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Clemson and MUSC Students Win South Carolina Collegiate Entrepreneurship Awards

Submitted by: John Warner on Jun 24, 2004 at 5:00 am Tagged with: General Archives Source:

Clemson and MUSC Students Win South Carolina Collegiate Entrepreneurship Awards

Entrepreneurial efforts in South Carolina are getting a boost from Upstate
educational leaders.
Clemson junior Shawn Becker won the $2,000 first place prize in the Spiro
Center's 2004 South Carolina Collegiate Entrepreneurship Award competition.
Becker is a Financial Management major running two profitable businesses:
Ocean Edge Landscaping & Irrigation, Inc. and Ameri Built Homes, Inc. Becker
established his landscaping company in 1999 as a small grounds maintenance
company; today, it is a full service design/build company providing services
including grounds maintenance, landscaping design and installation, erosion
control, drainage and irrigation. Becker moved into the real estate business
in 2002 with Ameri Built Homes, a company that builds speculative and custom
homes in the $130,000 to $300,000 range. Becker began his entrepreneurial
career with used lawn equipment purchased for under $200 in 1999, and since
that time his businesses have generated over $2.6 million in sales and over
$400,000 in profit.
First runner-up Michael Rosenblum, a student in his final semester at the
Medical University of South Carolina, received the $1,000 prize for his
Charleston Meal Plan, LLC (ChaMP). ChaMP provides an alternative to
traditional college meal plans by allowing students to dine at over 25
restaurants throughout the Charleston area through the use of
magnetically-encoded cards read by special card readers at the participating
restaurants. ChaMP currently has over 750 student subscribers from the
Citadel, Charleston Southern and the College of Charleston. ChaMP was launched
in the fall of 2001 with just over 100 students and has grown to almost 800
subscribers over the past 6 semesters. Rosenblum began with an investment of
$12,000 to finance the card processing software and hardware. Estimated net
income for 2004 will exceed $70,000 for a total of approximately $120,000
cumulative net income.
The Spiro Center conducts the SCCEA competition to recognize business-owning
college students across the state. Entries were submitted by students at
Clemson, Medical University of South Carolina, Midlands Tech, Charleston
Southern and Presbyterian College and included a diverse array of businesses
ranging from website usability testing to custom-crafted purses. A panel of
three judges from the business community with expertise in new venture creation
and valuation ranked the applicants based on their business description,
short-term and long-term goals, profitability, growth potential, management
creativity and impact on the community.
This year's judges were: Clemson graduate Robert Fletcher, Senior Associate
with The Trelys Funds in Columbia; Micheal Mino, VP of Business Development
with PropertyBoss in Greenville and former Entrepreneur-in-Residence with the
Spiro Center; and Lisa Ryan, Director of Marketing & Communications with
BookSurge in North Charleston and formerly with the Charleston Chamber of
Commerce.