Below you’ll find the slides, lesson plans, and where available, recordings from our presentations.
But first, we wanted to say thank you for such a fantastic conference and share some of our highlights:
HAPPY HOUR MILKSHAKES
MEETING SUMMIT FACILITATORS (IN REAL LIFE)
Twice a year we host the Teaching Entrepreneurship Summit showcasing the best entrepreneurship exercises we can find, and we couldn’t do it without an outstanding cohort of facilitators.
This award gives special recognition to the people whose outstanding passion for entrepreneurship is reflected in their teaching, writing, research, training, and public service.
Doan is one of only 85 people to be selected as a Longenecker Fellow over the last 36 years and we can’t thank him enough for his contribution to entrepreneurship education.
MAKING THE 3E PODIUM
This year’s exercises were the best we’d ever seen at USASBE.
Considering the level of competition among the Entrepreneurship Experiential Exercises (3E), we were ecstatic, and honored, that the Financial Modeling Showdown got recognized!
FEDERICO BOWLING FOR THE FIRST TIME
That face says it all 🙂
Overall, we came away from the conference reinvigorated and recommitted to providing the best entrepreneurship education resources we can!
Speaking of which, here are all of our resources from USASBE:
SLIDES, LESSON PLANS, AND RECORDINGS
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Get Slides, Lesson Plans, and Exercises
Marketing MVPs: Testing Demand on Social Media (Justin Wilcox)
The Teaching Entrepreneurship Winter Summit provides you with top-performing exercises and lets you experience these exercises like your students will. Plus, they’re…
Free when you join us live!
Both sessions will run from 1:00 – 2:30 pm Eastern on their respective days but if you can’t join us live, recordings are available for purchase.
Tuesday, December 13th
See It Taught Live: Financial Modeling Showdown
Watch Dr. Doan Winkel teach his students financial modeling live* using a fun, interactive game that you can use with your students too!
*We’ll live stream cameras from the classroom so you’ll literally see how the lesson is taught.
Tuesday, December 20th
Engagement From the First Day
Use this lesson to get your students to think like entrepreneurs from the first day of class.
In collaboration with Jay Markiewicz from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Customer interviews make students anxious because they fear approaching strangers.
It’s our job to build their customer interviewing muscle.
Like the Make Entrepreneurship Relevant Slides, you can use these slides to get your students excited about interviewing customers. If you’d like to lower student anxiety around customer interviews, try this series of experiences:
CRAWL: Learn What To Ask
In your first class on customer interviews, consider using a lesson like the Customer Interviewing Cards to help your students learn:
What questions they should ask
What questions they shouldn’t ask
And, most importantly, why
Once your students have a good sense of what to ask during an interview, they’re ready to . . .
WALK: Interview Classmates
Students should get comfortable interviewing in a low-stakes environment, so have them start by interviewing 2 – 3 of their classmates.
It’s common for students to feel awkward conducting their first interviews. Let them know the awkwardness is normal and that’s why you’re giving them the opportunity to practice. Reassure your students that the more interviews they do, the more comfortable they’ll feel.
Bonus: Having students interview each other means each student gets interviewed as well.
When students get interviewed, they experience how validating it is to have someone listen to their problems.
When students realize that it feels good to be interviewed, they discover they won’t be bothering their interviewees. That insight alone can reduce their anxiety.
Note: The goal of classmate interviews is just to practice interviewing – they shouldn’t be used for real business model validation. Have your students start their classmate interviews off with, “What’s the biggest challenge you have as a student?” and then let the interview flow from there.
Click below to learn how your students can RUN and FLY with their customer interviews!
RUN: Interview Family and Friends
After interviewing a couple of classmates, students are ready to try interviewing friends and family members. This step gives students a safe way to practice interviewing people who, like their customers, will have no idea what a customer interview is.
As homework, ask your students to interview 3 friends or family members for at least 30 minutes each. Their goal is to learn as much as they can about the problems their interviewees have encountered in the last week (i.e., “What have been the biggest challenges that have come up for you over the last week?”).
As with the classmate interviews, the friends and family interviews shouldn’t be related to the product/service the students ultimately want to launch. These are just practice interviews in preparation for . . .
FLY: Interview Customers
Your students are now ready for real customer interviews!
You’ll want to make your students know the right customers to ask for interviews, and how to ask for those interviews, but at this point, your students will have much less anxiety about interviewing customers.
Since we started implementing this progression with our students, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in our students’ interviewing confidence and the quality of their interviews:
“At the beginning, I was really nervous about interviewing but after getting feedback from my friends and family it’s, surprisingly, become my favorite part of the class!”
– ExEC Student
If you’d like any more help teaching customer interviews, including:
In upcoming posts, we will share more slides, videos, and exercises to engage your students.
Subscribe here to be the first to get these in your inbox.
Missed Our Recent Articles?
Whether you are new to our community of entrepreneurship educators, or you’ve been contributing for years, we wanted to give you a list of the posts our community finds most valuable:
Pilot Your Purpose. This exercise helps students discover what they’re passionate about and see how learning entrepreneurial skills can turn that passion into their purpose.
2021 Top Lesson Plans. Here is the list of our 2021 top entrepreneurship exercises and lesson plans based on feedback from our fast-growing community of thousands of entrepreneurship instructors.
“The best class I’ve taken!” We all want a Dead Poets Society moment in our entrepreneurship class. One professor using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum got hers!
Teaching Customer Interviewing. This card and the online game is a powerful way to teach students the importance of customer interviewing, and the right questions to ask.
Financial Modeling Showdown: A Game to Teach the Basics of Entrepreneurial Finance
If your students get bored (or anxious) when you start talking about finance, you know what’s waiting for you:
Disappointing and unrealistic financial projections.
Financial modeling is incredibly difficult to teach in an engaging way. That’s why, in addition to our Financial Projection Simulator, we’ve developed a new game to play with your students that makes finance fun and memorable:
The game works in two phases:
Theory: Introduce a lightly competitive game that teaches students the core elements of a robust financial model
Practice: Using the same concepts they learned in the game, students create a financial spreadsheet for their own business model
Check out this quick demo / summary video of the Financial Modeling Showdown:
At USASBE 2023, considering the high level of competition among the Entrepreneurship Experiential Exercises (3E), we were ecstatic and honored that this exercise received recognition and place on the podium too!
STEP 1: CREATE TEAMS
The first step in the Financial Modeling Showdown is to divide your class into two teams. Before revealing what choices students have for their teams, you’ll want to make big deal out of the fact that these two teams are mortal enemies and “disagree on just about everything” with the implication that the teams may be political in nature or represent major cultural differences.
Then you’ll tell your students to pick which team they morally align with most:
Team Pineapple: People who believe pineapple is a perfectly reasonable pizza topping
Team No Pineapple: People who believe pineapple has no business on pizza
Tell your students you’re going to play a game to determine if pizza topping preference is a predictor of entrepreneurial success.
This lighthearted way to create teams is quick, evenly distributes students, and sets a fun tone which is especially helpful for financial modeling exercises.
STEP 2: OPTIMIZE PROFITS
Tell your students they can put their pizza toppings preferences aside for now because they are all now inventors of a new product:
They’ve created a solar-powered cell phone charging case and their goal is to bring it to market in a way that will result in the most profitable financial model possible.
Students will then answer financial questions about their new product via a Google Forms survey (e.g. “How much will you charge for your product?”, “What do you want your salary to be?”, etc.).
STEP 3: THE WINNER IS…
As your students answer the financial questions, behind the scenes, the survey is automatically averaging the responses by team.
That means, as an instructor you’ll get a report that says (for example) on average:
Team Pineapple members want to charge $29.42
Team No Pineapple members want to charge $42.10
…and this is where the competition begins!
“It looks like Team No-Pineapple wants to charge more for their product. Of course, the more you charge, the more revenue you can make, so I’d say say they’re winning at this point. Next, let’s explore what effect conversion rates have on revenue, and we’ll see if Team No-Pineapple is still ahead.”
And just like that, you’re using financial vocabulary in a way that keeps students engaged because you’re using simple examples and leveraging a competitive game mechanic.
You’ll go through each of the major elements of a financial model this way, covering topics like:
Customer Lifetime Value
Customer Acquisition Costs
Salary, Taxes, and Benefits
Real Estate Costs
Unit economics
Etc.
And at the end, you’ll get to declare a “Winner.”
Or rather, you’ll get to demonstrate to students how hard entrepreneurship is to win. While one team will technical “do better” than their other team, it’s most likely that neither team will be profitable:
The game ends this way because we want to show students that:
Designing a financially sustainable business model takes iteration and experimentation.
Like everything in a business model, our initial assumptions are often wrong…and that’s why we do financial modeling!
Financial modeling is a tool to help them understand what assumptions they’re making about their business model that might set them up for failure.
If they begin modeling the finances for their own company, they’ll be able to see if they’re on the path to riches, or the path to ruin.
And this is the perfect segue for students to…
STEP 4: BUILD THEIR OWN MODELS
To apply the principles they learned playing the game, each student gets their own spreadsheet to model their business’s finances:
The results are financial models that are more realistic because students actually understand the concepts they’re based upon.
TRY IT THIS SEMESTER
If your students get overwhelmed by financial modeling, this exercise will help. Combining a competitive game with real-world financial modeling tools, students learn the core elements of a financial model in a way that keeps them engaged and results in realistic financial projections.
Get the Financial Modeling Showdown Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Financial Modeling Showdown” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.
It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers. Please feel free to share it.
What’s Next?
In an upcoming post, we will share exercises shared with our TeachingEntrepreneurship.org community by Business Model Canvas creator Dr. Alexander Osterwalder!
Subscribe here to be the first to get these in your inbox.
Missed Our Recent Articles?
Whether you are new to our community of entrepreneurship educators, or you’ve been contributing for years, we wanted to give you a list of the posts our community finds most valuable:
Improving Your (Inherited) Course. Inheriting an entrepreneurship course presents many challenges. Re-design the course and provide engaging experiences with this curriculum.
How to Improve Student Outcomes & Evaluations. Journaling can transform your students’ experience in your classroom. And can be a great way to get quality feedback on whether you’re an effective educator
“The best class I’ve taken!” We all want a Dead Poets Society moment in our entrepreneurship class. One professor using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum got hers!
Teaching Customer Interviewing. This card and the online game is a powerful way to teach students the importance of customer interviewing, and the right questions to ask.
If you’d like to lower student anxiety around customer interviews, try this series of experiences:
