Kent State’s College of Business Administration Student Selected for Entrepreneur Competitions

KENT, Ohio - June 25, 2015 - PRLog -- Kent State College of Business Administration senior entrepreneurship student Brian Bowles was selected to attend the Jumpstart Start-Up Scale-Up competition on June 17.

Bowles is the co-founder and CEO of Blackwolf Tactical, LLC.; a company that develops training environments based on physical locations that are reactive to the trainees inside. Brian’s company was nominated by Magnet Incubator to be one of 15 companies featured in the event. Each team had five minutes with no visuals and competed for cash prizes of $20,000 for first place, $10,000 for second and $5,000 for third.

Previous to the Jumpstart Competition, Bowles was chosen to pitch his company along with representatives from 81 other countries at the Collision Conference on May 5^th and 6^th in Las Vegas. Each entrepreneur created a “pitch display” similar to the layout of a job or science fair.

“The contacts and connections we made during the Collision Conference, both national and international, are essential to my future success,” said Bowles.

The Collision Conference is a sister event to Web Summit; Europe’s largest tech conference which attracts over 20,000 attendees from around the world. The goal of Collision is to be the new tech conference for America: “A meeting place for people who are both building companies of tomorrow and managing the companies of today.” Attendees included co-founder of Twitter; Jack Dorsey, President and Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post; Arianna Huffington, founder of Netflix; Reed Hastings and more.

Bowles’s company was also selected to participate in the PITCHUP’15 contest, an online voting competition that allows individuals to vote for ideas they believe are worth turning into a business.  After Brian’s success in the contest, he and his team pitched Blackwolf Tactical, LLC. at the Emaze live pitch event on May 19th to a panel of judges, in front of 26 investors and 20,000 live spectators.

The Emaze event was conducted out of Israel and consisted of companies targeting environmental preservation and going green. Brian was given three minutes to pitch, and although he was confident in his presentation, the event wasn’t one that Brian felt was fitting to his product. While Brian was somewhat out of his comfort zone, he had a pitch coach that provided help and gave him constructive criticism after the presentation.

Although Bowles did not place in the competitions, “the experience and feedback I received was immensely helpful, making each competition very valuable,” said Bowles. He went on to say, “Social media was a huge factor in getting support to enter each competitive phase; and he learned the advantage of leveraging social media for business rather than personal use.”

For more information about the Kent State College of Business Administration Marketing and Entrepreneurship Department, visit http://business.kent.edu/departments/marketing-and-entrepreneurship

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Kent State University’s College of Business Administration is one of only 180 colleges or schools of business worldwide to achieve dual accreditation in both business and accounting from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International, the global accrediting body providing specialized accreditation at the bachelor's, master's and doctoral levels. The College of Business Administration is home to 4,502 students, the second largest college of business in Ohio. The college boasts a satellite office of Kent State University’s Career Services Center dedicated to business students, and operates the Global Management Center, the Center for Information Systems and the Center for Entrepreneurship and Business Innovation all propelling scholarly research, establishing innovative industry partnerships and providing outreach to Northeast Ohio and beyond.

Media Contacts:

Michelle Parrish Manning, Director of Marketing Communications, (330) 672-2717, mparris3@Kent.edu

Bri Figley, Marketing Communications Specialist, (330) 672-1279, bfigley2@kent.edu