University of Dayton Emerging Leader Program - Business Simulation

Taking time to get caught up on my last couple sessions in the program....

I was able to attend only one of the two day sessions in the business simulation segment. Overall it was a helpful, game-style simulation around forming a company, setting a strategy, attracting employees and finding customers. The process revolves around matching people to your strategy, seeking customers in that category and generating your financial results.

For example, our team chose to go with a low debt structure, a small but highly trained team of people, specialized / niche type customers and to "stick to our guns". We led for the first 4 years of the simulation but found (as many niche type strategies do) that we literally ran out of room. We found that there were not enough niche customers willing to pay the higher service rate that our team was capable of providing. Our debt strategy held for the first four years as well until we had to reinvest in some money in higher training costs, etc. Our highly trained team could perform great work but we opted to retain 100% of the staff and ran out out of lower associates to take on more basic assignments.

We would have been better to take a loan earlier on (say in year 3) and bring on some lower associates in order to build capacity. This would have given us a larger range of people skills at various salary levels capable of generating an ever-wideing circle of revenue.

I was dropped into the team on day 2 and had to catch up quickly (just like the real world). Overall a great experience and I was able to take away some quick points to use at work.

Enjoying the program so far!