Entrepreneurs to start business soon
Student company Abacus hopes to sell to Fortune 500 companies
After winning 2nd place at the Shocker Business Plan Competition, the company with the product that analyzes financial data automatically looks to further develop software.
Tuesday, May 8th, 2007
Two University students are trying to show that an abacus isn’t just a way to solve simple mathematical equations. Christina Spires, Wichita graduate student, and Bob Thon, Fallston, Md., senior, helped create Abacus, a business plan named after the ancient calculation tool in an advanced entrepreneurship course. They won second place at the 2007 Shocker Business Plan Competition at Wichita State last April and plan to start the business with the University professor who invented Financial Reporting and Auditing Agent Net Knowledge (FRAANK) software, Rajendra Srivastava.
Abacus uses FRAANK, which analyzes financial data automatically instead of leaving it prone to human error and has a patent pending.
Spires and Thon plan to generate investor interest in the software this summer and follow through with their business creation. They will be looking for about one million dollars in investments from various parties.
The students won $3,000 from the competition, which Spires said would be used in going forward with the business.
Spires, who is chief executive officer of Abacus, said the company was projecting to make millions from the developed software.
“We definitely want to be involved,” she said. “There’s no benefit for us to sell the company.”
The students won $3,000 from the competition, which Spires said would be used in going forward with the business.
After Abacus approaches investors such as venture capitalists and gains financial support, the next step is getting property, computers, servers and programmers to build new financial fields for the program, Spires said.
FRAANK, which Spires said was in production for about 10 years, could benefit any publicly traded company and would be used for audits and sold to Fortune 500 businesses.
“Everybody’s going to have a need whether they use our product or our competitor’s product,” she said.
Thon said the program takes Microsoft Word and Excel documents with financial data, recognizes the financial terms and encodes them to a financial recording language. He said that during the competition, Abacus received several business cards from interested businessmen.
Wally Meyer, director of entrepreneurship programs, said Abacus would be the first student company to be created from the New Venture Creation course at the University.
“The plan is terrific. They’ve got all the components,” he said. “They did a great job in presenting and defending the plan.”
The plan was initially presented to about 70 investors at the business plan competition last month. Students were given about five to seven minutes to convince investors why they should be interested, Meyer said. At the final round of the competition, they presented their plan to judges, one of whom was Pizza Hut’s founder.
Meyer said the students received extensive education in creating the business plans, something they could use to create bigger business plans in the future.
“I don’t think anybody goes into entrepreneurship for job security,” Meyer said. “But does it give them an idea of what to do after graduation? Absolutely.”
Kansan staff writer Brian Lewis-Jones can be contacted at bljones@kansan.com.
— Edited by Joe Caponio
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