By GREGORY ZELLER //
There’s new-business blood in the water at Adelphi University.
The Garden City-based university is gearing up for the latest installment of its annual Business Plan Competition, a “Shark Tank”-style competition that puts students’ entrepreneurial skills to the test, with thousands of dollars in business-development cash and services at stake.
Among the finalists competing in the April 26 final round: an off-hours dental practice designed to accommodate shift workers, a high-tech urban-farming enterprise and a poultry-feed startup with an ecological twist.
Open to all Adelphi students, the competition is offered through the university’s Robert B. Willumstad School of Business and made possible by financial support from alumnus Kevin Mahony, senior vice president of wealth management and a financial advisor at UBS Financial Services.
With $5,000 in startup capital awaiting the first-place winner ($3,000 for second, $2,000 for third and another $1,000 in environmental, sustainable and governance awards), the 2022 contest opened in November and attracted more than a dozen preliminary proposals from student teams and single students.
Zachary Johnson: Leading by example.
The field has since been whittled down to four individual finalists, who’ve honed their proposals while receiving targeted early-stage business-development mentoring from business leaders and Adelphi faculty.
The finalists include MBA student Shuriz Hishmeh (and his Black Soldier Fly Composting, a poultry feed designed to reduce methane emissions from landfills) and nursing major Matthew Kessler (creator of Typ Mental Health, an artificial intelligence-powered digital platform that references therapeutic media and data based on patient journal entries).
Also going for the business-development gold are biology graduate student Ruiqin Fu (pitching Boom I Rang, the odd-hours dental practice) and speech pathology major Kayla Strayhorn (founder of BU Rooftop Farming, which combines urban farming and Internet of Things connectivity to address fresh-food disparities).
The finalists will present their business plans to a panel of judges including Evolution Real Estate & Renovations CEO Jennifer DeVito, John’s Crazy Socks co-founders Mark and John Cronin, Vision Long Island Director Eric Alexander, Anne Brower School and Camp ABC owner Lisa Marie George and Guac Shop Mexican Grill co-founder and CEO Matt Tesoriero.
Zachary Johnson, the Willumstad School’s interim associate dean of undergraduate students, applauded a 2022 slate of judges that practices precisely what the annual Business Plan Competition aims to teach.
“We identified a panel of business leaders who are transforming their industries and have met requirements related to sales, sustainability, employees and/or commitments to Adelphi,” noted Johnson, who is an entrepreneur himself – in 2019, the professor founded ProfVal, a startup that supports business proposals and professional plans with PhD-level expert-opinion letters.
“Each of these entrepreneurs represent the type of entrepreneurial leaders we hope our students will become,” Johnson added.
