AIM Fuzzi-Olympics 2009... remembering all the fun we had during our walk-about

What an experience! :)


This is one activity that I am going to propagate in my company once I am back in the work stream.

The Walk-About gave many of us a chance to do something out of the ordinary and for me personally it was like climbing a steep ladder, slowly and steadily, day after day and finally, the view from the top is really amazing.

First of all I would like to mention how we came up with the plan. Well before that, how ‘we’ happened. My partner in crime ‘Sameer Alve’. Since we both are the founding members of the Entrepreneurship club, it was just after a very healthy discussion on how to take the club forward, that he asked what plans do I have for the HBO Walk-About. I mentioned and I still have it on record (as we recorded our meeting discussions), that I wanted to do multiple things under the Walk-About umbrella and involve the maximum people possible. We didn’t have to ask to be partners, as we both were thinking of the same thing. Here, I think the mutual trust and respect took the decision.

Next what happened was a few emails sharing ideas and we have a plan ready for the ‘AIM Fuzzi-Olympics 2009’.

So we have a Big Hairy Audacious Goal assigned for ourselves amidst our tight MBA curriculum and man, were we excited :). Nobody knew what we were doing but considering that we were the silent types many had high expectations.

Planning to get sponsors for the event happened over dinner when we went to Pizza Hut and ‘were just talking that it was so far from AIM that not many people could be visiting them and Bang! Came the idea.

Our main objective was to make sure everyone has fun and enjoys themselves. Also since there were so many DE and Walk-About taking place over the last few weeks we anticipated that people would generally be low on cash. So we wanted to make sure that we kept our registration fee at the minimum (that could cover our admin expenses). Keeping the main objective of fun in mind we made the entry for family and friends of the students free of cost. Also the entry for the faculty and staff with family were also free.

Keeping the same value of Fun in mind we sold the idea to our sponsors who were more than happy to support the effort. But we had to make sure that every potential sponsor we approached had some connection with the student community (in our case Burger King, National Book store, Subway, Power Books, Lotus Massage spa and MINI STOP. To each of these, we made a separate proposal selling them the value of associating themselves with the event and AIM. It required a lot of follow ups and meetings before we managed to arrive at the sponsorship amount and gifts.

We wanted to make sure that students who participate - compete, enjoy and take away more then just the experience. We got prizes sponsored in the form of gift vouchers and gifts from BURGER KING, POWER BOOKS, NBS, MINI STOP organised all the materials for all the games... and as an add on, we got LOTUS SPA to set up a Mini Spa in campus giving all students free of cost mini massages. To make sure we got a good deal from Lotus we also tied up with them for a two month package of providing all AIM community 50% discount for all massages, unlimited times over the period.

So basically whatever we did had a motive and motivation.

During the entire process we had our highs and our lows. Our first high was when we got our project approved but after that was a long lull. We wanted to get sponsors who were taking time to respond. Here we both knew that we both were down but we never let each other feel low and encouraged each other to concentrate on our main objective. We both motivated each other with new ideas that we can do to raise funds. And we decided to raise some funds by organizing a poker tournament in, which went off pretty well. And once that went of successfully, we had five of the sponsors confirming with the interest on the same day. ( Happy faces, Yahoo!)

In my opinion, organizing “Fuzzi Olympics” was a new learning experience for both of us managing an event, negotiating with vendors, and promoting the event. It helped us generate some funds and an opportunity to work as a team. We engaged students and staff, as we knew that it could be difficult managing everything own our own. The anxiety of losing reputation was killed with enthusiastic participants enjoying the event and many students enrolling into free massage place. The barrage of cheering emails from all the participants was overwhelming and this has geared us to do another event in the future. We have tentatively named it “the AIM Sports Bonanza 2009” scheduled for September-October 2009, again targeting students, staff and faculty of AIM.

My most important learning from organizing this event has been ‘the planning and its execution’ plus patience. I also learned to trust and delegate responsibility when there is a crunch of resources. Any project organized at this scale cannot be successful without keeping the future in mind.

We also wanted to make sure that the biggest winners at the end of the day were not just us but all the memories that we created which are going to cherished for a long time to come.