By Ronald Seigneur
I am delighted to report on the 2024 BV Challenge Cup Finals, hosted last weekend by Georgia State University (GSU) in Atlanta's Buckhead district. Professors David Beard and Victor Jarosiewicz, both with GSU, organized an incredible two days with Bob Morrison, Curtis Kimball and Ron Seigneur serving as the judges for the 7 student teams from the following schools:
The University of Houston (2 teams) and Westminster also had student teams competing in the first round. Mark Zyla and Weston Kirk also were involved as judges in the first round. All of the student teams were from finance programs at their respective schools and performed well. Auburn was awarded first place, followed by Baldwin Wallace in second place and the University of Texas at Dallas taking third place.
There were 10 teams from 8 different schools in total in this year’s competition and each student team had an academic sponsor at their school. Each student team was assigned BV mentor, including Chris Mercer, Jay Fishman, Sarah Von Helfenstein, Dan Branch, Jonathan Whitehead, Carol Akers Klug, Laurie Leigh White and Ray Rath, who provided input to their respective teams following parameters developed by Professors Beard and Jarosiewicz to maintain consistency between the competitors.
Many thanks to GSU and Professors Beard and Jarosiewicz, along with Dr. Gerald Gay, the chair of the GSU Robinson Business School chair of the Department of Finance, for hosting the finals including a great awards dinner for all the student teams in the finals at the Buckhead Club.
Thanks as well to the sponsors who contributed to the student scholarship prize fund, ASA, Business Valuation Resources and John Borrowman of Borrowman Baker, all who were fully recognized on the website (www.valuationchallenge.org) and in the remarks made at the awards dinner. Many of the student teams also acknowledged how beneficial it was to have access to the ASA BV101 virtual course we made available to them, so thanks to KC Conrad on that end. BVR again provided all student teams with gratis access to their online resources, including Deal Stats, Cost of Capital Professional. Lastly, thanks to Adamy Valuation for preparing the detailed case set materials used by the student teams to value an actual manufacturing company for purposes of an ESOP transaction and to Don Drysdale for providing a sanitized sample report of another enterprise for the students to see a solid example of a full appraisal analysis and report.