'Growing-up' golf club wins UH business plan contest

By Will Hoover
Advertiser Staff Writer

It didn't play on network TV, and a national championship wasn't at stake — but five finalist teams fought it out at the University of Hawai'i's Stan Sheriff Center yesterday for prize money that would get any athlete's attention:

Len Higashi and Jill Hamasaki took first place in the Business Plan Competition. Their proposal was for a line of golf clubs with an interchangeable shafts that accommodate junior players as they grow up. Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser

Except these competitors weren't athletes. They had come to flex their mental muscles in the "May Madness" Business Plan Competition presented by the Pacific Asian Center for Entrepreneurship and E-Business, an institute of the UH College of Business Administration.

"This is an exciting day for us," said PACE managing director Shirley Daniel shortly before the contest began. "We've got five very nervous teams of students ... doing whatever they do to prepare themselves."

Preliminaries for the business plan competition started in January with 46 teams from the entire 10-campus UH system. At least one member of each team had to be a UH student.

The competition was eventually narrowed to 28 semifinalist teams, then down to the five finalist teams. Each finalist team earned the right to make a 20-minute presentation before yesterday's demanding panel of judges.

In the end, the $25,000 first prize went to the two-person team of Zoji Golf — which would like to tap into the Tiger Woods phenomenon by introducing a line of high-performance clubs designed with the junior set in mind. The clubs not only accommodate tiny hands and shorter legs, but also grow right along with the kid, using an interchangeable shaft system.

To reach this level, each team had to do more than prove it could come up with a knockout business plan, said judge Ron Higgins, a veteran career entrepreneur who founded Digital Island.

Higgins said the emphasis was on how well a team could sell its concept as a winner in the toughest competitive arena of them all — the real world.

"What I'm looking at is: Would these guys be able to attract financing to actually execute on their business plan?" he said.

Barry Weinman, co-founder and managing director of Allegis Capital, was not only a judge but also the venture capitalist who came up with the $25,000 for the first-place winners. Weinman says he saw more than one example of a business plan that he considered "fundable."

"I think a professional investor would back one or two of these," said Weinman, who has been involved in university-level competitions to pick the best business proposals by students here and on the Mainland. "That's about all you can ask for. Once they're here, they have to present it well and they have to stand up under the scrutiny of tough questions. We just thought this team did a little better than the other teams."

Jill Hamasaki and Len Higashi of the Zoji Golf team said they were stunned to learn of their victory. They said the business concept was born of Higashi's ability to design a solution to something that perplexed Hamasaki since she was a kid.

"I've been golfing all my life," said Hamasaki, an MBA student at UH. "And Len is an engineer. And I told him my concerns that children have playing golf when they growing up. I had to play with cut-down adult clubs. I just felt there was a great need, and Len has engineered solutions to fit these needs."

The second prize of $15,000, from the Aspect Technology Fund, went to the EMBA 12 team of Francis Duhaylongsod, a heart surgeon, and MBA student Jason Tongson from UH, who devised a plan to market StrokeAvert, a special catheter to protect the brain from stroke during cardiac surgery.

EMBA 12 also won the Best Technology Team Award, which comes with office space provided by the Manoa Innovation Center.

Third prize, $10,000 from CityBank, went to the PerfectSights team of Michael Lurvey, an MBA student at UH, and Hinano LePendu, also an MBA student. Their presentation highlighted their own patent-pending technologies designed to monitor critical habitats and perform related functions.

According to Weinman, each team involved in the competition is a potential winner, even if everyone didn't take away any cash.

The goal of such competitions is not only to help students formulate good business plans, but also to show them how to profit from their mistakes, he said.

"In Hawai'i, sometimes people put down failure," Weinman said. "They shouldn't do that. Failure is a way to learn. And that's what the university is all about."