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By Tim Gray
Catching up with Wharton Business Plan Competition winners — Where are they now?
After four years of toil, Chris and Natasha Ashton had earned the right to celebrate. Revenue
at their company, PetPlan USA, was surging. The Humane
Society of the United States had endorsed their pet health insurance
policies, and they’d begun hiring employees. They
were even the parents of a new baby boy.
Then the life that they’d cultivated since winning the
Wharton Business Plan Competition in 2003 nearly ended.
Last summer, a railing across a window at the back of
their house in New Jersey gave way as Chris was leaning
against it. He tumbled 15 feet to the concrete patio below,
smashing his leg and breaking two ribs. He endured four
months of recuperation and a patchwork of screws and plates
in his ankle before he walked again. Twice, blood clots sent
him back to the hospital. “The accident took me out completely,”
he recalls. “I was in the hospital for a bit, and I was
in immense pain for a couple of months. Thank God for my
Blackberry and health insurance.”
Four years earlier, when the Ashtons, both WG’03, won
the Wharton Business Plan Competition (BPC) with two
classmates, Laura Bennett and Alex Krooglik, they little
imagined the twisting path their lives would take. In the
wake of winning the BPC, PetPlan’s future seemed assured.
But shortly after graduating, they split with their partners,
who left to start their own competing company, Embrace Pet
Insurance. That forced the Ashtons to divide their former colleagues’
duties. They then had to crisscross the country in
search of investors and an insurance underwriter to back their
policies. And, just as all of the pieces were coming together,
Chris fell.
To the Ashtons’ credit, their fledging business survived
and today is growing smartly. Chris has returned to work,
and the Ashtons expect that their staff of 11 will grow to 20
by the end of the year. Winning the BPC has helped in each
step of their journey, they say. “It’s opened doors for us,”
Natasha says.
The details of the Ashtons’ odyssey may be unique, but the
rollercoaster ride they experienced is shared by Wharton BPC
winners. Victory brings elation and lofty expectations, inevitably
followed by the hard, time-consuming work of starting a
business or launching a career. Winning, Natasha says, “gives
you a rose-tinted view of the world. We thought we’d be up
and running within six months.”
“If you’d asked me when I got to Wharton if I was going
to win the Business Plan Competition, I would’ve thought
you were insane,” says Bennett, also WG’03. “I didn’t know
what a business plan was. The BPC changed my life.”
The annual competition, celebrating its 10th anniversary
this year, is the signature event sponsored by Wharton
Entrepreneurial Programs, the School’s interdisciplinary research
and teaching center. “It’s the largest outreach program
that we do,” says Emily Cieri, WEP’s managing director. “It’s
open to any student at the University of Pennsylvania —
graduate, undergraduate, PhD, or medical school.” Each year,
the contest touches hundreds of students and Wharton alumni,
who act as mentors and judges.
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