Sink or Swim? This year’s Shark Tank competition at CED

Tensions ran high and the competition was brutal! This year’s Shark Tank competition in Donnie Longenecker’s Professional Practice class brought out the best in several teams of BLA students. The goal was to create a plausible business plan for a design firm. The proposed firms had to be creative yet grounded in reality, with real-world potential. Winners will get their registration paid to the 2018 ASLA conference in Philadelphia next fall. 

Our panel of “sharks” included six merciless professionals:
Jon Davis, Former Planning Director, City of Norcross (MLA 1974)
Jon Williams, W+A Engineering (BLA 1996)
Greta deMayo, Kaizen Collaborative (BLA 1991) 
Missy Madden, Missy Madden, LLC (BLA 2002)
Paul Raulet, Raulet Property Partnerships, Inc. (BA 1985)
Josh Koons, Koons Environmental Design (BLA 1996)

Everyone managed to survive, but the winning team included:
Kinsey Bullock, Kayla Bare, Diane Kim, and Zhexin Yu.

Left to right: Jon Davis, Jon Williams, Greta DeMayo, Kinsey Bullock, Kayla Bare, Missy Madden, Diana Kim, Paul Raulet. Not pictured: Zhexin Yu and Josh Koons. 

The four women created “Zenscape,” a firm located in Savannah, Ga. and dedicated to building therapeutic sensory gardens for the health care industry. The proposal included a marketing and business plan. For this proposal the Sharks noted that Zenscape would have much more success converting to a design/build operation and with the proposed business structure, this would be doable. They also commended the team as having the best presentation of all.

Congratulations to all and many thanks to our sharks!