Wednesday evening saw the announcement of the winner of the inaugural HSBC Unipreneurs competition. As you have probably heard (we have made quite a song and dance about it) we beat around 400 other entrants to make the final, alongside 4 other successful student-run companies, vying to win the £20,000 prize.
As part of the final we were booked into the 5* Le Meridien hotel in Piccadilly, one of the swankiest hotels in London and far too good for the RateMyPlacement team. Keen to make the most of it we checked in at 2 o’clock and spent most of the afternoon swimming in the largest indoor pool in central London and relaxing in the Jacuzzi. Prior to the event itself we were given a show round the BAFTA theatre and introduced to our fellow competitors. We were then taken to a little room where we were to be held under the watchful eye of the organisers, presumably to ensure we didn’t get stuck into the free Champagne before our appearance on stage (shame they didn’t do the same to one of the panel). The format of the night was a 10 minute Q&A with the panel trying to find out more about our businesses, after which the audience of 200 delegates then voted for the company they thought deserved to win. We were told that the panel would only ask us some friendly questions about how well we had done to get where we were today; unfortunately Peter Jones (Dragons Den) and Wayne Hemingway (Red or Dead) didn’t see it that way. RateMyPlacement were last on stage and we watched as our fellow competitors sweated it out under the grilling. The more we watched, the keener we were to get on stage and tell everyone about the website.
We decided to keep the winning team of Ali and Chris, who got us through the semi-final, to go on stage. We were formally introduced to the audience by the lovely Jenni Falconer (one member of the RMP team managed to get 4 kisses from her and hasn’t washed since) who brought some much needed glamour to the evening. The next 10 minutes seemed like a bit of a blur. I remember Peter Jones gently welcoming us to the stage before picking our finances to pieces, and sadly one of the judges claimed that students could do what we do on YouTube! We don’t really think that the judge had grasped the idea of the site.
After our appearance on stage, the audience were asked to vote and the company with the most votes would win. So the result… Unfortunately it wasn’t us celebrating with an over-sized cheque for £20,000 but congratulations go to Scratch Face, a company who enable people with colour blindness to see website and computer programmes as the designer meant them to be seen. Also well done to Aspect Communications who put on a cracking event and got a lot of press coverage for us.
