PURPOSE
Are you looking for the best business simulation game at an affordable price? Here it is. In Running your Business for a profit, participants work in one or more teams to manage their own restaurant business.
This is an exciting and fast paced business education game that recreates the dynamics of the real commercial world, helping participants develop key management skills.
Team members work together to plan strategies, make management decisions and take action. They must learn from the results of their decisions and adjust their strategy and operations.
Teams need to be highly organised, well led and able to collaborate effectively to meet tight deadlines. You can fine them if they are late in submitting their decisions.
What makes our business simulation game so popular? Running Your Business for a Profit concentrates on the winning qualities that make an excellent business manager: understanding your customers, satisfying their needs, employing the right staff and motivating them so you get the best from them. It allows teams to experience and test their commercial acumen in a competitive market to see if they make a good profit.
HOW IT WORKS
Participants use the team briefing sheets to discuss and develop a basic business strategy, comprising the following elements:
- business plan
- branding and advertising strategy
- target customer base
- restaurant name
- shop-fitting policy
- food offering
- staff numbers and salaries
- marketing budget
- pricing strategy
- how much money to borrow.
The facilitator enters the team's decisions into a computer, which provides a results print-out in the form of a simple profit and loss report. You can also email participants the P&L report.
This business education game is just like the real world, where the management team need to be effective and efficient with their branding, buying, pricing and staffing levels. If not, turnover and profit will suffer.
As with all the best business simulation games, it's not solely about making a profit. There are typical staff and customer service issues for the facilitator to introduce to suit particular learning outcomes. They can also learn about features, benefits and values and put them into practice as they use their creative skills to design a logo, an advertising poster and a radio commercial. All these can increase sales.
The ability to adapt in response to changing market conditions is another skill the game helps to develop. After each trading period teams can adjust their strategy for the next period. The facilitator can also introduce various threats and opportunities, including competition from other restaurants, health and safety issues and expansion opportunities.
You can run this business simulation game with teams in competition or with just one team learning the key concepts of running a business. As for timing, you can run it for up to six trading periods in one training session, or spread the trading periods over several training sessions.
We've also designed this game to offer the trainer ample opportunity to observe teams in action. Lively discussions often continue well after the end of the session!
The most profitable restaurant at the end of the trading period wins.