Maine College Student Business Pitch Competition

2023-2024 Greenlight Maine Collegiate Business Pitch Competition

Greenlight Maine is delighted to announce that it will once again host its Collegiate Business Pitch Competition for the 2023-2024 season.

This year’s program will be run in a slightly different manner than in years past.

As such, this year students will create and submit an initial video of their 3-minute business pitch for consideration.

Students’ initial business pitch videos will be due by 4:00PM Friday, January 26, 2024, at which time they will then be sent along to a panel of judges for scoring.

Participating students must:

  • By 4:00PM on January 26th, create and email your “3 min. Business Pitch” video to [email protected]. Video submissions are allowed to be within 2 minutes and 45 seconds (2:45) and 3 minutes and 15 seconds (3:15).
  • Be fully responsible for ensuring that their video submission has been shot/recorded on a standard technology platform that is widely used for creating videos and that is compatible with commonly used software suites and hardware setups (laptops, personal computers, etc.)

See the FAQs below or contact Kerry Smart via email ([email protected]) or phone 207-859-1159 for more information.

Televised Pitch Competition

The televised competition which participants are competing to be in will be held amongst the best video entries chosen from the initial video business pitch submissions after November 17th.

All pitches will again be 3 minutes with a 3-to-4 minute Q&A. This is for the televised show only. Once the televised segment has been filmed, all presenters will get 10 minutes off camera to take a deeper dive into their business with the judges.

Presentation times will be allotted and, at this point, schools and presenters will be identified. From this round, 3 finalists will be chosen.

The Grand Finale

The grand finale of the collegiate series will be recorded in late May or early June with the airing of the shows in June.  The three finalists will vie for the chance to win first ($10,000), second ($7,500) and third place prizes ($5,000) in cash and the possibility of other services and benefits.

The pitching format will remain the same as the elimination round.

We look forward to everyone’s participation and good luck!

This event will be televised statewide on WGME CBS 13, live streamed on Facebook, available on demand and on YouTube.

All past episodes are available on YouTube at Greenlight Maine. For further information or questions regarding these instructions, please feel free to contact Kerry Smart at 207-859-1159 or [email protected].

FAQs

All prior participants still in school that did not advance to the finale in past programs are eligible to pitch again.

All participants will be identified by number only-no names or college affiliations.

Each contestant/s will have 3 minutes to pitch followed by a 3-4 minute Q&A.

For the elimination round as many as 3 individuals from each company will be allowed to pitch. However, in the televised competition only 2 will be allowed.

The judges will score on a numerical system from 1 to 10 in each of the 5 following criteria: Feasibility 20%- Innovation 20%-Scalability 20%-Overall quality of business idea 20%-Ability to grow business in Maine -20%. All judges will have no affiliation with any Maine college.