BizAcademy All-Stars was the toughest 4 days of my entire summer. All-Stars challenged my creativity, patience, and most of all, my decision making skills. There is no such thing as down time when it came to Biz-Academy. There was always a job that needed to get done. You could be logging your company finances for the day or perfecting a pitch to a department or venture capitalist.

A lesson that will forever stick in my head was when my company, Nature's Mind, double crossed venture capitalists Gary Hanna and Brian Millham. We would meet with 2 venture capitalist companies two times. First meeting is the pitch. The second meeting is the negotiation.

Gary and Brian were the "nicer" venture capitalists. They seemed like they were genuinely interested in what our company had to offer. They even offered to mentor us with if we needed any help in the future.

Then we met with the other venture capitalists, Bobby Napiltonia and Robert Zimmerman. The first time we met with Bobby and Robert, they made it very clear that they just wanted to make money off us. They were throwing outrageous numbers. One figure they threw out at us was that they wanted to get paid quadruple their investment! My team members' jaws dropped when they heard that.

Negotiation time came up, and we met with Gary and Brian first. We eventually reached an agreement with the two. We would sell 3 of our company stocks for $450, and give them 7% of our profits. Wow what a deal! Walking out of the room, with smiling faces, we were going to tell Bobby and Robert that we didn't need them anymore.

We walked into the conference room, and told Bobby and Robert the deal Gary and Brian offered. The two looked at each other, and threw out a counter offer. They said they would also buy 3 of our stocks for $450 and only collect 4% of our profit! My company asked, "What's the catch?" They simply replied, "We just want to sign more companies than the other venture capitalists." What a moral dilemma. We ended up signing with Bobby and Robert instead to save the 3%.

Once we told Gary and Brian, boy did we get it. Gary laid down a speech that made us feel like nothing. In a nutshell, Gary said we basically sold our integrity to save an extra $100 (What the 3% percent was). We felt AWFUL. And we felt CHEAP.

To cheer us up, one of our instructors, Julie Wurm, aka J-DUB, said it was better that we learn that lesson now, than in the real world. Which is true --we had to remember that this is only a simulation of what can happen.

What made this BizAcademy especially difficult was the fact that instead of us selling a product, we had to sell a service. We had to sell a service that would make a department more environmentally friendly. A product can basically sell itself if it is appealing enough to the buyer. You can physically judge a product by holding and testing it out. A service is not like that at all. A service can't be physically judged. A service is mainly judged on how well it can accommodate potential customers' needs. It is also judged on how well it satisfied previous customers' needs.

Unlike past BizAcademies, where students will go pitch to random people walking the floor during the hectic lunch hour, we set a presentation with 2 different Salesforce departments. We would show the departments what we have accomplished with past customers (all made up) and we would have to find out from the department members what their problems were. After meeting with the departments, we would have to configure a service to solve the department's problems and do another presentation to show how we would execute the service and how much it would cost.

BizAcademy taught me the value of thinking before speaking. I'm the kind of person who does not like long pauses in a conversation. During some pitches, I would just rant on to fill up pauses. BizAcademy also taught me that time is a resource you can never get back, so you must use it wisely. My company had so many good ideas about what kind of services we can provide. Yet we spent a lot time looking on how an idea cannot work and then we would just toss it away.

I talked about that issue with my mentor Elliot Moore, and he told me, "You can't spend all your time worrying about what could go wrong. Because you will never know how well it will work until you do it."

So with that being said, my advice to future BizAcademy participants is to come in with an open mind. Prepare to work and compromise. And leave with a ton of business cards, because an opportunity can be a phone call away.