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This online game is a fantastic medium for stimulating discussion and delivering the key curriculum areas of literacy and numeracy, as well as developing the pupils ICT and citizenship skills.
Lisa Fenaroli, Try Learning Centre Manager, Harlequins
The Small Business Game is an excellent resource that supports the key strands of Enterprise Education: Enterprise Capability, Financial Capability and Economic & Business Understanding. It is also a fun, interactive and innovative resource for teachers and students alike.
Mark Thomas, Enterprise Champion, StepClever, Liverpool and Sefton
Getting started
When you first play the game, go into each of the rooms and try clicking on all the objects in the room, this will give you a good idea of where everything is. Each week you may want to check your emails in your office, see what your customers are saying in the store and read the news ticker at the bottom of the game screen. This will give you crucial information about what’s happening in your business and the surrounding environment.
To progress through the Game, click on ‘Next week’ and the impact of your decisions will be calculated.
Remember the store runs like any business. There are some core activities that you will need to undertake each week, while others you may only need to undertake every few weeks or every month.
Ordering product
Order product from within the stock room within the game. Experiment with what may be best sellers, what might suit certain targets, and which methods of promotion will work best. The worst thing that can happen is that you either run out of stock (customers will not be happy), or that you have too much stock (you may find it is left unsold and worthless).
Making sales
Your sales within the game are calculated at the end of each week. Once you have completed all of your activities for the week click on the ‘next week’ button and the game will calculate your sales.
Increasing your sales
There are various ways to increase your sales within the game from running a promotion, improving your customer service and giving your staff some sales training to a whole bunch of ideas you’d probably never consider (You will need to find these out for yourself. You didn’t think we’d tell you everything did you?). We recommend you take a ‘test and see’ method to increasing your sales – you may be surprised by what works, and what doesn’t. And of course, what works in real life may just work within the game.
Increasing your game score
Your game score is a combination of your net profit, your character rating (what kind of person you are and whether people like you) and your social rating (how well respected you are in your community). To do well in the game (and in life) you’ve got to pay attention to all aspects of your score.
Some extra tips you might want to think about…
- Hire staff if you can’t physically serve all the customers coming into your store
- Create an online store if you think there’s an opportunity to sell to more customers
- Price your products a little higher or lower than the recommended retail price to improve profitability or increase demand
- Prepare for upcoming events such as home games by ordering more stock
- Play again if you go bust 😉