The UK’s largest competition for small businesses has made an appeal to Lancaster students to give much greater focus to their entrepreneurial aspirations and enter into their contest for the coming year. The Pitch has seen a notable rise in recent years of the number of student entrepreneurs applying for support for their own business ideas coming directly out of university, and have taken particular interest in Lancaster given how much business-minded talent comes out of not only the Management School but the university in general.
Meg Pope, event manager for The Pitch, best summed up what benefits the competition has to offer successful participants: ‘a year long programme of free education, interactive business coaching boot camps and a networking extravaganza – and it’s all free! The competition is still at the heart of it, with the overall winner bagging a massive business boosting prize package of mentoring, technology, creative, advertising and pretty much everything a small business could need to get it off the ground’.
The competition involves you making both a written and 90 second video application to the competition judges via The Pitch’s website. If successful you will then be placed on a shortlist of just 100 contestants by the end of July, and will then be welcomed to share your ideas online through your personalised Pitch profile in an effort to win votes in order to claim the competition’s Digital Marketing award. In September and October, the shortlisted contestants will be invited to attend The Pitch’s ‘boot camps’ in London and Manchester in order to allow participants to both be mentored on their idea and hone their pitching skills. A second application must then be completed to demonstrate the knowledge you have learnt from the ‘boot camps’, and following a review of these the 100 shortlist will be downsized to just 30 finalists. In November these finalists will make their final pitch at a live event in Bristol, where a new Pitch champion for the year will be crowned and receive the rewards detailed above.
