let's learn how to play the go venture ceo business simulation so if this is the first time we're playing we will have already created our username and password and logged in and launched to simulation we then have to enter the simulation number provided to us by our instructor and choose join new simulation we only have to enter this number one time here we can confirm the simulation number that we want to play we can also see who's on our team so in this simulation we may be running a business individually on our own or we may be on a team with other colleagues or classmates running the same business and as our our teammates join the simulation they will appear here we can also see the competitors so the competitors are usually other classmates that we're competing with in the same simulation competition so we'd all be running the same type of business but competing for the same customers and our competitors will appear as they begin to join the simulation competition once they join the first time they will always appear here but keep in mind if this is the first time you're playing not everyone may have joined at the same time so some new competitors may appear a little bit later let's click play to continue
so this is the main interface of the simulation so we're going to be running a business we're going to be making decisions for that business in most cases we may be producing or manufacturing a product or offering a service and selling that product or service to customers now go venture ceo is very customizable so the product that we're selling the industry that we're in the budget that we have available will all be different based on the settings that your instructor has chosen for you and so in my case we're going to be playing a particular type of simulation your interface will look the same as mine but there will be some differences now the main interface that we can see here allows us to navigate to different areas of our business starting with company management production research and development sales marketing human resources customers and competitors and finance and we can use this menu to navigate to different areas of our business we also have the same menu at the bottom here which allows us a quicker ability to navigate from screen to screen now you can actually jump to any particular screen there's no particular order that you have to follow but you will notice that there will be a natural progression based on the decisions that you need to make so let's go in and start with the company screen
so here on the company screen we have to choose a name and a logo for our business but we don't yet know what business we're running so i'm going to hold off on doing that for a moment i can also see the scoring method so this is how i'm going to be compared with other businesses that are competing with so in this case it says share price share price is a common scoring metric another is net profit there are others as well but you're most likely going to see net profit or share price here now keep in mind this is how you're going to be compared with other businesses your grade or your assessment if you're taking this as part of a course may be different than what you see here it may actually involve more variables and more assessment options than you see here and that would be provided to you by your instructor at the bottom box here we can see the simulation details and what's called the decision deadline we'll talk about that in a moment so on the right hand side is our management team and objectives so here again i can see myself and any teammates that have joined the simulation with me if i'm playing on a team and i can read the backstory so this is very important to understand what i'm supposed to be doing so it's telling me here that i'm the ceo of a specialty furniture manufacturer making home office desks and our goal is to generate the highest share price possible and we begin by selling our products in the domestic territory but then we can expand into other territories so we can take a moment and read the details here including our budget and other options that are available to us but based on that information i'm going to now choose a name and logo for my business so i'm going to call my business bestdesks now i can set my name of my business in the first period but once i set my name i won't be able to change it later on and then i can choose a logo for my business we'll choose this one here all right so now let's take a look at the rest of the interface in the bottom corner something's very important we see year one of eight so the way goventure ceo works we're manufacturing or making a product or service we're selling it and we're making decisions about our business to do that the simulation stops or pauses at the beginning of each business period to allow us to make those decisions so in my case the business period is years and we have eight years of the simulation that we can play your simulation might be different your period might be months or quarters or weeks and the number of periods you're going to play could be different as well but in this case we're all started we all start in the first period and we all have an opportunity to make decisions now how much time do we have to make our decisions is based on a schedule set by your instructor or simulation manager in my case i can see this decision deadline is december 31st at 7 00 am utc so i have to make and save my decisions for year one by that time it's very important i do not miss that time because if i do i cannot go back i will miss a period and that's because everybody that i'm competing with in the same simulation competition usually my classmates or colleagues we're all on the same schedule so if one person misses you can't roll back the simulation for everybody so it's very important that you follow the schedule and the schedule is set by your instructor there may be other methods of advancing the simulation where the instructor might choose to click a button to advance the simulation on a different time but your instructor will inform you of those differences now it's also very important to note the the time zone here is utc that's universal coordinated time and that is not the same as your local time zone the reason utc used it's a global time reference that doesn't have to worry about daylight savings times and other differences between time zones so what you want to do is you want to google your time zone and utc time to see what the time difference is and you may want to do it frequently in case you have daylight savings changes events like that okay so keeping in mind we're going to be making and selling a home office desk one of the things we should do first is look at our market overview which is right here and this is a report it's one of many reports available in goventure co that gives us insight into the market and how we should make better decisions so i can see that the average market demand market demand is how much money consumers are spending on home office desks in this particular simulation competition the average is one million per year per company so i'm only one company if i'm competing with nine other companies for a total of 10 companies the total market demand would actually be 10 million so this is just an average share now keep in mind this is not what i've earned or what i've won there is no history when you start a simulation and go venture ceo there is no past history or past sales everybody starts in the same place and this just gives me an idea of if i did i made average decisions and everything was average i might generate about a million dollars in revenue and so that's important to help me price my product and do make other decisions i can also see the population percentage so the simulation has consumers and their consumers have different profiles and they're different groups of consumers so i can see in this simulation there are four groups of consumers that are profiled differently there could be actually up to 10 in your simulation or fewer and in this case again there's four and i can see that group three is about 30 percent of the population by by roll over the pie chart group two is the largest at 40 percent and then groups 4 and 1 are a little bit smaller than those that helps me understand who's spending money and how they're spending it and then i can look at what's called the consumer psychographics so this chart shows the consumer psychographics of the consumer groups in the market the consumer psychographics identify the factors that influence how consumer makes a purchase decision and i can see in this simulation there are five factors price brand the composition which is what the desk is made of and the size and the features and i can see by the majority of the consumers they're very worried about price they're also worried about brand and somewhat worried about features composition and size is the least important factor of the majority of the consumers i can also see the features that are attractive to most consumers in this case here i can see that a utility desk is the most desirable feature modern design is also desirable for gaming is somewhat desirable and no preference is a smaller percentage of the consumers and so i can differentiate my products in various ways and i can watch videos to help gain further insight into how i should strategize for my business let's go back to the simulation so that gives us some insight into the consumers and how much money they're spending and what type of desks they may want now keep in mind that if i'm competing with other businesses we can all customize our desks in different ways and and target different consumers so you may want to target consumers that have certain preference over others let's move on to the management screen here on the management screen we can see what our budget is so budget is the amount of money we have available to invest in our business and i can see in this case my budget is seven hundred fifty thousand dollars and that's for the current period which is year one seven hundred fifty thousand dollars in year one and then i can start allocating budget to different areas of my business for example i can click on this and just give me some ideas where i can allocate my budget now there's a few options here as well so we have a what-if calculator that allows us to do some forecasting so we can plug some numbers in see what the results might be now keep in mind this what-if calculator does not affect the simulation anyway this is simply a calculator for planning purposes we also have a strategy journal now strategy journal may be required or optional and you'll see the little tags here that suggest whether they're required or optional and what it does is helps put some structure to your strategic thinking so it helps you identify what your objectives are at the beginning of each period of the simulation you do that by clicking on each of the boxes and identifying your objective for example in year one what is my objective is it to generate a lot of revenue is it generate a lot of profit or maybe i just want to get a lot of market share by units sold i don't want to get as many units out there as possible and maybe i might be willing to have a below average price to do that so there's no right or wrong here it's really about what your strategy is and this has no direct effect on the simulation it's really to help you think about strategy but what's important to note is that if you complete this there's a coaching report that's available to you that will identify whether you are adhering to your strategy or not and that will help you identify your strategies working as well as you expect it or not there's also a free form notes area or a journal function where you can type notes and post them here if you're on a team each time a team member posts a note it will time stamp it and stamp it with the name of the team member who posted so it allows you an asynchronous or non-real-time way of collaborating with your teammates if you want a real-time way to collaborate you may want to use a an external chat or other tool so that's our strategy journal we also have an ethics module again this may or may not be visible on your particular simulation but it if it is what you have to do is you have to identify your ethics are you going to run a business with strong ethics or weak ethics or somewhere in between now based on your setting you'll notice some things are changing in terms of operating costs probability of lawsuits and effect on brand and so on so these factors will change over time based on your level of ethics so that was our management screen now let's go to production and distribution so here we're going to identify the price of our desks and we can enter that price here we can change the price every period of the simulation if we like and experiment with different pricing but this is where we would enter the price of our desk by the way you'll notice there's orange question mark buttons are available throughout the simulation and by clicking those you'll find more information that's very helpful for you in terms of identifying what all the choices are i'll also notice here that there's a dealer discount of 20 that means the person or the organization that is helping me resell this product is getting a 20 margin on my 150. so when the product retail selling price is 150 that means that's what the consumers pay is paying for the product i'm not going to get 150. i'm going to get 150 minus the 20 percent so i'm only netting 120 dollars in revenue per sale in the production and distribution box i have to identify how many desks i think i'm going to sell this year and i would enter that information in this box and what i want to do here is i want to forecast exactly how many desks i want i think i'm going to sell i don't want to manufacture more desks than i'm going to sell because that has other costs and issues associated with it which you'll see here like inventory carrying costs and so on and it also ties up my cash i also don't want to manufacture too few desks because then i might miss out on sales where consumers want my desk but i've run out of inventory so this is a very difficult decision and the what-if calculator we looked at earlier can help us do some of that forecasting the market reports that we looked at earlier can also help us identify how many desks we think we might be able to sell and at what price i'm going to enter 7000 here for now and you'll notice the total costs are automatically calculated and i have to keep in mind of what my budget is so i can use my smartphone to help with that because there's a little budget app icon here and you can see as i'm spending money the remaining budget will appear in the list so that's what we're going to enter here for production distribution let's move on to research and development so research and development allows us to differentiate our product or our desk in the marketplace keeping in mind that there are other businesses competing with us and they'll also be making decisions here as well and none of us are going to be able to be the best at everything so we have to identify which type of consumers do we want to go after the most so i can see here style is one way i can differentiate my desks size of the desk composition of the desk features of the desk and so on so by default everybody starts with the same settings in this case i have utility very small particle board maybe i want to make a medium-sized desk but notice if i choose a medium-sized desk there might be costs associated with switching retooling and other costs associated with switching to that medium-sized desk and but i'm going to do that i'm going to go ahead and do that i can also change what it's made of so particle board tends to be cheaper materials but maybe i want to do hardwood which will again increase the cost and the value of the desk so there's a variety of choices i can make here to differentiate my product in the marketplace and again if i'm not sure what these choices are we've got a little question mark help buttons you can click to find out more detail
let's move on to sales and marketing so in sales and marketing we identify the territories that we want to sell into and how much money we want to spend on promoting our products our services and building our brand and our brand equity and here everybody i'm competing with starts in the domestic territory or it might be named something different for you so all the territories that could be named by countries or continents or cities or regions could be very different based on your particular simulation but in my case i have a domestic territory and then two expansion territories and by default all of my desks are being distributed in the domestic territory i'm not distributing in the other two territories and your simulation will be similar in that you won't necessarily be expanding in other territories unless you choose to do so so i can choose to distribute maybe in the second territory keeping in mind there may be costs associated with doing so when i do make that decision i'm able to choose how many of my desks i wanted to distribute to each territory the boxes on the left the overlays on the left allow me to monitor how much money i'm spending in sales and marketing in each area how much i'm distributing in each area and my overall brand equity in each territory or region in sales and marketing tab this is where i can identify how much money i want to invest in sales and marketing i can also apply a discount and promote that discount in order to increase my sales in the box on the right i can see my sales and marketing history now since i'm just starting the simulation there is no history but as i keep playing i'll be able to see and compare how much money i'm spending then we can move on to advertising if the advertising module is enabled in your simulation you'll see something similar to this where you would choose the territory and each of each territory that you're selling into you you would actually set the advertising option separately and then you can see different advertising options and what you would do is you have to set how much of your marketing money is going to go to each type of advertising option or media and it has to total 100 percent as you see here cannot leave the screen unless you distribute your marketing dollars 100 percent based on the media that you choose and the simulation will track your effectiveness on spending that money and you'll have to experiment to try to figure out how to maximize that effectiveness so that's sales and marketing then we can move on to hr now as we make decisions and invest money in different areas of our business so you can see on our phone where we're allocating our budget the number of employees we need in each area of the business will start to increase so with goventure ceo we're not managing individual employees instead we have five departments so production research and development sales marketing operations and management and the system tells us how many people we have employed and again since we're a new business we don't have anyone employed yet and how many employees we need so this is telling me that i need two production employees oh and look already i've run into some trouble because i do not have enough money to hire my employees so i have to go back to one of my other areas and reduce some of the costs i'm spending so for example i probably should reduce the number of desks i'm going to manufacture to 2000 and then now let's go back to hr so that frees up some of my money and remember the decisions are not locked in yet they won't be locked in until the decision deadline so i can come in here make decisions change decisions as often as i want up until that decision deadline once the decision deadline hits then i can't change anything everything is locked in so what's going to happen now is i'm going to adjust to how many employees i need and notice the numbers have changed as well so i actually need fewer employees and that's because i'm not manufacturing as much as i had said previously you can always have more employees although it may not make sense because you're spending extra money that you don't necessarily need or have and in fact i'm running out of money again but i'm able to hire all these employees so that's good now there's a few other things i can do here i can look at benefits and other incentives and rate i'm not investing any money in benefits and programs for my employees and what i can do is if i want to improve the compensation package of my employees i can add various benefits that you see here simply by checking check boxes on or off and that will provide those benefits to my employees on the main screen here i can see what the salaries are of my employees so in the production department the current salary i can see this is set by default at the beginning of the simulation is 60 000 and that's by the period so that's 60 000 and my period is one year if your period was monthly that would be the monthly salary and that doesn't include benefits or training or anything else that's the base salary now i can change that salary by using the buttons here if i want to increase or decrease the salary the salaries and overall competition package is actually competitive with the other businesses that you're competing with in the simulation competition so if you have a better compensation package than the other businesses you will find that your turnover rate might be lower turnover meaning how many employees leave your business every period the turnover rate will be lower for your business than others if you treat your employees better and low turnover has a lot of benefits including the fact that you don't have to hire and retrain new employees all the time and you don't have to worry about severance costs as much now every business is going to have some turnover so what you have to do is just try to manage to minimize that in terms of improving your profitability and so on now you can also train employees to improve their productivity and other metrics and you can do that by following the directions on the screen and investing money in training each department of employees that you have and the simulation will track various metrics that you see along the top like morale productivity turnover rate and hr score and again you can view help to find out more details about these various metrics that you're tracked with and moving on to customers and competitors so here we have access to various reports and some of the reports may be free or others may cost money so you can see if i want to buy this report i have to pay five thousand dollars out of my budget for that report in fact i can see i don't have enough money to do that with my current settings but the reports can be very helpful so you should really consider when and how to buy those reports in fact the market overview report which was a free report that we looked at previously there's actually more details in the consumer profile reports here so i can pay to get more details in what was available in the free reports as i buy reports they will appear here in my available window now keep in mind that report data gets old so if i buy a report now in year one by year two year three some of that data is not going to be updated i have to buy the report again if i want to get updated data and then we have the finance area of the simulation and here we have access to various financial reports so these are financial reports of our own business these are all free so we have balance sheets profit and loss or income statements and a variety of other reports that makes it easier for us to understand how our business is doing financially and how well our decisions are working out for us in your simulation you may or may not have the option of loans and stocks loans allow you to borrow money which increases your budget so you can be more aggressive in your business than your budget might have allowed stocks allow you to raise money by selling shares or equity in your business also raising money to be more aggressive with your budget so these are two options that may or may not be available in your business so we've just completed one period in terms of making the decisions we can go back and adjust things so if we want to have some more money available to pay our employees we can reduce our production or our r d or other decisions like that but before we quit what we need to do is we need to save our simulation very important that you save so remember you have to save before the decision deadline and you can save as often as you want now when i first come in here i can see that the simulation has not been saved and what i can do now is i can click the save now button and if the save is successful you will see a message that confirms that very important that you look for the success message sometimes you'll get a message that will tell you that the save was not successful the save may not be successful if you are missing some key decisions for example if your strategy journal is required but you have not completed it or if you needed a certain number of employees but you didn't hire the minimum required the simulation will not save your decisions you'll get a message warning you that your decisions are not saved because you have to go back make some adjustments before you can save your decisions i can see now i've got a green save message so i'm good to go and i can see when the decision deadline and everything else that's going to come so now i can log out of the simulation knowing that my decisions have been locked in i can revisit relog into the simulation anytime to change those decisions if i want again as often as i want up until the decision deadline i can also access other features like calling one of my vp so as you navigate to different areas of the business for example as i navigate to products i have a vp of products or a vp of operations and i can call them by clicking the call button and ask for advice and these are just virtual characters that can give us advice along the way we also have a text messaging system where you'll get messages or events happening in the simulation you can also post messages for other players to see almost like think of it like posting a news release or other information this is a one to everyone message so in other words everyone's going to see the messages that you post here including your instructors so you want to be careful to make sure that the messages are are appropriate for everyone and you can review your performance here as well now since we just started the simulation we don't have any performance data but when the decision deadline comes the data results will be created and i can log back in and see my results and we'll look at that in a moment you'll also see these icons these are achievements that we can earn every period of the simulation they're explained in more detail in the performance report which we'll look at in a moment and then finally we have a language selector so you can use that to change the language of the interface and this uses machine translation so the translation is not perfect but it can be very helpful if english is not your first language so what we're going to do now is we can log out so we can click on menu and stop playing this particular simulation and then when the decision deadline comes the simulation will advance it will take my my decisions and everybody else's decisions that i'm competing with and crunch them together and determine the results so the next time i log in we're going to see results okay so the simulation has advanced let's go and play after the decision deadline has passed you'll be able to log in and see your results so let's join the same simulation again and we can see a message now that the simulation has advanced the next period and we'll be able to view the results under the news icon or app on the smartphone and this will tell us who had the most profit and most revenue for the period but then it guides us to our performance report which is here always available on our smartphone the performance report shows us charts and graphs of how we did and it compares our metrics to everyone else that we're competing with revenue profit market share achievements inventory everything you need to know about your business is available in this report and you should use it and assess it and analyze it closely to get better prepared for making decisions in the next period so my simulation has now advanced to year two it's paused at the beginning of year two with a new budget my budget is now reset and i can now allocate that budget to different areas of my business now some other things you should notice in the performance report we have our advisors that are going to give us advice we should read that advice every period see what they say we also have access to a coaching report the coaching report assesses our strategy and gives us really great advice as well in terms of understanding how our simulation is working out for us or business decisions are working out for us we also have access to rubric reports so the rubric report is often how your instructor is going to assess you and so you can monitor what some of that assessment is in real time while you play the simulation so the simulation now you can see at the bottom it's now year two it has reset i have a new decision deadline for year two so i have to make sure i make and save my decisions for year two before that decision deadline and i can navigate the simulation using the same buttons as before adjusting and making my decisions as i go along and try to improve the success of my business so that's go venture ceo there are more videos and user guides available for you to learn more about the intricacies of the simulation and the help inside the simulation technology will help you with that as well i encourage you to look at all of those resources so you can improve your results and good luck and go venture