A first place finish in the business strategy category highlighted UNBC's participation in the JDC West business competition held in Saskatoon over the weekend.
The three-member team of Dan Beaulieu, Kaleena Ross and Dustin Renaud took home the honour, making it the second year in a row UNBC has won the category.
The team dealt with a bit of a curveball to win the category. Rather than being assigned a case about a traditional for-profit corporation, they were given one about a small, non-profit yacht club.
The team was given three hours to come up with a proposal to pull the club out of financial trouble and build up its membership.
"We had to do a lot of thinking outside the box," said Beaulieu, who added Ross's skill in non-profits came into play.
"What a lot of the other teams did wrong was they tried to say 'take bank loans etcetera, etcetera,' whereas we took the not-for-profit strategy - looking into corporate sponsorship and more of a slower revenue generation strategy that was going to take some time but had a lot less risk.
"Cause marketing" strategies like giving troubled youth a chance to learn how to sail in exchange for doing maintenance work around the club, holding a plant-a-tree day as a "launch pad" for the marketing efforts and creating a small website were also proposed.
"They had a dilemma on their hands - whether or not to become a launch for motorboats, which is very profitable, or stick to the original vision and have more of a long-term strategy and a more green strategy," Beaulieu said.
Other highlights included third place finishes in the marketing and entrepreneurship categories and fourth places in taxes and accounting.
The marketing team was made up of Jill Lee, Kyle Amonson and Tony Tran, the entrepreneurship team was made up of Garrett Dobson, Lisa Garcia and Randeep Janjua.
On the taxes team were Andrew Holland, Wendy McRae and Ryland Nicholson and on the accounting team were Tahir Ahmad, James Alexander and Erik Marchand.
The 44-member team as a whole was fourth in participation - judged in terms of overall presence, camaraderie and spirit - and fifth in charity fundraising for raising $24,900 for Spirit of the North Healthcare Foundation.
Overall, UNBC finished seventh out of 11 teams.
