Business Essentials Simulation
BizCafe
BizCafe is a business essentials simulation that provides a great way to learn about running a business. It is designed to help you learn about the challenges and rewards of making good decisions in a small, service-based business. You will learn about management, operations, marketing, and accounting by running your own coffee shop for up to 16 simulated weeks.
CASE SUMMARY
In a college-town, a local successful business professional wants to help college students learn about business by operating their own company. Each team in BizCafe represents a group selected to receive a $25,000 start-up loan at 10% interest to manage their own coffee shop for a year as an independent study for credit. At startup, teams choose equipment, furniture, and a name consistent with the image they want to project. As the simulation progresses, students encounter all the facets of running a business at a basic level. They gain experience with financial statements, the difference between cash and accrual accounting, handling staffing issues, operations management for a small service business, marketing and promotion, and the importance of customer satisfaction. Growing sales, maximizing profit and managing the daily operations of a café will help them understand the ins and outs of operating a customer service oriented business. As a business essentials simulation, BizCafe offers a full experience for students to learn the fundamentals.
OBJECTIVES
As a business essentials simulation, BizCafe provides students an opportunity to learn the fundamentals of business by running a simple start-up enterprise. Student teams will function as a “real-life” company competing in a dynamic and evolving industry. With direct-competitive play, students’ stores all compete with each other, their decisions affecting each other.
BizCafe is designed with the following goals for your students:
Planning & Analysis
Write a business plan
Monitor implementation of plan
Calculate break-even pointStaffing
Project staffing requirements
Decide on employee pay rates
Calculate total cost of compensation
Manage employee turnoverMarketing
Identify the 4Ps of marketing
Set pricing for multiple products
Calculate gross margin
Project impact of promotion
Create advertising copy
Operations
Project purchasing needs
Manage inventory
Set shop hours
Maximize customer satisfactionAccounting
Distinguish cash and accrual accounting
Create and analyze income statement
Create and analyze balance sheet
Calculate return on an investmentTeamwork
Allocate responsibilities fairly
Complete assigned tasks on time
Communicate problems and plans
Collaborate with other team members
KEY DECISIONS
- Management: Hiring of managers and servers (setting wage, hours)
- Marketing: Pricing (coffee), Advertising/Promotion, and Creative Design (of cups, ads, logo, etc.)
- Operations: Shop hours, Coffee purchase, and Cup purchase (inventory)
- Special Decisions: A variety of “incidents” are available (mini-cases), for instructors to add additional depth to the simulation.
ASSESSMENT
- Comparative results report with several performance measures such as Revenue, Net Income, Customer Satisfaction and more, as well as instructor-weighted score card
- Quizzes
- 17 assignments to choose from!
- 16 incidents (mini-cases) to choose from!
- Online peer evaluation