Two students from BYU’s Mechanical Engineering department were members of the teams that won 2^nd and 3^rd place in the BYU Business Plan Competition.  Michael Sanders, a Master’s student, and Mark Roberts, a senior, were on the FlexLeg team that won 2^nd place.   Sanders was also a member of the ActiveAlarm team that took 3^rd place.

The BYU Business Plan Competition is the largest private business plan competition in the nation.  Each year winners compete for over $100,000 in prizes and awards.  You must be a BYU student to compete.  The prize awards for the 2012 BPC were $30,000 cash plus $20,000 in-kind for 1^st place, $20,000 cash plus $10,000 in-kind for 2^nd place, and $10,000 cash plus $10,000 in-kind for 3^rd place.  The competition is funded by generous donors whose mission is to help develop entrepreneurial leaders and ventures, and all prizes are to be used for business expenses that will help grow the wining businesses.

FlexLeg, which took 2^nd place, is based off the idea of prosthetics, but applied to non-amputees.  The device creates an alternative to crutches for people with below-the-knee injuries.  With this device, one is able to traverse stairs and carry items with the hands, both of which are not possible with crutches or knee scooters.  For more information about the FlexLeg product, visit www.flexleg.com.

Sanders recruited fellow ME student Mark Roberts to help develop the idea, and the two of them developed their prototype for the Fulton College’s Student Innovator of the Year Competition.  After that competition, they brought on business student Seth Gonzales to help with the business end of the project.

“Just like there is a process for developing a great product, there is also a process for developing a great business,” commented Sanders.  “This is key if you want your product to be impactful.  The competitions held at BYU really help you flush out the detail of your business model, business plan, and help you refine your ability to present them in a way that is understandable and clear.”

“If you go through the business competitions that follow the engineering competitions, all together, these competitions become a machine for generating products and businesses with a much higher probability of success,” Sanders stated.  “We plan now to take what we have learned and are continuing to learn to create a successful venture that will provide a way for each of us to give back to BYU and all those who have helped us.  FlexLeg is a great product, but it is also a vehicle to allow us to do good things for people.”

Third place team ActiveAlarm was an idea that came from Peter Thorpe, a friend of Sanders.  Thorpe is a career firefighter, and after responding to so many calls from fires started by unattended cooking, he called Sanders with the idea that became ActiveAlarm.  ActiveAlarm is a device that you plug an appliance, like a stove, in to.  When someone leaves something unattended and it begins to smoke, the smoke will cause the standard smoke detector in a home to go off.  If a home owner is not home or is unable to control the situation and the detector is allowed to sound for three minutes, the ActiveAlarm device will cut the power to the appliance, therefore cutting the source of the heat before combustion occurs.

The ActiveAlarm team had help from electrical engineer Chase Roberts, MBA student Rhett Weller, electrical engineer Zack Bomsta, and Kevin Sanders, a BYU MBA alumnus.

“We are continuing to move forward on both these projects,” Sanders said.  “We’ve been contacted by many potential investors and consumers, so we’re pushing to get these products on the shelf soon.  We have been so fortunate to have been a part of competitions like the BYU Business Plan Competition and SIOY, to help us build capital to be able to move these products forward.”

Each year the BPC awards over $100,000 in cash, in-kind services, and prizes.  The competition partners award additional cash prizes for special business plan categories.  On top of great resources and prizes, participating in the BPC helps contestants learn and gain exposure to experienced investors and influential friends of the university.

The BPC sponsors events throughout the academic year intended to prepare teams to compete in the BYU Business Plan Competition, including workshops, Super Saturdays, idea pitches, a speed pitch competition, a business model competition, BYU Opportunity Quest (an executive summary competition funded by Zions Bank), and a YouTube competition.

The mission of the BPC is to provide opportunities, incentives, and resources for students of Brigham Young University to organize and direct the creation of successful business plans and entrepreneurial ventures.   The BPC hopes to inspire and prepare BYU students to be world-class leaders in entrepreneurship and technology, to foster interaction with successful role models, and facilitate supporting faculty research.

For further information, contact the Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology at the BYU Marriott School of Management http://marriottschool.byu.edu/cet/.