Once again, a business plan proposed by students from Mongolia to establish a common U.S. service there won the annual BYU-Hawaii School of Business entrepreneurship conference award for developing nations, while two students from the mainland won the award for developed nations with their proposal for an unusual extreme sports park.
As the culminating event in the School of Business' two-day entrepreneurship conference on February 3, Dean Brent Wilson and Dr. Gregory V. Gibson, Director of the university's Center for International Entrepreneurship, awarded the developing nations business prize of $4,000 to Tsogtbilegt Enkhbold and Erdenetsetseg Tumurbaatar, junior accounting majors from Mongolia. Their convincing plan calls for establishing a water damage restorative and professional carpet cleaning services business.
Dean Wilson and Dr. Gibson awarded the $4,000 developed nations prize to recent international business management graduate Devin Moncur and Carson Ammons, a senior accounting major, who proposed building an automated wakeboarding park on a five-acre lake in Phoenix, Arizona.
A second-place prize of $2,000 went to Heber Moulton, a 2003 international business management grad who is currently working on an MBA in Honolulu, and his wife, Olga Bosch Moulton, to start up a Mexican restaurant in her home town of Khabarovsk in eastern Russia, which is considered a developing nation. The second-place prize of $2,000 for developed nations went to Michael Kong and Jonathan Yuen, both accounting majors, and Kisslan Chan, an art major, who want to build a private soccer stadium in their native Hong Kong.
Over 30 visiting entrepreneurs who attended the two-day conference and helped put on a series of smaller-session discussions, judged the competition.
Enkhbold and Tumurbaatar explained two facts of life in Mongolia make their proposal feasible: Aging and poor quality plumbing systems often cause water damage there; and Mongolians, who love carpets, currently have to clean them on hands and knees using "cup and bucket" methods.
"There's no instant response service and there's no competition. This will be a unique and new service in Mongolia," they said, estimating they need about $25,000 to start the business. They have already done an apprenticeship with Hawaii Restorative, a successful local company run by BYU-Hawaii alumni Drew Chamberlain and Charles Crismon, that has played a key role in cleaning up damage at the University of Hawaii caused by a Halloween day flood.
Moncur and Ammons explained that even though there are over 100 automated wakeboarding parks in Europe, there are currently only four in the United States. The European parks use a technology similar to ski lifts "to tow wake boarders around the water at about 18 miles an hour, with all kinds of sliders, rails, kickers and other features," said Moncur.
"People are just becoming aware of this concept. We have a great opportunity for you investors," he added, indicating he and Ammons hope to raise $1 million to start the venture.
Dr. Gibson explained this year's competition drew a total of 31 entries, "all of whom were able to hone their plans and work with mentors. It was a great competition. In the developing category, there was only one ballot between the first and second place."
Dean Wilson announced that a "substantial donation came out of this conference for the Center for International Entrepreneurship endowment," and added that "a number of visitors indicated they're willing to be involved in future activities."
Earlier that day Tim Sloan, Director for LDS Employment Resource Services, underlined the importance of entrepreneurship in relation to the Church's emphasis "on what we know today as the International Underemployment Initiative. We focus on the unemployed, and the underemployed. Closely aligned with that is the under-skilled: We help them get into school, or to get training."
"The bulk of our members outside the United States have to have some form of self-employment. I've been told this initiative is paramount."
Sloan demonstrated the magnitude of the problem by citing the following statistics from the Harare Stake of Zimbabwe: 70% underemployment, 900% inflation in 2003 and 241% interest rates — down from 600%.
"These situations are not unlike a lot of other places — northern Argentina, northern Brazil, Nicaragua, Honduras. There's a real need, and in order to establish the Church beyond the first and second generation, we've got to help these people be economically independent," Sloan said.
He explained the Church uses its series of employment centers, training, workshops, paid staff, volunteers, and the Perpetual Education Fund to accomplish some of these objectives.
"While we're doing this, we're also helping people who are not of our faith. It's estimated that at least a third of the people we help are not members [but] they're all God's children."