Hey there, I'm Mathew Georghiou, the lead designer of GoVenture. I'm really excited to tell you about GoVenture Entrepreneur! It's the most realistic and comprehensive small business/startup operation simulation ever created. We've been designing business simulations, and financial simulations and all sorts of simulation for over 20 years we've invested millions of dollars in building, testing, and refining our simulations and GoVenture Entrepreneur represents a culmination of everything we've learned over these years serving millions of players around the world, of all ages and thousands and thousands of educators/instructors, who use our simulations as part of their curriculum.
Let me tell you about GoVenture Entrepreneur. GoVenture Entrepreneur is made for people of all ages, because we have different levels of progression within the simulation, so people can progress to the level of comprehensiveness that fits their profile or your curriculum as an instructor. So we start with everyone with a lemonade stand, and then they level up to a kiosk or mobile truck, and then they run a full business and potentially franchise their business. Let me show you each of these steps very quickly.
The lemonade stand simulation is a great starting point because not only does it help you learn the fundamentals of business, but it also serves as a tutorial for the kiosk and full business, so when we start each level of business we actually have a walkthrough tutorial that walks us through naming our business, choosing a logo for our business and then following a variety of steps, which I am going to go through very quickly here just to save us some time.
So I'm going to choose a design for my kiosk and we start off with a certain amount of cash we can see in our smartphone, and now the walkthrough tells us to buy 20 of each of these ingredients that we need to make our lemonade. Let's go ahead and do that, so we've got some inventory now we've got to set the recipe for our lemonade. We can go sweetened lemony or sour and watery, it's somewhere in the middle. Of course, the customers like sweet and lemony better but that costs us more to make. We can monitor our cost of goods here, so now we've got our recipe let's set our price, we can set all sorts of prices. of course if we set our price too high we might lose customers if we set it too low we won't make enough money.
All these challenging decisions we have to make in running a virtual businesses are the same as a real business, and now that we've got our price, our inventory, and a recipe! Let's open a business! here we go, we can watch customers coming ti our lemonade stand, and I have to mix the lemonade. Let's go ahead and do that as quickly as possible to make sure we can keep up with these customers, and we can see little icons that represent the customer feedback that we're receiving whether customers are happy or unhappy or somewhere in between and you can also see little icons to the side that represent things that our customers are thinking about in terms of our pricing and our speed of service and so on.
Now, I've actually run out of inventory. I've run out of inventory, which is one of the challenges of running a businesses and customers are still coming, but they're not going to be very happy in a moment because they cannot order lemonade from us. So this is a daily animation, the simulation will run for about a minute or so, you can see I was making sales and missing sales and monitoring what was with our customers and now we have our results for the end of the day. So I can see how many customers I've served, how many I've lost, how many products I've sold, my sales revenue, CoGs, gross profit, gross profit margin, and if I had too much inventory I might end up having it damaged or spoiled so that forces me to make sure I can forecast accurately in order just enough inventory to serve all my customers but not have too much left over. So you can see even this very simple simulation of running a lemonade stand there is some deep business concepts happening in a very basic experience and you may be thinking now well how do we know what gross and CoGs means if this is our first time learning about business, well what we actually have built into the simulation microlearning modules.
There are over 140 microlearning modules that cover every aspect of business, you can see them here and instructors can pick and choose which of these modules they want to make available to your students. They can click on the subject and then watch a short video, every module has a short video, generally it's only one or two minutes long. Very brief! You watch the video, then you do a review and reflect on what you just watched in the video and then you do a short quiz and you are scored with one or two stars, if you complete the quiz and every single module it is aggregated together to create an overall score. This is all automated, so a lot of the things that instructors have been doing in terms of lecturing in class and specific topics is already built into the simulation, and you could choose to use the resources in the simulation. Again, there's over 140 microlearning modules, it takes several hours to complete them all and students can go in and out of the microlearning while they're playing the simulation to learn the specific concepts that they may not completely understand in the simulation itself and then you also have the instructor resources like printable activities, that you could also assign as a part of the experience.
Now we've completed our first day of our lemonade stand simulation and now it resets to the second day, you can see we're on Day Two in our smartphone here, and we can make our decisions all over again. So we can go to the grocery store, purchase inventory, we can adjust our recipe and experiment with the sweet and lemony and sour and watery and we can experiment day after day and eventually as we become more successful and we can more cash we gain more profit we'll be able to start a second lemonade stand in a different part of the neighbourhood and then eventually a third lemonade stand in a different part of the neighbourhood. Because we can't be two places at once, we'll have to hire employees (our virtual friends) to run our individual lemonade stand so we're essentially franchising our lemonade stand business.
So you could play this game, this lemonade stand for many hours and have much learning and much fun just in this basic experience. But we're only just getting started, let's move on to the next level, and while we move on to the next level, let me show you something else that's really cool. We have global leaderboards, so students at any time actually go to the global leaderboards and compare their performance to the best in the world and our global leader boards are anonymous which means that students names cannot be seen. So you don't have to worry about privacy but students can see their own names and instructors can see their student names as well, so it's an amazing opportunity for students to compare their performance to the best in the world and by the way, what you're looking at here is the student dashboard.
From this dashboard, this is the online version from the student dashboard. Students can actually play an unlimited number of simulations, so you can assign students as an instructor to play many simulations, different business types and so on. Okay, so now we've leveled up to our Kiosk Business similarly to the lemonade stand simulation, we also get a walkthrough tutorial for the kiosk business, and we were playing out lemonade stand and running out lemonade stand business in this upper left area of the city. This is actually the neighborhood we're in, where my mouse pointer is. But now we've graduated up to the rest of the city, so we've got a bigger market for our kiosk business. Alright, so this is really cool. You have different business types that students can choose from. You can choose ice cream, costume jewelry, hot dogs, tacos, popcorn, clothing, electronics, and we continue to add new businesses as we go. So let's go ahead and choose ice cream as the initial one, and here we can choose our name and logo again. We're going to call it Icee, and choose this logo which looks like ice and then we can choose the design for a kiosk and a location for our kiosk and you'll notice now we actually have five different locations in the city where we can run our business, and we can bring up consumer profiles and now we're getting into much more depth here in understanding marketing, location, and consumer psychographics and demographics where we could see information about our customers, and the traffic pattern so we can understand what times of the day might be best to run our kiosk business as well so you can see we're getting much more comprehensive now than the lemonade stand business. So let's go ahead and choose the shopping center for our first location and we can also again choose a design for our kiosk. Let's choose the green one, now the other thing to know about the city is that once I become successful with my first kiosk I'll be able to start a second kiosk in one of the other locations that we saw a moment ago and eventually I'll be able to start a third kiosk and the third kiosk is a mobile truck and that mobile truck usually moved to different parts of the city every single day based on weather. You can see the weather up here, other factors that you might consider what's going on in the city and try to maximize your sales and profits so let's go back to our company screen the other information we have here is our founder information. So we can see our health so this simulation both the kiosk and the Full Business actually tracks how many hours we're working and we work too much then that can impact our health and we also have the option of doing a one-page business plan and journaling about our business. Some instructors like students to journal about their business and then present their experience as part of their assessment you can do all that built into simulation. We can see information about finance and legal. So now what we have to is: we have to go to our products and we can see our products so the kiosk business has three products, while lemonade stand only had one. Now we have three, and if we go to full business you could potentially have dozens of products. So here we have ice cream sundae, ice cream cone, and ice cream bar. We can see the inventory items that are needed to make the ice cream. Various other metrics that we haven't got any information yet because we haven't started yet, we can adjust our selling price for each of the three products at any time and it allows up to experiment with pricing and profitability. Here's our inventory items and we can see how many we have and how they're being aged over time and if we hold inventory for a long period of time and the quality actually degrades so very realistic, and in this simulation we have three suppliers to choose from we have low low which is low price, lower quality, ingredients we have all good high price highest quality ingredients, and value mark which is somewhere in the middle and to order more inventory we simply choose our supplier. We can see how many we have and how they're being aged over time and if we hold inventory for a long period of time its quality actually degrades, so again, very realistic. In this simulation we have three suppliers to choose from: we have Low Low which is low price, lower quality ingredients, we have high price, high quality ingredients and we have the value option which is somewhere in the middle. To order more inventory we simply choose our suppliers, we can see what the supplier offers and then we choose a quantity of each item to offer. We can also do a quick click here or in the quantity discounts. Let' go ahead and place that order and our order arrived immediately. In the Kiosk simulation it arrives immediately, but when we move up to full business it takes time to arrive.
So now we have our inventory, let's just go to operations for now and set our time so we can choose what time to start working and what time to finish working. Now since I'm in the shopping district I'm probably going to start a little bit later, let's go 11am and stay a little bit later as well into the evening because I think people will be shopping later. Remember we had customer psychographics and demographics information that we could use to understand traffic patterns and other information based on our location, so let's go ahead and open for business now a similar lemonade stand we can now see our customers coming into our kiosk and now unlike lemonade stand we can now see our customers coming into our kiosk and now unlike lemonade stand I don't have to click anything to mix any product instead here I should focus more on what's happening and every time you hear that ding that means there's a sale. Every time you hear a little bloop that's actually a missed sale for some reason and I can monitor my customer feedback and remember we have these little icons that gives us even more insight into what customers are thinking so an icon that appears on the left hand side of the moji is something that's negative. It's a negative feeling and something appears to the right is a positive feeling and we're not getting a lot of positive feelings here so far but I can see things like this little purple clock which tells me my service is too slow, this is all in the user guide by the way where you can find out more information about this now. At the end of the day we can see how many customers were served and lost, products sold, and sales revenue. It's very similar to lemonade stand. We have the same information here, damaged and spoiled inventory items and now the simulation resets to the next day we can see Tuesday, day two, and I can now play the simulation for as many days as my instructor allows me to play and the instructor with the online version can control how many days you want students to play now, as I continue to run my business. I'll eventually need to hire employees and here we have multiple have employees with really great experience but also costs more and I can mix and match which employees I want to work and as I run multiple kiosks I can have different employees at different kiosks helping me run the business. I can also conduct marketing, so if I want to increase the number of customers coming to my business I can conduct advertising. I can invest in signage and adherence. I can also improve the quality of my products in addition to the ingredients, I can have better packaging and other things like that to improve that then we have a finance area as well where we can see our payables, our receivables, we can see our seed financing and then our reports where we can access everything that we need to be successful. Now one of those things I didn't show you with lemonade stand is our performance report. So here it is in Kiosk and the performance report gives us a quick snapshot of how our business is doing and not just with a couple of metrics, but with a whole bunch of detailed information and analysis. So we can see the summary information in terms of our skills and revenue and so on. We can see each of our business locations and how the financials compared to each location and then we have our skill score and our skill score in kiosk is made up of 10 different metrics in which we're measuring actual behaviour and decision making in the simulation. So it's not just profit, it's actually how well you are generating revenue and your profit margin and your health and the customers they're serving and the customers satisfaction. You can even see inventory spoilage so it actually measures behaviour and scores on every one of these metrics and rolls them all up into what we call a skill score. The lemonade stand looks similar to this except there's only two metrics in the skill score because we're keeping it simple. It's an introductory level as we move up to the full business it's going to be even more comprehensive than this and then look at all these reports that we now have access to balance sheet. Great looking balance sheet very easy to follow, very easy to understand, very much like a real world balance sheet. Income statement is the same idea, all these amazing reports, cash flow, we can even look at things like customer feedback and see what kind of positive and negative feedback we're getting everything we'd ever want to know is available in these reports and if you're reaching accounting we even have general ledger and general journal.
Let's start our full business similar to the other business types. We have a little walkthrough that builds upon what we've already learned in the lemonade stand and then kiosk business and we can now choose business type so we have casual restaurant, we have a fitness gym, we have a sandwich restaurant, we have a cafe, we have a mexican restaurant, we have a pizzeria, we have an ice cream parlor, a department store, an automotive shop, and more businesses coming.
Let's go ahead and just choose a casual restaurant to start and the business types have three levels of difficulty, so you could assign a more basic experience for students, or the much more advanced experience and the casual restaurant is one of those advanced experiences because it has so many products and inventory items we have to manage. So similar to other businesses we have to name our business, lets call it MCD and then we'll choose a logo and our location. So we have three different locations and again we have to look at consumer profiles to understand consumer psychographics demographics and traffic patterns in different areas of the city. Now let's choose the main street location, so we're going to do that and you can notice now it's a much bigger city as well, so much more traffic and many more customers available. So then we go to the operations and you'll notice our walkthrough is stepping us through everything that we need to do here, so it's pretty simple. So we have to choose a site for our business, and lets go ahead and choose the economy site. The site has different rents, different leaseholds, different capacities and we can upgrade our site as we go along. We have different equipment that we have to buy,a nd again we have different levels of equipment, different pricing whether it's new or used, and maintenance costs. Let's go ahead and choose out starter equipment and then we can set our schedule, so this is where we would set the operational hours for our business. We can actually control the operations every single day of the week and when we hire employees we'll be able to schedule them individually every single day of the week. It's incredibly granular and detailed. We have all sorts of startup documents and decisions so the students are aware and introduced to this concept of starting a business means you have to do business registrations, tax IDs, permits, and fire inspection. Now we don't go into much detail into any of these, it's just to introduce students to understand that these are things they need to consider and then you as an instructor can take a deeper dive in these particular areas if you feel it fits your curriculum. We have much more detailed financial information here, in fact we have payables and receivables here. You actually have to pay your bills. In the other two simulations (lemonade stand and kiosk) all of your bills were automatically paid out of your cash, but here you can manage your cash flow even more granularly by choosing what to pay and when to pay it. You can see here I can put maybe 25% down or 50% down, or 100% down on each particular bill that I want to pay. This allows me to manage my cash flow much better now. Of course I can't go too long without paying my bills because eventually I'll go bankrupt. I do have to pay my bills and I'll be forced to pay them at some point but I can defer the bills but there are consequences to deferring payment because we have a reputation metric in which you're measured and part of that reputation metric is how quickly you pay your bills. So let's keep going here, alright so now we have a clock so this is the other cool thing about the full business simulation: in the lemonade stand in the kiosks the clock was stopped you had as much time as you wanted to make your decisions for the day and then you clicked the button to open for business here we actually have a running clock so now there's a real sense of urgency in the student in the learner just like real business owners. They don't have all day to do the things they want to do and you have to manage things based on this time so everything works based on this clock so if you set that your business is going to open at 9am. When 9am hits your business opens customers start coming if you're going to close at 6pm, business closes at 6pm, customers can't come anymore and you can control the speed of the clock. We have a little slider here, you can also click on the clock to control the speed so you can have the clock running faster at certain times when you're making sales for example and slower when you're doing things like reviewing your financials and your reports and ordering inventory and so it allows you to control that time really effectively and don't get through the simulation. This one takes about two hours to do a month in business, some students will get through it faster, some will get through it slower, but generally two hours for a month in business. So let's take a look at some of the other aspects of our business. So our products notice how many products now we're running a casual restaurant we've got all sorts of products. Every product can be priced differently! So you can see here I can set the price, I can see what every product is made of which means I have to manage my inventory and notice a lot more inventory items to manage here we have different suppliers a lot more suppliers to choose from and not all suppliers offer all products so for example let's say I want to have premium quality meats and artisan breads. I can choose this supplier which specializes in those particular items and so I can mix and match my ingredients in my inventory to match the type of business that I want to offer because I can choose to offer a lower cost quick serve type restaurant in this particular example, or a more premium high-cost type restaurant experience. So, I can individually choose where I want my business to be once I order inventory so now only choose a supplier and quantities but also shipping because the inventory doesn't arrive immediately. So I've got to schedule all that and manage my time properly. Lets jump over to employees and here we can look at job applicants and you see we have many job applicants with different levels of work experience and education. In fact, if I take a deeper dive in any particular one I can interview them by looking at specific skills that they offer and I can negotiate salary offers with the employers so let's go ahead and make a job offer for this employee. Now notice that she has an expected salary of $20, so I'm going to match that. So she accepted my offer, now she's my employee and I can see her morale and other information here. I can also implement benefits like health insurance, dental insurance, or paid sick time and of course everything has a cost associated with it and I'm going ot make sure I can afford to pay my employees these things and then I can move on to training so as. have multiple employees I can invest in training them which will increase their experience and their skills, and so that's another aspect of this simulation, and why it's so incredibly detailed. We can review HR reports to see how employees are doing and of course, if employees aren't working out I can let them go and try to replace them with new employees but I have to consider all the money I invested in training as well so there's a real balance of what has to happen here. We can also have an incredibly detailed marketing experience where students can monitor their business reputation, their advertising effectiveness, and then can implement various programs for signage and appearance, customer service product, quality market research, implement a sale, conduct advertising in terms of product, brand advertising, sales promotion and discount advertising. We can review all sorts of customer information here and then before we can advertise we have to define our targeting message and media just like in the real world of marketing. Here I can identify the consumer groups that I'm going to target, I can also identify the keywords I'm going to include in my messaging my advertising that will hopefully resonate with those particular customers and the media that I'm going to use to distribute my message. Whether it's TV and video, an event, sponsorship, or social media. The cool thing here is as i make selections because not all these selections are going to be the best. For example, if I choose specific keywords as I run my business I'll get feedback that will tell me whether I'm on target with the right keywords that I'm choosing here, for example let's say I'm having a quick serve type business. It's not really a gourmet business. Then maybe using the word gourmet may not be the right term to use to reach my particular consumers and so the simulation is smart enough to know which of these terms matches the consumers you're targeting based on your decisions in the business. SO incredibly detailed! Back to financing. We've got our payables, our receivables, we've got to look at our payroll. We have our seed financing, and we have loans. We can actually take out loans and pay interest on the loans to help grow our business, we even have stock we can sell shares to investors and then our responsibilities to pay dividends. Dividends is a percentage of profit to those investors. So we can grow our business through debt or equity financing and similar to kiosk all sorts of detailed reports available here as well so students can access everything they need. Detailed performances reports with very detailed metrics and skill scores measured. We hope you'll give it a try since it's an amazing learning experience.
There is truly no better way for anyone to learn how to start a business and manage a business than using a simulation, and we think GoVenture Entrepreneur is the best simulation for that. It's equally good for instructors and facilitators because we provide you everything you need to make this an amazing learning experience for you and your students. We have a very comprehensive instructor guide with ste-by-step details and videos for everything you need to know. We have an instructor dashboard if you're using the online version of the program where you can actually customize specific aspects of the simulation. We have microlearning where you can actually customize specific aspects of the simulation. We have microlearning as I've shown you. We've got a over 200 pages learning activity book in .pdf format that provides the fundamentals of everything students need to know about business. It's a great reference guide! We also have over 50 printable lessons and activities which you could either print on paper, or actually do as a .pdf input forms. We have many videos to supplement the learning that's happening, if you want to take a deeper dive in any particular area, videos that we've sourced from TEDtalks and Stanford University and various other sources around the internet. We have built in assessments, all automated. We have award certificates, we have user guides, basically everything that an instructor needs to implement this in any curriculum. Whether is a short curriculum or a full course, you can make GoVenture work for you. Finally, I think you'll also be quite surprised at how affordable GoVenture Entrepreneur is.
Regardless of what your course and program needs you're going to find an option that works for you. I encourage you to find our more about Goventure at GoVenture.net
Thanks for watching.
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