Uncle Fred is a great guy, means well, but really doesn’t mind screwing you over without you knowing. Let me help you get straightened out! This guide assumes you’re new to the game and running through the story campaign, but the advice given will apply across any game.
A fresh start in life
This guide is NOT an optimization guide. There’s others who talk about how to get the most out of every day and squeeze every dollar. This guide is what to focus on, things to look out for, and diving into some of the smaller details that will make a huge difference in your experience (and income).
I will be using the hard difficulty in story mode to walk through this. The advice given will help in any mode and difficulty, but if the numbers seem way off compared to your playthrough, this may be why. Also feel free to skip this first section if you’re have experience in the game. I’ll go over finer details in the next section.
So you get yourself into Manhattan and Uncle Fred starts to show you the ropes. Awesome! You get a place. Get a job. Get a car. Get an education. And most importantly you get to dip your toe into being a business owner!
Frankly you can stick to the tutorial until it talks about opening your second business! There’s a few ways to build up faster, but I won’t get into that (like getting your job a day early and getting the schooling done fast). Ultimately it works the same.
One thing I will mention is take the time to sit with the manager and just choose to cancel the conversation. This will add their contact to your phone. Furniture and business supply stores can deliver for a fee and that is worth it when you’re making money and your time is better spent doing something else. And when you get your fridge is the perfect time to visit the appliance store manager.
Something else to consider.
This bar at the top is your energy, hunger, and happiness. You need to maintain them. You need very little sleep for a full bar (about 6 hours from completely empty), hunger drains in about a day and foods fill it easily. It’s mostly a matter of making sure you get to them because there’s no warning about them as of this writing until they run out and start having issues (a surprise trip to the hospital isn’t fun). Lastly, happiness has a few effects, but long story short if it’s over halfway, you’re fine. You increase happiness with various things such as a possible income. But you might not realize you can buy and watch TV in your apartment or play a video game (you learn this in the story) to increase it. Along with walking in the park.
During your first and second day, you’ll likely have a good bit of down time. It’s the perfect time to visit this place.
Inside the school there are two classes. The basic class will get you able to hire employees. The other class will let you open more than one business. You’ll need to finish both, so put in several hours here in at least the basic now since it’s most critical. Even better if you can complete it. Also the school has specific hours (6am to 8pm), so trying to take classes late won’t work. You need 10 hours for the basic, 24 for the other.
Go to your job the next day (it’s a good idea to wake up around 7:30 so you have time to get there). Maybe spend a couple of hours after work to attend class. Whatever boats your float. Just get through two days of work. And don’t forget you need to eat and sleep!
Uncle Fred has a buddy at the local bank who helps you get a $15k loan. Cool! And he tells you to get a shop. Also cool.
This is a good time to look at the map a bit.
Yours will be a little different. But you’re introduced to the filters, looking for rental spaces. I also suggest ticking the Garment District one. And perhaps the other 3 neighborhoods. It highlights each on their own color. When you look at market trends later, this is how the districts are broken up.
For this first shop, we’re looking for in the Garment District (green highlighted area), with 75 square meters of floor space.
Here’s probably the best you could ask for!
Below the address are three import figures. The first with the cars icon is the traffic. 50 is fantastic! 40 is really good. Anything below that and you should probably look elsewhere. The second next to the square is the floor space. Pretty self explanatory and from what I’ve seen there isn’t anything smaller than 75 square meters. The third icon of people is how much capacity the building has. This is a critical value! What it means is you can never have more than that many customers per hour in that location. This isn’t so important for our first shop, but will be a big issue later on.
Follow the tutorial in getting the place and quitting your job, you lazy bum! By the way, double check your sleep and hunger about this time. Might need some attention. Along with all those alerts you just got. Let’s get your beater car first. Hopefully it’s a color you like. You could always restart the game and roll again if it’s that big of a deal since this is randomized. Hopefully yours isn’t green like mine!
Get the stuff for the shop. But there’s a few other things worth getting since you’ll need them later in the tutorial anyway. An extra round shelf, a storage shelf, a cleaning station, and a drinks fridge. Just a quality of life thing to grab them now and load them in the car.
Feel free to lay out your shop how you like. Here’s mine. You’ve got plenty of space and don’t have to try to cram it all tightly. I’m not particularly creative in interior decorating, so I’m sure you can do something nicer.
Go to the wholesaler. Assuming it’s open, get what you need to stock up (your objectives will say paper bags and cheap gifts, but don’t forget sodas if you got the fridge earlier). Steal the handcart just for fun. They won’t miss it. Stock up. Set your hours in the schedule for the shop. And get to running it for a couple of days. What hours should you run? Well, honestly 24 hours a day, 7 days a week is the best. But we’ll talk about that in a bit. You can always stick to less for now. The game will default to 8 hours. I have different plans.
Just work when you can. Eat and sleep as needed, feel free to look for fastfood or a supermarket to get food from. Maybe wrap up that basic class if you haven’t already. And ignore these people complaining about the interior design and lack of music. Or the notice of being open with no employees. We’ll cover that in the next section.
You’ll need to head over to the Anderson Recruitment Corp to start getting employees. Remember when I mentioned talk to the manager in the appliance store? Same idea here, except talking to a hiring rep will do the same thing in giving you a contact. This works the same at the other recruitment agency, but that’s geared toward your office positions, including your headquarters.
Get that first employee hired, set on a schedule and working for you! Because there’s one simple fact about this game. If you’re sitting behind a cash register, then you’re wasting your time. Do not be shy about hiring employees. You need them. A lot of them. And this is about the time to get into the next section…
The Gift Shop That Could!
Your first shop is setup, open, and running. You’ve got your first employee and you’re happy. But there’s a lot bothering you. Customers are complaining. They want music, they hate the ugly interior, the customer service is bad. Your employee is dropping in satisfaction as well. And you have the hours set by default, but you can’t help feeling like this isn’t the best. And while you can handle more customers, you’re just not getting them. It’s time to fix that! Also you’ll want to sort your first business out before considering opening another. Trust me, it’s a nightmare to manage two stores, much less more, that aren’t running themselves! So when you’re told to open a fast food restaurant in the story, it’s time to pump the brakes and revisit everything!
Let’s talk about your employees first. What you’ll want to do is start two campaigns with the hiring agency. Now that you’ve visited them, you can go to your contacts and call them during business hours. You’ll want to pick your shop, customer service, age group of 15-30, 10 candidates with 10 days to deliver. Why? Because you’ll get on average 1 candidate per day for the next 10 days and it only costs $500. And you’ll end up needing a lot of staff as you expand. This shop alone you’ll need at least 5 employees anyway.
The second campaign you want is for cleaning. You won’t need anywhere near as many cleaners, I tend to have 1 part timer for each shop with small places and it works great. But you still need them. Set it up the same as above with all ages, but for cleaners. You’ll waste a lot of the candidates being offered, but you’ll be able to pick and choose for lower pay rate and without annoying demands. Employee demands are covered extensively in other guides, but long story short, the fewer they have, the better. These campaigns can run at the same time and if you’re curious where they’re at, you can call and choose manage campaigns to find out what’s left on them.
Scheduling
So you’ll probably start with something like this if your first employee is full time.
Note to make sure she’s assigned to the cash register, NOT the cleaning station. There’s a few big issues here. First, I have the store open 7 days a week, which is good. But Scarlett here is set to work 8 hours a day for eternity. That’s 56 hours a week. She’s going to hate that real fast. So we need to lower that to keep her satisfaction up. How low? You can get away with 49 hours a week, or 7 hours a day for eternity. That’s much better!
But now the shop is only open 7 hours per day. Well, you can open it 24 hours still, and there’s no real reason not to other than to not get notifications. But you won’t make any sales without employees or yourself manning the register. That’s where hiring a lot of employees comes in. Oh, and make sure you assign uniforms to all of your employees. Customers will complain. This is as simple as going to the employee roster and selecting default for each one. But if you like, you can make your own uniform designs (note to change both male and female designs in that menu) and have them designated separately. For instance, I have a uniform type for the cashiers and another type for the cleaners, another for drivers, another for my office staff, etc. But it’s all flavor to have different ones and won’t affect your bottom dollar.
Music
This is a simple one, but stupidly annoying to figure out on your own. I’ll make it simple. You need a loudspeaker from the Ika store in the south.
There’s a couple of spots in the store with them. Here’s one here near the registers. Make sure EVERY store you own has one. That $80 investment is plenty worth it and plopping one down anywhere in the store will solve those complaints. I like to stick it right in a corner, but feel free to place it anywhere that doesn’t block displays.
Also Consider talking to the Ika manager near the entrance while you’re here for the contact. This enables deliveries from your phone.
Interior design
Customers will complain about the ugly interior and it shows in their satisfaction if you check on your business info.
Yeah, they’re not so happy. Now personally I don’t care how my shops look for now. I just want to make the money. So I pick the most expensive walling or flooring and stick a few tiles in. How many? It’ll matter by the size of the store mostly, but I notice going along one wall seems to be about enough for the small stores.
I’m too lazy to test any of it and not sure anyone has, but put some down and check the decoration satisfaction the next day.
Especially when they’re this ungrateful!
A second day after and that resolved it. Not sure why, but a small shop doesn’t need much. Even if it costs a couple thousand to handle.
Keeping Inventory
You’re running out of things to sell. It happens. Well, hopefully. It’s a good problem to have. But you need more stock. This is a good time to purchase a storage shelf from either of the appliance stores if you haven’t already. You’ll want at least 1 in every store and likely more than that in many places.
Uncle Fred is great, but while he sends you to the Metro Wholesale store, you’re much better served at NY Distro Inc a block south of there.
First off, way more variety and cheaper prices. Second, and you’re going to love this, you can drive in and load up your hopefully not green car, then pull through to the cashier and pay while in your car!
Alright, so you are at the distro and you don’t know how much you need. Or maybe you forgot what you need in the first place (seriously? We’re only selling three items right now!) But it’s okay. Go to Bizman and select your shop. On the Inventory & Pricing tab, you’ve got some info to work with.
Here’s an example of my shop right now. Yours will likely look a little different (maybe you didn’t start selling expensive gifts yet. That’s fine). Let’s break this down a bit. The column for how much was sold in the last 7 days will be critical in figuring out a good amount to keep in stock. Now one thing to keep in mind here is the shop hasn’t been open a full week (at least in my case) and so you’ll need to keep that in mind. In my case it’s been 5 days. But the math is simple for how much you sell each day. The total sold divided by 7 (or however many days if it’s a new store). In my example, I’ve sold, on average, 313 divided by 5 items per day on average. Or about 63 per day. So let’s say I keep in stock at least one case which is 200 for cheap gifts, I have no worries about running out of stock for a couple of days.
Except no. This is a new shop. Bad customer service, ugly floors and walls, no music, no marketing. As you get your shop better established, you’ll (hopefully!) sell more. So you’ll want to keep in mind a bigger buffer to have in stock until the place is mature.
Getting The Word Out!
There’s a mystical area of fantasy, fear, frustration, and fury. You’ll find joy in it, or outright rage. Often both. At least in real life you would, but Big Ambitions makes advertising super easy!
First off, you have two advertising agencies as of this writing.
Both are in Hell’s Kitchen. McCain’s eMarketing offers online advertising, which is cheaper, located to the southwest. And CityAds is to the northeast and offers billboard services, which are a bit heftier in fee. The cost is correlated with the price, so don’t be shy about ramping up accordingly.
You will want to visit both locations and just talk to a rep. Again, you only need to add them to your contacts on your phone and you can start new advertising with ease during business hours.
While at McCain’s, this is a good time to get some advertising started anyway. Let’s get a large internet campaign.
Check that out! Our marketing is nearly full and promotion is high.
We can just leave it there, but I’m going to call and add a small advertising campaign with it for just $100/day.
And now we have….
100%! Awesome possum.
If you get curious about your campaigns run or want to play around with them, you can do to the Marketing tab in Bizman for each store.
Bigger stores will need more advertising. That’s Where CityAds comes in (you did go over there and sit down to get the contact right?). Try to keep marketing at 100% when you have an established store. You’re doing yourself a disservice otherwise.
Building Up (or What Now?)
You’ve got an employee or two. You’ve got everything stocked, advertised, cleaned, musiced, and you’re making money. But it’s not enough.
Keep hiring more employees and get it running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You’ll need around 5, maybe more if you can’t get full time employees to have it running constantly. Don’t be afraid to give full timers anywhere from 31 to 49 hours and part timers 29 to 10. And keep the cleaner short on hours. A couple of hours a day is plenty to keep this small store clean. Here’s an example of what I have.
You can fine tune to make weekends different or whatever, but it’s not worth messing with in my opinion. But feel free to spend some time getting it setup how you like.
Customer service is going to stay pretty bad. And there’s not much you can do about it for now. You can take employees off the schedule for 24 hours and send them to train for a 10% increase. This is just not worth it right now. You need the store staffed full first. And then you can take additional workers and train them, then swap them in for the unlikable staff you still have in place. Or…well, we have a secret weapon known as HR Managers. But you need a headquarters for that and we’re not there yet. We will be soon, though. Either way, don’t fret about the customer service right now.
Watch your stock. You’ll sell more and some days sell more than others. Don’t let a drop in sales worry you. There’s a cycle to the week that I won’t cover here, but focus on one week being better than the last.
Don’t mess with prices! The Garment District is very price sensitive and increasing those gift prices a buck or two you can probably get away with, but more than that and you’re driving customers away. To me it’s just not worth playing around with, but something you can consider when you really want to squeeze that last bit out of it, which we’re nowhere near ready to worry about.
Essentially you want to be stuck doing one thing with your store: restocking. And you should only have to purchase the goods from the wholesaler and cart them into the back of the store. Let the staff stock the shelves. It’s what they do. Also feel free to run off with hand carts. And leave handcarts everywhere. Heck, leave them in the roadway to block traffic. Stick a few in the back of your car. You’re the king of this city and you can take whatever hand cart you want!
Consider finishing up your schooling. The Fundamental of Business Administration” class is 24 hours to complete and needed to open anything else up anyway. So it’s a good time to take classes while you have staff in the store. Once that’s done and the store is largely running itself, you’re ready to expand! Even if it’s not staffed at all times, as much as that’s ideal, we can move on. You might also consider running a second hiring campaign for more workers. Get twice as many candidates going!
The Second Store!
This is where the game really starts to open up. The second store is pretty critical in figuring out where you want to go. The two main ways to go are to open a different type of store in the same (or another) neighborhood. Or open another store of the same type in a different neighborhood. I believe the latter is a much easier option and will help you get a solid foundation with little headache. Not to mention a gift shop is solidly profitable with comparably little setup cost. And when you start dealing with logistics, it streamlines the whole process. After all, handling the logistics of three items is a bit easier than a half dozen or more.
Remember that MarketInsider app that Uncle Fred mentioned? Let’s fire it up.
You can click the demand button to sort by demand in a given neighborhood. You can click each neighborhood to check each of them. You can click on the product to sort by name. You’ve likely used Excel’s sort function before, so you get the idea. We’re already intent on another gift shop here, so let’s check the other neighborhoods.
Now I don’t really put much stock in the demand because it will shift around and it’s not like you’re going to open and close shops with the trends. Well, maybe you will. But I’m not. What I do like it for here is to figure out what to expand into next. And in my case, Hell’s Kitchen has a high demand for cheap and expensive gifts. They also have really low soda demand (29%), which I don’t care much about, but nice to know. Oh, but something to mention about neighborhoods!
They each have different demographics! What does this mean for you? A variety of things, but other than more expensive spaces and further from the wholesalers, the working, middle, and upper class figures are a bit of a big deal. Mostly because the higher their class, the more you can ramp up prices. Remember when I said don’t screw with prices in the Garment District? This is why. When you have a place in Midtown, pump those prices high! And wouldn’t you know it? Hell’s Kitchen’s demographics are ripe for some price hikes.
This works much the same as firing up the first store. But should flow much easier. Go to the map, pick a location (in my case, staying in Hell’s Kitchen). Look for something with high traffic (again, over 40 is great!) and the more people the better, which is going to call for a bigger footprint. See my example below of lucking out and getting another 50 traffic location. That’s pretty rare, so don’t feel bad if you settle on a 40 something.
Now for a quick check in. In my game at this point, I have about $15k and it’s wrapping up the second week. Don’t feel bad if you have less or taking longer. In fact it might be a good idea to delay the second store until you have a few thousand. You’ll need some money for the deposit for the retail space to start with. Then round shelves, soda fridge, cash register, cabinet to set the register on, cleaning station, and storage shelf. And enough to stock the shelves. Ideally you can buy enough to fit capacity, but to start with let’s assume you can’t. We’ll get into capacity in the next section.
Set your store up.
Stock it.
Staff it. And schedule it. That wasn’t as sexy to add. In my case I don’t have enough people to hire, but it’s a good start. Even partial staffing is better than none.
Don’t forget to do something about the ugly walls and floors and we really want to hear some music! If you can’t afford it yet, don’t worry. Just make sure you do that before moving on. You’ll want to hit advertising too, which you’ll need a bigger budget if you have a bigger shop. Put it off if you can’t quite set it up all the way, but don’t neglect it! Essentially take care of all the good stuff you setup for the first shop. Also expect to spend time taking trips to restock both stores. Luckily you have only three products and two of them have high volume her case. So that makes it really easy to stock them.
But before we get too excited about yet another business venture, let’s talk about capacity!
How much can you fit? About Capacity
Customer Capacity
If you put in the same shelves in a store with the same capacity (30) as mine, you’ll see something very similar to this. It breaks down pretty simply. Your store can hold a maximum of 30 customers per hour. That’s the building limit and can’t be changed. Each of the items that customers interact with has a capacity. For instance, you can see my rounded shelves each handle 15 customers. And my cash register handles 20. A stack of shopping carts handles 30 and drinks fridge handles 20 by the way. So we see a bottleneck. Our shelves are holding back our maximum customer capacity. Alright, so you get two of each for cheap and expensive gifts. Yes! That will bring us to the building maximum for each of those. But the cash register can only handle 20 people. So get a second cash register (or another one that handles 30 instead of 20, which is much better, but we’ll come to that). That brings us to 40, which is over building capacity. Well, that’s capped at 30, so even though the 2 registers can handle more, the building can’t. And we’re also looking at the soda can sales cut short because they’re still at 20. Wait, did I say soda sales are cut? Well that’s technically true, but it also cuts the sales of ALL items in the shop. In other words if you have 30 capacity building, 30 capacity shelves for gifts, and 20 soda can sales, then ALL of your sales will be capped at 20. Keep this in mind when you have multiple types of products in place and consider having a lopsided capacity. It will cripple all other items.
Back to the cash register, if I get a second one, I can now handle 40 customers, true. But I now have to hire twice as much staff to man that second register. Not so cool. What is cool is there’s another appliance store called AJ Penderson & Son just around the corner from the other store. And it has a wider variety and different hours. You’ll notice a lot of shiny new toys here, but we’re after one thing at the moment (don’t worry, we’ll be back for more soon). Grab yourself a checkout counter near the back corner.
What’s so special about this thing?
It has a capacity of 30 instead of 20. While it’s more expensive and takes more room, it’s only a little more costly than the register and counter together. Along with the massive savings you’ll get from having less staff.
So with any luck you’ll soon have a fully stocked store that is running at max building capacity.
And maybe you’ll do some interior decorating at some point, which I hadn’t done yet.
Face The Music – Opening The Fast Food Restaurant
There’s a key reason we stopped the tutorial up to this point. Fast food places don’t make good money. And it’s for one simple reason: the game has very low profit margin for food, which itself is pretty cheap. What that means is since you have a capacity limit, the low profit margin items just can’t keep up with other shops (like the gift shop) that have a higher per item profit. And when both in a small shop can max out at 15 customers, it’s a no brainer that you want to sell the larger profit margin item. To add insult to injury, fast food items have very expensive equipment in comparison. For instance, french fries require an industrial fryer. A cool $4,400 investment to sell up to 15 per hour at $2 each. I’ll let you figure out that ROI. A cheap gift will cost you a shelf (or a product board if you want to go even cheaper) at $1,200 to sell to up to 15 customers at $20 each base price.
Alright, there’s a rant. TL:DR version is fast food sucks.
So let’s do it. The hard part is you will need to get a “revenue” of $150 from this fast food joint in a day. And when it says revenue, it really means profit. You can see this on the Econoview display. NOT the 7 day average shown on the BizMan menu. An income statement for all shops is on the bottom left of the main econoview screen and you can click any of them for their breakdown.
This will mean trying to fine tune some things. First, I strongly suggest avoiding marketing for this. You simply won’t recoup that cost. Even the $100 is going to not give you the customer boost you need to make up that difference. Second, move your cheapest employees to the fast food restaurant if possible. Third, and probably the most important, put a variety of items. While you have a limit to how many customers you have and they’ll typically only buy one of an item on their visit, they might order a burger AND a hotdog AND a soda AND fries. And that’s a hard pill to swallow when it comes to these food items and knowing you will be spending big bucks to get minimal return. But darn it, you want to get past this right!?
Something else to add. While the game seems to suggest it’s not okay, you can put things like cupcakes and croissants into your shop. And with that in mind, we have a cheap way to handle this.
So what’s the easy mode?
Stick a different product category in there. Like, perhaps, cheap gifts. You’ll need an appropriate display. I personally used a display board with cheap gifts and that same day I completed the objective. In fact it’s so lucrative in comparison that the display board cut my customer capacity to 10 for the whole store and I still comfortably met the goal after putting it in halfway through the day.
If you’ve been following along with my guide, you’ll be introduced to the drive through warehouse you’ve already been using. Thanks Uncle Fred. And you’ll complete a couple of other milestones. With any luck that will lead to Uncle Fred saying it’s time to rent some office space. Hmm, what’s he got in store for us?
A Headquarters for My Kingdom!
All these employees have garbage customer service and it’s hurting sales.
All of these shops need to be supplied and I’m getting a bit tired of stuffing my horribly green Civic Mimic’s trunk with gifts.
Also this is about the time Uncle Fred is going to tell us about wholesalers. Oh boy, I like the sound of that! Let’s dive in!
Go ahead and check your map for some office space. For some reason the office space in my playthrough here is mostly snatched up for law and web dev businesses.
With your headquarters founded, you’ll need three things for each of your headquarters staff:
A desk
A computer
A chair
Much like the shop employees needing full or part time and sometimes wanting to not work evenings or other similar wants, your office staff is going to want specific chair types, desk types (namely executive if any request), or additions such as coffee makers. Frankly your starting headquarters is going to be too small to fit a few employees with executive desks, so I strongly suggest skipping any candidates with that requirement for now. You can get all the furniture you need from Ika or the office furniture store in Midtown.
One other key issue, getting these actual employees. You can’t get them from the same agency you’ve been using. You’ll need to go to the other location which only provides office staff. They’ll provide you with HR, Logistics, and Purchasing staff. But they also are who to go to for lawyers and programmers if you go to those businesses.
The first thing we’re going to handle is HR, which will also be the easiest and be a boon for your current businesses and future ventures. Frankly this is pretty simple. Each desk you setup properly will be its own slot, much like the cashier and cleaner positions in the stores. Just assign your HR employees to the headquarters and then drop them in a schedule. Now they’re ready to go!
Head over to the HR tab and you’ll have an option to assign your staff to that HR member. This will let them assign employees when there are call outs and, more importantly, they can passively train your staff. You’ll want to slide the training level from 50% to 100% (I’m not sure the reason why it’s defaulted to 50% or why you would want to, I’m sure there are reasons for it, so please chime in to correct this) and when you hire a second and further HR staff, you will want to make sure that the HR staff are also included in getting training from each other. By the way, the percentage level of your HR staff determines how many staff they can have under their care.
Now with your store staff getting trained passively, you should see sales improve gradually.
Wholesale and The Art Of Hating Paper Bags
When you have some down time, head over to the coast and visit one of the dock buildings. While they may give a seedy impression, these are the businesses that offer selling directly to you from the manufacturer.
Cool, direct sale. What’s the benefit? First off, prices are noticeably cheaper than purchasing from the wholesalers. Second, they will haul the product to your warehouses. Oh, right. Warehouse…uh, we’ll get to that! Just hang out with me here for a second. Third, you won’t have to go back and forth from the wholesaler. Instead you can go back and forth from your warehouses. Alright, that’s not a big jump up, but we’ll take care of that issue real soon.
There’s some negatives though. While products are cheaper, these places don’t sell piecemeal. Bring the big bucks or go back to your wholesaler with your tail between your legs. Okay, the amounts aren’t THAT much, but can be a hurdle if you don’t have a solid foundation which you should have with two gift shops running (by the way, feel free to get rid of that fast food shop if you want. We won’t need it anymore and might make the logistics ahead a lot easier. And you could use that staff to open a third shop now or soon). Also, and the whole reason you need a headquarters first, is they ONLY work through purchasing agents. They want nothing to do with you directly. Jerks. To add insult to injury, you need to get their contact by going to each of the docks and talking to the rep who bluntly lets you know they don’t want to talk to you. So you don’t get to skip getting shunned a few times if you want to get all the distributors. Which is a good idea to get them all and have their contact at your fingertips.
Got the distributors on your contact? Awesome! Call up the office agency to get a couple of purchasing agents (you’ll want one for each distributor you will purchase from). Get them setup in the headquarters. And now we come to the fun part.
A warehouse is needed to send product to. A warehouse will need pallet shelves to store said product (they hold 60 cases. The storage shelves in your stores hold 16, for comparison). You can get these at AJ Penderson & Son only for $3,000. A warehouse will also need a vehicle to distribute goods, but we’ll cover that with your logistics team. For now, you can pull in with your car and distribute, as much as we want to get away from that as soon as possible, we’ve got a lot to handle to get there.
Now that the warehouse has a space to put product, you can head over to your contacts and give your distributor of choice a call and have them reach out to your purchasing agents. Don’t know which one you need? Just call one, assign your purchasing agent, and have a look at what is offered in your headquarters tab. That’s the round about way. You can also press F1 and items will state who the supplier is for them.
Fun fact (and the reason for the title name), there’s only one that handles paper bags and that one you probably won’t use since their goods are more expensive than others with the same item, but that’s a battle tactic for you to decide on handling.
In your headquarters tab, under the purchasing agents, you can decide how much to purchase. This can be one time or set repeatedly with the goal to keep the warehouse stocked with a certain amount. I won’t get into logistics here (there’s a couple of nice guides already covering that), but the simple idea here is to stock enough in the warehouse that it will stock all of your stores and have some buffer left for any surges in sales. This can get VERY messy when you have multiple distributors you need for one store, but for now it shouldn’t be much of an issue. There’s always the option of going to a wholesaler if nothing else, which isn’t ideal at all. But better to get most of your products setup than none for now.
Driving Me Crazy!
Logistics
Remember when I said you can take the products from the warehouse yourself to the stores? That’s still true, but you have more important things to handle. So let’s cover arguably the messiest part of your headquarters.
With any luck you still have a desk left after your HR and purchasing agent demands are met. Assuming so, get yourself a logistics manager. Assign them to your warehouse. Similarly, get yourself a driver hired. Assign them to the warehouse too.
Hmm, not working… Oh, right. You’re using your car to move stuff. Your driver needs their own vehicle. Head over to the truck shop and buy a van. Or a freight truck if you have been expanding more stores outside of this guide. Actually a freight truck won’t work if your driver is less than 50% ability, so keep that in mind.
Now if you look at your logistics tab in the headquarters, you’ll find you can add destinations. This number of destinations is based off of the skill of your logistics manager and the vehicle used (freight truck can go to more places than the van). Odds are you’ll see two when you first set this up. And we have two shops we want to stock. Perfect! Assign each and it’ll ask how many of each item to stock for each store. Simple enough. Check the weekly sales, divide by 7, there’s your daily sales. Take that figure and add a buffer. Maybe a day’s worth. Maybe more, maybe less. You’ve gotten this far, you can decide that. Annoyingly you can’t see this in the same screen as when setting up the amount to stock, but ideally you only need to set this up once and never again. Of course if it’s short in the future, you’ll get a notification about it too. So you can adjust it higher then.
At this point I’ve covered what should get you well established and explained some of the more annoying things in the game right now (like cheesing the fast food restaurant). Hopefully with this information you can fine tune your shops and expand further. It doesn’t take much from this point to open a gift shop in each neighborhood. Then expand to other products. A liquor store, which handles wine and cigars, is a pretty nice one to eyeball. As well as jewelry if you’ve got a nice bundle of cash to launch that. And as mentioned before, other guides can help you with specifics, like your logistics or detailed list of which supplier offers which product.
Other Little Things
Pay off your loan
It doesn’t seem like much. A daily payment of $62. $17 interest each day. What’s the issue? Well, you do the math and that’s about 30% interest (since it’s not quite a year, it’s actually a much higher APR than that, but either way…). Paying it off early will save you a few thousand. Which also doesn’t sound like much when it’s a fraction of what you make early on. But that’s one less cost to worry about in the future. It’s also of questionable value to take out loans as you get more established. Especially when you really ramp up. There’s no real harm in taking a big loan that you plan on paying off within a couple of days, but don’t leave it sitting for long term.
Investments
I admit I haven’t done much with them, but my feeling is if you have the money to blow on investments, you have the money to blow on expanding your business. It’s not a bad idea to toss some in there to see what happens, but don’t rely on it. And it’s also the sort of thing you put your money into and likely won’t ever pull out, so why bother in the first place? The returns can be pretty good, but also lose yourself a good chunk too.
Leave Your Carts
Just like in real life, a shopping cart is best left in the middle of the parking lot, walk way, or in the middle of a store. If they’re empty, they’ll disappear when you leave. Consider filling a vehicle with them, truck them out to a busy intersection, and crowd the roadway with them. It’s not like we expect New York to have good traffic flow anyway.
The Cars Aren’t Indestructible
I’m a huge fan of racing games, have a completely accident free driving record in real life with tons of miles driven across the country with a variety of vehicles. I know how to drive. And while the game has a surprisingly satisfying and polished driving model, I have run into my fair share of things. At the bottom of the screen while driving, you’ll see the fuel amount and the durability. You don’t want either of these to reach zero. There are a couple of gas stations around the map and they have garages to repair your vehicle when if you start running into things and take damage. It’s a good reason to be a little more careful with your car, but not enough to ruin you if you go full speed head on with a freight truck. Also that’s advice for the game, not in real life. Please don’t ever try to go head on with a freight truck or any other vehicle in real life.
Office Businesses
Uncle Fred will introduce you to making a law firm. I won’t reiterate his advice, but I will mention a few things that took my business from bleeding money to making tons of money within a day.
Lawyers and programmers are heavily skill based. And this skill completely effects how much customers are willing to pay. Which is really annoying to have to fine tune as you get them higher in skill (you are using HR to train them, right?). Also each desk you setup can have a whole 24 hour schedule. Which you won’t want to use. Customers won’t be coming at 2am to get these services, so keep your schedule to prime time. This is also why you’d want to get a full set of desks to max out the office capacity and then fill those time slots with as many lawyers as you can. Although it’s important that as you’re building up, make sure to fill a desk’s capacity before assigning another desk. It’s much better to have two or three lawyers at one desk in shifts with one customer half the time than to have two or three on the clock at the same time with one customer and no one for the rest of the time open.
Except you’re going to bleed money still. Why? Because you need marketing. Like covered before, you’ll want to get that advertising maxed out to get the max number of customers here, assuming skills are good enough to justify it. It’s a bit of a juggle really.
Also I keep mentioning the amount customers are willing to pay. Did I mention you NEED to adjust that amount? Yeah, you knew that. Of course you did. Everyone knows that. But I say it because you might forget to do that while setting it all up. And after a few days when the skill of your staff is higher. And a week or two later when it’s higher still, etc. Also when we talk about increasing prices, I don’t mean $10 here or $20 there. Bump it up by $100 or so per hour. Especially in the high end neighborhoods. When you see the price bar between around 90-100%, you’re in a sweet spot. For now.
lastly, these employees are not cheap. They can bring in very good money and you don’t have to touch them after they’re established and happy. But you can expect to make very little or lose quite a bit of money when you first get them going unless you carefully manage them. It’s a long term investment that doesn’t take all that long to cover the ROI and then keep feeding the rest of the game.
