Before you even think of starting a company, make sure you have a group of people interested in following you. There is nothing worse than sitting alone in an underperforming company, plummeting towards bankruptcy. A company requires a strong force of loyal employees that can adequately fit the roles required.
Choosing the right position for the right employee.
This is really a trial and error exercise. Every single company is unique, and it may take many weeks to find the perfect setup which produces the optimal amount of daily income. Generally, you'll need to have a good mix. Having full efficiency is one thing, but harnessing that efficiency with the correct mix of job positions will launch your company into a whole new league.
Don't just copy what other business are doing, your perfect balance of positions will probably be different for your employees.
Determining employee pay.
Employees expect to be paid for working for you. You'll need to see what similar companies are offering their staff and try to match or exceed it.
A higher pay could make your employees take their jobs more seriously, which may reduce their drug habits or increase their activity. Dedicated employees who stick around will also produce higher profits due to the settling in bonus.Â
Daily reports.
You'll receive a report daily at just after 6pm TC time in the company's main news. This will provide you with the amount of profit you made that day and the number of customers you had. You can check more detailed information in the pricing section, which will tell you how many of each individual stock the company sold.
Upgrades.
Upgrading your company will be essential if you wish to compete with others. Company size, storage size and staff room size can all be upgraded 6 times above the base. The cost of the upgrades depend on the initial start-up cost of the company.
The company size is probably the most important upgrade. This will allow you to hold more employees. At stage 7 (the final stage), your company will be able to hold 2.5 times the amount of employees the starting size did.
The final stage of upgrades is only available to directors who have completed the bachelor of commerce.
Popularity bar.
The popularity bar has no impact on your company or your income. It is just an indicator for how you compare to other companies. 100% means you're the best performing company in the category.
A high popularity means you are generating more income per week than most other companies in the category.
When you first start a company, you will have 0% popularity. This will rise as you start to generate income.
Efficiency bar.
Efficiency is probably the most important bar to keep an eye on. This displays how efficient your employees are on average. Ideally, you'd want to keep this at 100% as much as possible.
The efficiency bar itself is capped at 100%, however the true value may be above this if you have over-performing employees. This may cloud the ineffectiveness of other employees however. In this case, you should resort to viewing their personal effectiveness and personal income reports provided by secretaries, receptionists, or similar job positions.
Efficiency will drop if employees are inactive or using drugs, but rise if they meet or surpass the stat requirements for their assigned job.
Users may also be slightly ineffective once they join a company, becoming settled in after just over a week.
Environment bar.
Drug users and inactives will lower your environment as well as efficiency. Buy bigger staff rooms or hire cleaners and managers to compensate. Cleaners will boost environment more, however do not help generate profit & employee effectiveness like managers.
Keep your employees satisfied by surrounding them with drug free colleagues who actually turn up for work. A lavish staff room wouldn't hurt either!
The amount of environment that is increased depends on Cleaner and Manager effectiveness.
A low environment can lower income by up to a third.Â
Having less employees than the maximum available will increase your environment very slightly as they will have more space to work.
Larger companies will struggle more to keep their environment high, but its not the end of the world if it drops slightly. You may find its better to keep an employee in a vital job position rather than making up a few environment points setting them to a cleaner or manager.
When you first start a company, you will have 100% environment. This will most likely decrease after your first working day.
Maintaining your stock and shipments.
Some companies will require stock to be purchased from retailers before you can begin to make a profit. You'll need to make sure you have enough stock to satisfy the demand. Upgrading your storage capacity can reduce how often you'll need to purchase stock.
Some companies instead create the stock onsite by setting employees to specialist job positions. These employees will create the stock which can be sold during the same day, any leftovers will appear and build up in the stock & shipments section until the maximum storage capacity has been reached.
Some companies will not need to purchase or make stock, and instead sell for example an Entry Fee or Ticket which can be infinitely sold.
Using secretaries for more detailed report.
Having a secretary or two (or similar job position) can really help you as a director formulate decisions about your company. At the end of the working day, secretaries will provide a report on every employee, estimating how much profit each one was responsible for. If your secretary is not fully effective, they may produce inaccurate results - in this case you can hire multiple secretaries to make sure that your reports are as accurate as possible.
Some job positions may appear to produce little profit but have other vital roles which boost other employees.
The detailed statistics will only be given for those who directly help to sell stock. Details will not be provided for positions that just make stock, or help in specific areas like advertising.
Pricing your stock & gaining customer loyalty.
Generally, you should price your stock slightly higher than what you bought it for, but you'll have to play around each day to find the perfect cost for your company. If your goods are priced below the RRP, you'll instantly gain more customers and start to gain customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is gained slowly over many months.
Advertising & Marketers.
Advertising is a daily fee which you can personally set. The company will put aside this amount each day to spend on advertising. Your company will be competing with other companies of the same type for customers, so you may need to constantly adjust your budget.
You'll need to work out what kind of budget is profitable for you, you may be missing out on opportunities or overspending. It is wise to put at least a small amount into your advertising budget each day.
Assigning marketers (or similar job positions) will boost your advertising campaign, sometimes considerably. It may be worth trying it out for a few days to see what the impact is.
Putting your foot down.
If your company is plagued by under qualified workers, drug addicts and inactives, why not assign some managers? Managers will increase the effectiveness of employees who are not meeting expectations. Every effective manager will decrease the missing effectiveness of all employees by 25%. For example, if an employee only has 60% effectiveness, a manager will increase this to 70%, a second manager would increase this to 77.5%, a third to 83.1%
Training employees.
Your company will receive an amount of trains equal to your rating. For example a 3 star company will receive 3 potential trains per day.
You use these trains on employees via the Manage employees section. This will give them a small boost to their primary and secondary recommended working stats.
You can also hire trainers (or a similar job position) which will increase the amount of trains your company receives each day depending on their effectiveness.
Get educated!
Many business management courses are available at the education campus. These can drastically increase your company's success. They'll boost your employee effectiveness, advertising abilities and productivity!
The bachelor of commerce will also unlock a final stage of upgrades for your company size, staff room and storage space.
Outside help.
Invest in the TC Media stock to gain a large boost in company productivity. Profits will spike by 10% upon having them in your back pocket. In addition to this, investing in Crude & Co will boost profits by a further 10% for Oilrig corporations.
Investing in Tell Group PLC will significantly increase how far your advertising budget goes. Certainly recommended when competing against rival companies for advertising space.
Busiest times.
Get to know your company well. Many will be busier and receive more customers on certain days of the week. For example, the Saturday report (which also contains Friday night) will be more positive for Pubs, Clubs & Restaurants. It might be wise to make sure you have everything running like clockwork for these days.
Communication with your employees & newsletters.
Its great to let your employees know how the company is doing from time to time. Reminding them that they're working in an active and profitable company will mean they're less likely to leave if they receive an offer from someone else.
If the company isn't doing so well, you can ask them to get into shape or face dismissal.
Company name & Image.
Branding is everything! Choosing a company name and image that is professional will attract employees. Don't use your company name as an advert for new employees, it makes you look sad and desperate.
You could hire an artist in the Graphics forums to make a company logo for you.
Selling your company.
At any time, you're able to instantly sell your company back to the system for 75% of what you've spent on it. This includes your start up cost, upgrades and purchased stock.
If you have a well-performing company, you may be able to sell it to an entrepreneurial player for more than you paid for it.