Fotini and Fernando LaGuardia have baked empanadas out of their mom-and-pop catering business in Austin for 10 years. Now, with the help of four UT students, the couple can add award-winning marketing to their business strategy.
The four McCombs School of Business students were assigned to help Empanadas La Boca improve its marketing as part of the first Students Consulting Initiative competition that concluded Saturday. Team Maverick - consisting of Monica Ridgway, Yun Du, Chad Zidow and Alex Schliker - won the competition.
As part of the initiative, teams of four business students were matched up with struggling Austin businesses to gain real-world consulting experience. Team Maverick worked for seven weeks to increase the company's visibility, using marketing ideas learned from their University coursework. The teams presented their projects to a panel of judges Saturday morning.
The LaGuardias owned a restaurant and cafe, La Boca Argentinian Cafe, in Santa Monica, Calif., for five years before moving to Austin in 1994. Though students may have never heard of Empanadas La Boca, they might have tasted their creations at Ruta Maya, The Ginger Man or other partner businesses to whom the LaGuardias sell.
Fotini LaGuardia said she noticed an increase in catering orders in the time that Team Maverick had been working with her business. She said the team helped with some marketing strategies that she could never find the time or energy to do.
"They were very accessible. They were always in touch with us," LaGuardia said. "They were terrific."
The team helped boost business by creating a Web site, business cards, menus and company banners. The team also helped the owners implement a marketing strategy that better showcased the catering business' aim to offer an assortment of Spanish, Italian and Greek foods.
Team Maverick member Zidow, an accounting and business honors junior, said the community service made the competition a good experience.
"I've done a lot of case competitions before, and it's not nearly as fulfilling when you're given a fake case," Zidow said. "But when you know you're working with a real company you can see the impact that you're making. I think that's probably why we won this - because we actually did things that are going to change the company. We didn't just tell them what to do."
Finance and government senior Brian Smiley and finance senior Brian Borton founded the initiative, which was hosted for the first time this semester.
Out of 12 teams that applied for the competition, six were selected to compete and given $300 to use in their consulting. Landon Hoover, a business honors sophomore and financial chair of the initiative, said preparation for the event began in the spring. He said students were assigned to companies based on strengths the company would benefit from most.
Narayan Bhargava, a finance and business honors sophomore who acted as an external relations chair for the initiative, touted the program's originality.
"If you look at it from the perspective of the business school, such an endeavor hasn't really been gone forth from other universities, so we're taking the first step and we're setting sort of like a framework for other universities to follow," Bhargava said.
Professional accounting junior David Wesch worked on the first runner-up Convenient Solutions team that worked with business owners Alma and Luis Linares of the MLK Food Store.
"They bought the business, but they didn't really know the technical, business-savvy things, and that's where we came in," Wesch said. "We saw opportunities for us to give them improvements to their store, and so we just took our knowledge that we have learned in our class and applied that to their business and tried to make them as successful as they can be."
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