ACU CEO and Wildcat Ventures executive teams win CEO Global Chapter of the Year and Best Revenue Generating Initiative awards at the CEO Global Conference and Pitch Competition. (Back) Evan Beck, Shelby Watson, Greg Johnston, Caroline Fairly, Cammie Seaman. (Front) Courtney Eubank, Meredith Orr.
This past weekend at the Global CEO Conference, ACU CEO won the Global Chapter of the Year award for the fourth consecutive year, and Wildcat Ventures won the Best Revenue Generating Initiative Award.
The CEO and Wildcat Ventures executive teams traveled to Kansas City, Missouri, to attend the Collegiate Entrepreneurs’ Organization Global Conference where they gave a presentation about their work on campus.
During the conference, CEO and Wildcat Ventures took part in seminars and sessions where they learned from some of the top CEO’s around the world.
Meredith Orr, president of CEO and senior marketing and management major from North Richland Hills, said she felt prepared when presenting.
“I was really confident in our team and what we’ve been doing,” Orr said. “You never really know until you get there and see the other people who are presenting against you. We’ve won for the past three years so we knew the experience that we needed to get us to the win.”
In early October, the team submitted written video pitches to explain the progress of CEO throughout the past year for the Global Chapter of the Year Award. In the past, three teams have been chosen to present at the conference; this year four teams were selected.
Orr said they were surprised to find this out from an email the night before they arrived at the conference.
“Normally, they pick the top three schools to present live,” Orr said. “There was an exact tie because the judging had been so close. So we had, essentially, one more team that we were competing against than we were expecting.”
At the conference, the CEO executive team gave a 5-minute presentation, followed by a Q-and-A session on Thursday evening.
The team consisted of President Meredith Orr, Vice President Greg Johnston, junior information systems major from Coppell, Student Director of Startup Week and Startup Madness Cammie Seaman, junior marketing major from Georgetown, Vice President of Speaker Series Caroline Fairly, sophomore management major from Amarillo, and President of Wildcat Ventures Courtney Eubank, senior accounting and music major from Phoenix, Ariz.
Winners were announced Friday evening.
Orr said her favorite take away from the conference sessions after the presentation competition was getting to meet other presidents from organizations across the nation.
“There was a room of probably 50 presidents and we all just got to share ideas, see what’s working in our chapter and maybe why that’s not working in other ones,” Orr said. “It was just a really cool collaborative session that I thought was really interesting.”
