Billy Rossini and the company he founded, Nocqua Adventure Gear, would probably never have worked with the Farmer School of Business First-Year Integrated Core (FYIC) – or spent two days in Oxford – if it weren’t for his business partner.

“My business partner's daughter goes to this school, and he had talked to me a little bit about the Client Challenge, and that we might be a good fit for it,” Rossini said. “I really didn't know the details, what it would involve, and how many people were involved in it.”

The Client Challenge is the final part of the FYIC, an eight-credit hour program comprising four classes required for all FSB students. Students spend the first 11 weeks of the semester building key skills that they will need for upper-division classes and that employers expect FSB graduates to have.

The remaining weeks have the students working in consulting teams to find solutions to a problem posed by the client. Rossini asked the students to find new uses for a particular battery pack that his company produces, and 137 student teams went to work.

“They were very clear in what they wanted. They gave us a challenging prompt that left room for a broad amount of solutions, which very well fit the Client Challenge,” sophomore Marketing major Zara Jamil said.

The 137 teams pitched their ideas to Farmer School faculty, and the 10 top teams then presented to Rossini and his chief operating officer Heidi Klein at the Farmer School of Business.

“It was really exciting to go from that little seed we gave them to actually being here and standing in front of all the students and hearing these amazing ideas,” Rossini said. “It fired me up to apply even more passion into our business, seeing what they put into it and knowing that we could take this to another level. So that was pretty rewarding.”

“I definitely thought it was humbling. This is an eye-opening experience for me. It lit a fire in me to want to go back and get to work on making what we have even better, tapping into some new markets that we didn't even know existed,” Klein said.

Jamil said she gained a lot from the experience. “My overall experience with the client challenge taught me a lot about how to work effectively in a team, both in and out of class,” she said. “It also taught me important skills like analytical research and critical thinking. The most important takeaway I have is that every component to a business proposal such as this, whether it be teamwork or content, is crucial to its success.”

“I've been in this business for 13 years now, so I think what the students accomplished was pretty amazing, because that's very difficult to do when you're trying to adjust a product and not just knock something else off or copy something. They came up with original ideas,” Rossini said.

“I hope that they'll continue to come up with original ideas,” Klein said. “Hopefully it excites them to maybe create their own product one day.”