The winning Business Plan “Temporary employment agency” was written and created by Ana Radunovic, a student of the Faculty of Economics of the University of Podgorica. Her business will employ, train and educate young people to give them the opportunity of practical work in the important and rapidly developing national companies. The price of EUR 10,000 will be used for registering the agency, creating database of employers and unemployed people, organizing and conducting trainings and labour market researches.

Spark's Private Sector Development project organises a regional business plan competition each year in South East Europe. Read more about the project and the stories of other winners.

BUSINESS PLAN COMPETITION 2006

A second regional Business Plan Competition was successfully finished in October 2006. Continuing to support students from the Western Balkan region in gaining several new experiences and skills and offering them opportunity to start their own business, a total of 41 business concepts were received during the first round. An International Selection Committee evaluated and short-listed the 20 best business concepts, which were offered a one-week business plan writing course to help them prepare full business plans. After the second round, the 3 best ranking business plans were invited to present their outlines at the October 2006 PSD Stakeholder Conference in Sarajevo.

The winning Business Plan for the “Temporary employment agency” was written and created by Ana Radunovic, a student of the Faculty of Economics of the University of Podgorica. Her business will employ, train and educate young people to give them the opportunity of practical work in the important and rapidly developing national companies. The agency will also support entrepreneurship by supplying human resources as basic capital for development, organizing training courses for unemployed and employees, researching the labour market, working on project and programmes that aim to reduce unemployment. The price of EUR 10,000 will be used for registering the agency, creating database of employers and unemployed people, organizing and conducting trainings and labour market researches.

“I took this contest as a test of my abilities, as well as additional satisfaction, provided I manage to achieve results. I entered the first round with a great deal of curiosity about how it would all look like and how my work would actually be done. The announcement of entering the second round at once made me feel triumphant, but also anxious in the anticipation of the outcome itself. The competition was outstanding. The people from SPARK whom I have met will, at least I hope so, have great meaning for my further career, and the prize itself is another motivation for working harder in this area”.

Ana Radunovic, 1st prize winner BPC 2006

The “Monitoring of outdoor advertising” business plan that won the second prize was prepared by a group of students of the University of Belgrade. Their business will collect, organize, sort and present data on outdoor advertisements in a form that is useful for advertisers, outdoor advertising providers and other clients. The prize of EUR 5,000 will be used for registering the company and developing software for monitoring outdoor advertising. “We heard about SPARK's business plan competition through the unofficial students’ site of the Faculty of Organizational Science. We had an idea for our business for a long time and we decided to try winning this competition. Having received information on our entering into the last round, we traveled to Sarajevo in order to take part in the last match,. The time came to present our business to the jury. Experienced judges, managers of their own companies from all around the world were friendly and we felt like they were supporting us in order to establish our own companies. At the end, our team managed to gain some capital, and we hope that this end is a beginning of our new and successful company”.

Zoran Robulj, Jelena Filipovic, Vladimir Makevic, and Ivan Dimitric, 2nd prize winners BPC 2006

BUSINESS PLAN COMPETITION 2005

I read on my faculty's web site, that SPARK is organizing a business plan competition. During that night, after a student party, I decided to apply (cheer in the early morning hours :). Now, the main question was: what business idea to take? I did not even read all conditions for applying, but I decided to take tuna farming as a business idea. I knew that's quite big business, but very profitable. So, it started. After the first round, SPARK contacted me to say that my idea is in the final round (with all my surprise), and it was on the second place in the first round. The difficulty was that I could not find anything about tuna farming in Montenegro, because nobody is doing this. However, I started with the use of the internet. 3 months of web surfing, contacting tuna farms all over the world (Malta, USA, Australia, Spain, New Zeland, Croatia,...), collecting information, reading official reports, sending faxes to farms, ...that was a quite intensive job. Well, there were some good people from these countries I mentioned before, and they send me some useful web links, so I collected around 1000 web pages of tuna farming. And of course, I thought, that is enough for a final business plan. But, Murphy's rule says "If something can go wrong, it will go wrong". So, just few days before deadline, for final round, my computer crashed, and I lost everything what I had on it, all 80 GB of hard disk. I wrote the final business plan during the last two nights. I sent my final plan, finally, on the last day of the deadline, in the afternoon. After a month and a half, they told me I won. That was a surprise for all participants, as well as for me, because I had the greatest investment in my business plan, of all participants, and of course, none, neither me, thought that I could win. After that, while I was taking a big rest at home during summer due to a broken leg, one investor called me on my phone, and told that he wanted to meet me. He visited me, and offered me a partnership in tuna farming. After the summer, we made the official deal. He offered me the director's place in the firm and 20% of profit. Good deal! Now, we are preparing with the Government of Montenegro (Ministry of agriculture) everything for the development of tuna farming. So, that's my story. Funny, but true.

Drazen Vlaovic, 1st prize winner BPC 2005

Before I even knew about this competition, I have always had a wish to start my own company, and implement some of many ideas that accumulated in my head over time. I was in the same time lucky to have friends that shared similar ideas. We talked a lot about it, and discussed all of the possibilities that we had. I am an economist, and two of the friends that I joined with are IT engineers, so we considered starting a Marketing agency, Web & Graphics design studio or some kind of IT company. The main problem of course was money, as it always is.

Having been in the fifth place after the first round, we knew we had to make a greater effort for the second one. The forms for the second round where much more complicated. They required much more details, and the financial plan it self required a lot of effort. Having previously had some experience with business plans, we still found this to be rather difficult. In the other hand, we where positively surprised, that SPARK had provided us with all the forms and explanations of what is required from us. It was also very useful, because it made us work very hard on developing our initial idea, and finding all of its strengths and weaknesses. It showed us that starting a business is a serious business. We made a great effort to complete all the forms, which is to resolve all of the issues that our future business would have to cope with. We sent it off hoping for the best, but really not expecting anything. Few months later, we got the results. We won the second prize and 5.000€. The award ceremony was in Skopje, Macedonia, where we went, and really enjoyed our stay. We stayed for few days, visited Entrepreneurship day, some useful lectures, and went site seeing through beautiful city of Skopje.

The best thing about this competition is that it was all organized over the internet. We saw an advert on the internet, downloaded competition rules, information and forms from SPARK web page and lastly applied over the internet. Later on we got the results, and did all communication with SPARK, over the internet. The whole process was very well organized. Overall, this was a great experience for us, where we learned so much, and also enjoyed so much. We would like to thank SPARK for this great experience.

Senad Hukic, Dino Ablakovic, Emina Arifhodzic, 2nd prize winners BPC 2005