Leeder focused on four main areas: product price, product packaging, who to market, and when to market. The main factor in determining the value of a location was summed up in the equation $$$ ~ # of eyes, meaning that the value is dependent on the number of unique and frequent eyes that look at it.

Randy Woods, President of Buystream.com, lectured on "Magic From A Hat-How to Take a Credit Card Start-up to a Multimillion Dollar Success". Woods talked about the seven stages of small business growth and their impact on organizational planning. These stages are: idea generation and industry identification, creating a lead client and partner relations, leveraging your lead client, first signs of growing pains, the growth spurt, large growing waves, and giving up the company.
At the end of the course the students expressed their gratitude for listening and learning from the first Magic From A Hat - Entrepreneurialist Culture Lecture Series.

Copyright. Darcy McRae, President, ACE-Carleton Entrepreneurship Club, January, 2001.



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