A five-member Olds College (OC) team finished second out of 14 in a business case competition.
That's the best finish an OC team has done in the approximately 10 years they've entered, according to OC business instructor Kim Kennedy.
"We've participated for 10 years now and we have placed third a couple of times. But second has been the best that we've done," Kennedy said during an interview with the Albertan. "We've placed three times during that period so it's pretty good for a small college."
The team, consisting of a mix of business and ag management students, won $2,500.
The 14th annual Alberta Deans of Business Case Competition was held in Edmonton last month.
The team featured three first-year business students, one first-year ag management student, and one second-year ag management student.
Members of the team were Destiny Burnside, Owen Smigelski, Brittany Rath, Mae Cary and Graham Harper.
"They listen to a business owner and he has a live case study that he presents. So they learn about a business problem and then they need to perform analysis and come up with recommendations and solutions for this real business owner," Kennedy said. "It's a real business owner and he has a real problem.
"On the Friday they go into what they call a war room, where the students are in there alone and they're the ones who are making decisions and doing analysis and research and coming up with recommendations and solutions for this business owner."
The next day, they present their analysis and proposed solution to a panel of judges via a PowerPoint presentation.
Burnside, a second-year ag management student, said the competition was invaluable for her.
"I was able to learn a lot of tools from the business world that I normally wouldn't have learned in my program through ag management," she said.
She said examples of those tools included being able to come up with recommendations for a business, because "we are not learning about analysis through the ag program. We do more farm-based problems."
Burnside and Kennedy were unable to reveal what problem the team was presented with or the name of the business that relayed it because all participants were required to sign non-disclosure agreements.
Kennedy has a theory as to why this year's team did so well in the competition.
"I just think that they developed very valid recommendations and so they worked well as a team, which is really important, and so they're learning great team building skills that they'll use out in real life," she said. "And I think their analysis skills, they really applied those very well."
Burnside said another factor is all the team members come from farms or small towns, as opposed to big cities, so they related well to each other.
"I think the reason our team did so well this year is because we all come from similar backgrounds, but in very different ways, so having a mixture of ag students on our case team with business students I think really helped," she said.
"And there was a mixture of different ages and years on it. I think we all were able to just bring something different from our own backgrounds into the case and how we analyzed."
Next year, the Alberta Deans of Business Case Competition will be held in Calgary at SAIT. Kennedy said Olds College will be entering again for sure.
Olds College hosted it in 2013, the school's centennial year.
