 From a business perspective everything starts off better when you say hello and introduce yourself to the judges when you first walk in the room. It sets the tone right away. It’s awkward for everyone if you walk in quietly and just start setting up – you wouldn’t do that in a true business situation, so you shouldn’t do that for competition either.
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- Make sure that the name of your PDF files
contains  the project name and your contestant or team number! When the files are downloaded from the email they are impossible to match with the right contestant or team.
Ex: Eco Research Team 02-0123.pdf
- Make sure you are registered before sending in the project. Projects that have to be added later make a poor impression.
- Make sure that your projects are PDF files. Due to virus protection and server limitation .doc and .zip files are not acceptable!
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 My objective is for the students to do the best possible presentations by being better prepared at the local level. The students should ask many obvious questions at the beginning of the projects. My purpose for doing this is so that students will learn to take facts and turn them into knowledge.
RESEARCH PAPERS
- Make sure you can explain and justify everything that is included in your paper. If you cite companies, know what they do. If you use graphs, make sure you can explain them. If you include figures, make sure they compute and are verifiable.
- Do the math! If you sight a % of a number from a source, take a moment to actually do the math. In many papers I have judged, the % of the raw numbers is wrong.
- Grammar and spelling. I am not an English major so when I write something important that will reflect on me I get help. Do not rely on a computer program to tell you whether what you have written is grammatically correct and/or spelled correctly.
- Outline your paper before writing it. Organize your thoughts in a logical order. Get help from an English teacher. This will save you much correcting later.
- Structure of sentences, paragraphs and the paper is important so that your intent is understood. Your grade suffers if the judge has to guess your meaning.
- Say what you mean and mean what you say.
- Separate feelings from facts.
- Do not be anecdotal or provincial. (Look these up)
- Ask your teachers and business professionals to read your work and ask you questions. Nothing is obvious to the uninformed. You must make your presentation obvious to the judge, who is not familiar with your work.
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Have answers for the most obvious questions.
- Do you know the cost of goods sold?
- Do you know the TRUE cost of having employees?
- Do you know your competitors and what they charge?
- Do you know every cost of doing business? Include taxes, permits, insurance, rent, utilities, furnishings,equipment, wages, etc.
Passion is fine but businesses do not go out of business for lack of passion, they go out of business because of their lack of  business skills.
Understand the following:
- Cash flow is not profit.
- Gross sales is not profit.
- Gross revenue is not profit.
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After hearing a number of contestants I realized that they did not understand the prompt. The prompt was about job-sharing. They had no idea what it was, they all thought it was teamwork, basically. Because of this, they were unable to adequately argue the point. My advice is for students to ask for clarification of the prompt before preparing for the contest. 
Small Business Management Team