It all begun on a Thursday morning after we had been made aware of the impending adventure some few days back. We were seated in our lecture room when the Master of Simulation aka MS (yeah, just like in Master of Ceremony, MC) came to give us a brief introduction to the simulator hereby called Marketplace Live and set the rules for what will become a 7-day long business simulation exercise full of ups and downs.
On this day, we had a lecture on culture which was supposed to prepare us for building the culture of our virtual companies. It is said that, building the culture of your company is as crucial as your desire to see your company succeed (are you confused? Never mind am the only who says this).
But wait, something very interesting happened prior to the lecture on culture, it was the team formation. The MS selected 7 people hereby called buyers from amongst the 26 in class and gave them $1,000,000 to bid for the members of their team. This exercise exposed the miserly in the class. Though the money was virtual, some buyers were unwilling to spend (can you believe that). Eventually when the spending begun, guess how much a valuable human being was bidded for, $50,000 (he knows himself) and no one gave a counter bid. And so it happened that we all finally had team mates, some were in groups of 5, some 4 and others 3.
Day 2 which was a Friday started the whole game officially. All the teams by now had a name for their companies as well as all the culture. Company names included Pineloop, Horce Inc, Torus, Iris, AWC (aka AWotse Computers), AxiComm Inc and OakMac. I was the buyer for the Horce company and formed a wonderful team of 4 (you will see why we're wonderful later).
From day 2 to day 4, companies put in place strategies and investments into winning market share and having a good balance scorecard score.
Day 5, a Tuesday was the investor fair. Companies that needed capital injection could raise up to $4,000,000 to continue to push their companies into taking control of the micro computer manufacturing industry. My team needed to raise the maximum amount and so we participated in the investor fair. As at this quarter, our company had just 1% of the total market share, this position was a difficult one for us, we were not strong per our books to make a strong case for the investors to believe in us.
At the fair, our only point of argument was that we had a market research which no team had and so we could use this to soar up our market share by 15%. Though we spoke confidently, some investors did not believe we could salvage our current situation.
But funny enough when the time came for the real investments even though our books told a different story, out of the 6 investors present only 2 declined to invest in our company; can you believe that? A company that was in debt, had a meagre 1% market share and virtually had no proven industry expertise was able to raise 4 million dollars in investment! The excitement amongst my team members was just overwhelming.
But as the saying goes, don’t just talk the talk but walk the walk; and that’s exactly what we did. The next quarter did not only see us move from 1% market share to 16% market share (we predicted this, yes we did), but we were also out of debt, we had lots of resources at our disposal and most importantly we now had a deeper understanding of our industry and knew exactly what to do to grow from strength to strength.
Meanwhile on the other side, some teams were still gambling, others were neck deep in debt, while the rest wondered what the heck just happened to their market share! Well, business is like life itself, you think it's a game but then things get real and you realize it's no longer a game.
After Day 6 came day 7, the day for the announcement of the winners of the whole simulation exercise. To keep things short my team won (that is Team Horce). We emerged from the bottom to beat the top giants in the market. We were the black horses, yet we never despaired. Interestingly, the market giants at the start of the game now were market followers, some knee-deep in debt.
It was a week long of mixed feelings, frustration and happiness all bundled up in a “game”. It brought our emotions and joys of being an entrepreneur to reality. Virtual world or not.
Valuable lessons were learnt on business, risk and most importantly team work. That is after all the entrepreneurial life.
Thanks to: Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology, MEST 2015 year group, Kingsley Abrokwah (@Paapakwame) and Anirudh Narla.
