Bizcafe summaries for Portfolio PDF

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Summary

This was part of the bizcafe project where we had to write a summary of our choices, why we made them, and what we learned....

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Personal Reflection Bizcafe has helped me gain a new-found appreciation for anyone involved in the business industry. After working with Bizcafe for 9 weeks, I have learned the ins and outs of running a business and how the smallest decisions can largely affect a business. The first week of Bizcafe was the hardest, I did not have a great strategy, my main focus was on increasing revenue, so I would opt for every kind of advertisement and my prices were one of the highest. I did not keep in mind that my expenses would sky-rocket and for a lot of the simulation, my cumulative net income was greater then everyone else’s. This strategy made it so that I was extremely behind in my city. After realizing that my strategy wasn’t really working for me, I decided to take a look at what my industry was doing and that really helped me to increase my results over the next weeks of the simulation. The most important thing that I learned from Bizcafe is that when it comes to running a business, you have to have a clear goal but to keep in mind how certain decisions made can affect your business negatively.

Start-up and Week One My start-up decisions and week one decisions were made around the same as the rest of my group members, as we wanted to see how our decisions would affect each city differently. I decided to go with used furniture to keep costs low since we were looking to purchase the auto-four coffee machine. My week one decisions included hiring 6 employees, 2 managers and 4 servers. I paid my servers $0.23 and my managers $25 above what was stated on the local labor report so as to not stress my employees. My hours were from 7am-5pm from Monday to Friday as I assumed there would not be many customers coming in after that. I bought the $0.50 Off online ad and the 10 spots/day radio ad to increase my brand awareness and bring in as many customers as possible. As for the special decision, I opted to purchase the $500 insurance to protect my business in the case of any accidents.

Week Two For the second week of the simulation, I made changes to better improve my results from week one but my decisions were all reset and so unfortunately, no changes ended up being made.

Week Three

After last weeks poor results, I decided to make drastic decisions to attempt to reverse the effects caused by my week two problem. I hired one more manager because I decided to open on weekends and I also hired 11 more employees to try and increase customer satisfaction. I increased my weekday hours from 7am-5pm to 7am-9pm because after looking at the competitors in my industry, I realized that the longer you were open, the better the chance of customers coming to your café. My weekend hours were Saturdays from 8am-7pm and Sundays

from 8am-6pm. I changed my coffee quality from “Good” to “Organic” to increase my sales and also customer satisfaction and I increased my prices to $4.00 due to the change in coffee. I dropped the online ad because I noticed that it was not attracting customers as much as the radio ads and also because I had to keep my expenses low. In regards to the special decision, I decided to have a training session because it was cheaper than purchasing the training session and would be equally as effective at increasing customer satisfaction and I also thought it would help my employees more than the “On the job” training.

Week Four After last weeks results I realized that my strategy in hiring more employees and changing the coffee quality worked extremely well in increasing my revenue and customer satisfaction, so I decided to continue on the same path. I increased my weekday hours so it would be open at all available times of the day because I thought that this would increase the number of customers coming in and increase the sales and increased my weekend hours from 8am-7pm and 8am-6pm to 8am-9pm . I hired two more servers so that my servers per hour would be higher to cope with the increase in hours and increase customer satisfaction even more because my employees would not be stressed. I also purchased 5,000 small and large cups, because I did not think that we would run out in the amount of time that was left in the simulation and I charged $3.49 and $4.49, respectively and basing the prices on what I was charging for my medium cups. After last week, my cumulative net income was still pretty high so I decided to save costs wherever possible. I decided to lower my radio ads from 10 spots/day to 5 spots/day and I decided to go with purchasing the baked goods from the bakeshop at $1/unit because I thought that going with the oven was an unnecessary expense since we did not have that much time left in the simulation and it would end up costing me more.

Week Five This week, I decided to increase my hours on Saturday from 8am-9pm to 7am-11pm because I wanted to keep my hours similar to the hours of my city’s competitors and I also expected that it would increase sales. I only increased my Sunday hours to 8am-10pm because my sales on Sundays were usually much lower then the other days and I thought that increasing the hours y a lot would just result in me having to pay my employees more with a minimal increase in sales. I also noticed that my brand awareness did not increase by much in the last week, so I decided to increase my radio ads to 10 spots/day hoping that this decision would also attract more customers. As for the special decision, I decided to purchase the duo express maker because I was about half way done in the simulation so the extra expense did not seem reasonable and also because I already had the Auto-four coffee machine. I also decided to rent the additional space thinking that it would generate more sales and increase customer satisfaction. Week Six This week I decided to make it so that my hours for the entire week were from 7am – 11pm, to increase customer satisfaction since some customers had complained about the inconvenient

hours in the customer survey. I decided to hire another server to keep my server per hour number high. I also decided to lower my expenses by bringing my radio ad slots back to 5 spots/day. I lowered the prices for all my coffee sizes, because I noticed that mine were very high compared to the other cafes in my industry. For my special decision, I purchased the coffee roaster to increase sales and ambiance that was set low in the customer survey.

Week Seven This week I kept my coffee purchase the same (105 lbs) because I wasted some of it (6 lbs) in the previous week and my sales were not increasing extremely fast. I also hired 7 more servers, to keep them from becoming stressed and increase customer satisfaction and hopefully sales as well. I kept my prices the same but increased my radio ads again to 10 spots/day to increase my brand awareness. I decided to go with the more expensive option of the radio show offer, because I wanted my employees to be stress free and I also did not want to take the chance of the other options not benefiting my café as much.

Week Eight This week, I hired two more servers because one had quit in the previous week and I also increased their wages by $0.20 ($13.60) which was a little higher than the local average. For the special decision, I decided to just fire the problem employee because I did not want them to negatively affect my customer satisfaction and cause the rest of my employees unnecessary stress.

Week Nine For this week I kept a few of decisions the same because I was happy with the results from the last week. I increased my managers wage from $905 to $908, to keep up with the local average and keep my managers from becoming stressed or unhappy. I decreased the prices of my small coffee from $3.20 to $3.05, medium coffee from $3.75 to $3.50 and my large coffee from $4.35 to $4.05 because I noticed that my prices were one of the highest between the other cafes in my city. I also decided to request that the irate customer leave because he was creating a scene in the café which would have caused my customer satisfaction and overall employee morale to decrease....