OC team tops business comp
Okanagan Edge Staff - Mar 19, 2018 - Biz Releases

Image: Contributed
Dillan Crema, Dan Allen, Madison Deutscher, Scott Overland, Saige Girouard, and Nico Dirksen.

Business students from across Western Canada flocked to Okanagan College last weekend, vying for glory at the Western Canadian Business Competition.

WCBC is a comprehensive undergraduate business competition that tasks student teams with running a simulated business scenario—exploring everything from marketing to HR—over the course of a hypothetical eight-year timeframe.

The competition has been running for almost three decades, and has been hosted at the College for the past seven years.

Okanagan College’s junior team finished second at this year’s competition, behind a strong team from the College of the Rockies. Langara came out on top at the senior level.

The local junior team’s CEO, and first-time competitor, Madison Deutscher says the simulation offered her and her teammates a real-life lesson in collaboration.

“The opportunity we get as OC business students to work together in team competitions like this is incredibly valuable,” Deutscher, who is completing her second year of the Bachelor of Business Administration degree program, says. “It’s a great way to learn when to be a leader—when to speak up—and when to listen and support others in their ideas.”

Joining Deutscher on the team were fellow business students Nico Dirksen, Dillan Crema, and Saige Girouard.

Together they tackled operations, marketing, finance and HR for their hypothetical company, Everlast Digital Systems, which marketed drones and wearable camera equipment.

“In order to maximize sales over a span of eight years, we had to give a lot of thought to strategic planning,” explains Deutscher.

Their detail-oriented approach paid off. In addition to earning runner-up spot in the Junior Team competition, the group was named the top team in the Junior Strategic Plan competition.

The team was mentored by Okanagan School of Business professors Dan Allen and Scott Overland.


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